Firebase vs. LaunchDarkly

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

Great for rolling out features slowly for beta testing in production. I would say it is less well suited for toggling features permanently for users as this requires more integration with our backend and billing systems that would be a lot of work to set up.

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

• Feature Flag Management: It's like magic. With a flip of a switch, you can manage feature rollouts to visitors or accounts across the web and mobile applications!
• Segmentation: Create a segment of visitors or accounts and then use that to target a feature flag rule. Really easy to use and saves so much time.
• Ease of Use: Seamless copy/paste functionality, really clear status indicators so you can find what is on and for whom.

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

• It would be nice to see a feature flag's settings against all environments at once.
• It would be to have a "array" type flag for related but different settings (eg, enableA and enableB could be enable: [a, b]).
• It would be nice have customizable columns on the Users page (eg, if I want to inject a new meta data).

Incentivized

It fits out business case

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

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.

Incentivized

No issue with availability at all

Incentivized

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.

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

The overall support is very responsive

Incentivized

Yes I do.

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

Rollout is another dedicated feature flag tool that can be used to manage features. LaunchDarkley offers all the features of an enterprise level tool, unlike Rollout, reserves the security features for the Enterprise plan. Out of box integrations are limited but they do have a well documented REST API.

Incentivized

The platform didn't go down since we implemented it

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

• 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.

Incentivized