Firebase vs. Google App Engine

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

Incentivized

Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.

Incentivized

• Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
• Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
• Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
• FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.

Incentivized

• Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
• Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
• Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.

Incentivized

• Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
• While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
• Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.

Incentivized

• For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
• For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
• The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.

Incentivized

App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.

Incentivized

I don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

Incentivized

I had to revisit the UI after a year of just setting up and forgetting. The UI got some improvements but the amount of navigation we have to go through to setup a new app has increased but also got easier to setup. Gemini now is integrated and make getting answers faster

Incentivized

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

Incentivized

Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.

Incentivized

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.

Incentivized

• Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
• From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
• From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.

Incentivized

• App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
• App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
• The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.

Incentivized