Firebase vs. MongoDB

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Firebase
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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
MongoDB
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
MongoDB is an open source document-oriented database system. It is part of the NoSQL family of database systems. Instead of storing data in tables as is done in a "classical" relational database, MongoDB stores structured data as JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster.
$0.10
million reads
Pricing
FirebaseMongoDB
Editions & Modules
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
Shared
$0
per month
Serverless
$0.10million reads
million reads
Dedicated
$57
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FirebaseMongoDB
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFully managed, global cloud database on AWS, Azure, and GCP
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FirebaseMongoDB
Considered Both Products
Firebase
Chose Firebase
Firebase is easy to manage and scale really well for web application services. It offers better authentication and is easy to implement. For real-time analytics on web applications, it works very well. Firebase offers more features compared to other services especially it can …
Chose Firebase
Firebase is well suited for projects with simpler database workloads that require its real-time features. For data that is heavily read in real time, it's a great choice and gives developers a lot of features that would have been complicated and time-consuming to build up front …
MongoDB
Chose MongoDB
Your default choice should not be MongoDB in my opinion. Most user-facing systems are relational by nature so a well known and reliable SQL database would be easier to maintain and simpler to develop long term. If you highly value speed of development go with Firebase. If you …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
FirebaseMongoDB
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Firebase
-
Ratings
MongoDB
9.1
38 Ratings
4% above category average
Performance00 Ratings9.038 Ratings
Availability00 Ratings9.738 Ratings
Concurrency00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Security00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.438 Ratings
Data model flexibility00 Ratings9.138 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility00 Ratings9.137 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FirebaseMongoDB
Small Businesses
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Quickbase
Quickbase
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FirebaseMongoDB
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(27 ratings)
9.4
(78 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(67 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(14 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(6 ratings)
9.6
(13 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
FirebaseMongoDB
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
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.
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MongoDB
If asked by a colleague I would highly recommend MongoDB. MongoDB provides incredible flexibility and is quick and easy to set up. It also provides extensive documentation which is very useful for someone new to the tool. Though I've used it for years and still referenced the docs often. From my experience and the use cases I've worked on, I'd suggest using it anywhere that needs a fast, efficient storage space for non-relational data. If a relational database is needed then another tool would be more apt.
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Pros
Google
  • 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).
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MongoDB
  • Being a JSON language optimizes the response time of a query, you can directly build a query logic from the same service
  • You can install a local, database-based environment rather than the non-relational real-time bases such a firebase does not allow, the local environment is paramount since you can work without relying on the internet.
  • Forming collections in Mango is relatively simple, you do not need to know of query to work with it, since it has a simple graphic environment that allows you to manage databases for those who are not experts in console management.
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Cons
Google
  • 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.
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MongoDB
  • An aggregate pipeline can be a bit overwhelming as a newcomer.
  • There's still no real concept of joins with references/foreign keys, although the aggregate framework has a feature that is close.
  • Database management/dev ops can still be time-consuming if rolling your own deployments. (Thankfully there are plenty of providers like Compose or even MongoDB's own Atlas that helps take care of the nitty-gritty.
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Likelihood to Renew
Google
No answers on this topic
MongoDB
I am looking forward to increasing our SaaS subscriptions such that I get to experience global replica sets, working in reads from secondaries, and what not. Can't wait to be able to exploit some of the power that the "Big Boys" use MongoDB for.
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Usability
Google
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.
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MongoDB
NoSQL database systems such as MongoDB lack graphical interfaces by default and therefore to improve usability it is necessary to install third-party applications to see more visually the schemas and stored documents. In addition, these tools also allow us to visualize the commands to be executed for each operation.
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Support Rating
Google
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.
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MongoDB
Finding support from local companies can be difficult. There were times when the local company could not find a solution and we reached a solution by getting support globally. If a good local company is found, it will overcome all your problems with its global support.
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Implementation Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
MongoDB
While the setup and configuration of MongoDB is pretty straight forward, having a vendor that performs automatic backups and scales the cluster automatically is very convenient. If you do not have a system administrator or DBA familiar with MongoDB on hand, it's a very good idea to use a 3rd party vendor that specializes in MongoDB hosting. The value is very well worth it over hosting it yourself since the cost is often reasonable among providers.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
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.
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MongoDB
We have [measured] the speed in reading/write operations in high load and finally select the winner = MongoDBWe have [not] too much data but in case there will be 10 [times] more we need Cassandra. Cassandra's storage engine provides constant-time writes no matter how big your data set grows. For analytics, MongoDB provides a custom map/reduce implementation; Cassandra provides native Hadoop support.
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Return on Investment
Google
  • 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.
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MongoDB
  • Open Source w/ reasonable support costs have a direct, positive impact on the ROI (we moved away from large, monolithic, locked in licensing models)
  • You do have to balance the necessary level of HA & DR with the number of servers required to scale up and scale out. Servers cost money - so DR & HR doesn't come for free (even though it's built into the architecture of MongoDB
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ScreenShots

MongoDB Screenshots

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