Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
$0.01
Per Verification
iZooto
Score 10.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
iZooto is a user engagement and retention tool that is designed to leverage web push notifications to help business to drive repeat traffic, leads and sales. iZooto, Datability’s first product was rolled out publicly in Feb 2016. The vendor says the fundamental difference between how a mobile application and a website works with users is in the level of interaction and personalisation that a mobile application offers. Additionally, the vendor says with iZooto, they are empowering…
N/A
Pricing
Firebase
iZooto
Editions & Modules
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Firebase
iZooto
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$99 number of subscribers
Additional Details
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User Engagement is at the heart of every business. It is the reason that drives business growth. Businesses focussing on creating contextual communication to engage users, will outpace everyone else. This is our mojo - to help you engage your users and create delightful moments.
Yes, that really is our mission. We understand that whether you are small business or a large business or just a One-Person-Army, restricting number of websites per account where you wish to use iZooto is frustrating. For this precise reason, we have consciously stepped away from the number of websites per plan model. So when you create an account on iZooto, you can add any number of websites and any number of users to manage those web properties for yourself.
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.
iZooto is well suited to any web property that needs to nurture its relationship with users and needs another channel besides email, social media, and paid retargeting. Because of its integration with WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify, it's perfect for ECOM sites and other consumer-facing sites. But I can see it work well for a B2B / saas company too. In short, it makes repeat visits much more likely.
Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).
iZooto allows us to keep up to date with various browser developments & push notification standards that keep evolving.
iZooto allows us to re-target users who viewed a particular product, or products in a certain price range or users from a certain location or all all of these together.
iZooto allows us to monetise our push notifications without any extra effort.
Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.
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.
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.
They were on top of things right away when I reported an issue with their WordPress plugin, or when I needed to switch from Shopify to WordPress. Very hands-on and responsive. They have built-in live chat support in their app, though it would be nice if they incorporated it into their WordPress plugin too, so I didn't have to leave WordPress to report issues.
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.
We use a few more tools regularly, but specifically for browser push we found iZooto to be the most focused player and the pricing to be reasonable. The monetization layer that they provide for publishers like us is a big value add. We continue to use different tools for analytics, funnels and other marketing automations.
Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.
