Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If a new feature should be added but unsure of how it will actually work or how users will accept the new enhancement or change, this tool allows you test and measure initial results. This saves so much time and energy knowing the results before it is deployed and might have low user adoption or acceptance.
Read full review Pros 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). Read full review A/B or Multi Variant Testing as a methodology to gather insight from customer usage. Experimentation as a feature within LaunchDarkly offers information around the success of one variant over another and whether the experiment has reached statistical significance. Being able to decouple deployment of code from the release of a feature is hugely valuable. Development teams are empowered to manage features within their production applications for reliability or testing purposes. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Limited number of users on cheaper plans that is limiting our ability to audit log who is making changes. Some of our engineers are confused between flags and segments and have set up items incorrectly. Better documented support for React with Typescript. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It fits out business case
Read full review Usability It is simple to use overall, the console's main menu is divided into Develop, Quality, Analytics and Grow - which have further subdivisions by their set of features and tools. Develop and Quality are relevant for product and tech. Analytics is relevant for product, analytics and Grow is relevant for marketing. This makes the overall use very easy.
Read full review It's very easy to create new feature flags and set them properly. It is more difficult to get LaunchDarkly integrated within a distributed system so that flags can be used. Especially on stateless servers where gating features by user is not easy. Overall though, it is very easy to get started and I like how simple it is to use.
Read full review Reliability and Availability No issue with availability at all
Read full review Performance From what I have seen, LaunchDarkly integrates well with your code and also services you might have in your tech ecosystem. We use Jenkins for automation and we were able to use it to build pipelines to automate the control of LaunchDarkly toggles in our code.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The overall support is very responsive
Read full review Implementation Rating Yes I do.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review LaunchDarkly stood out to us because it put control of the application within the hands of our engineers. We didn't want to allow business users to manipulate the production site via a third-party tool. Instead, our focus was on delivering faster as an engineering team.
Read full review Scalability The platform didn't go down since we implemented it
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Improved developer experience with some teams moving to Trunk-based Development. Increased deployment frequency due to smaller code releases. Validation of the technical and business value of work is achieved more quickly through smaller pieces of work and through experimenting with a small group of users before a feature gets to 100% of customers. Read full review ScreenShots