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.
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Netlify
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Netlify is a platform for developers from the company of the same name in San Francisco, used to build performant and dynamic web sites, e-commerce stores and applications. By uniting an ecosystem of technologies, services and APIs into one workflow.
Netlify is best for static websites (JAM stack websites) hosting. It supports continuous integration and continuous deployment out of the box which is not there in Firebase or Heroku. It uses CDN, which optimizes images, videos, and documents on the fly. In short, Netlify is …
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.
Netlify is a static website host, so it obviously wouldn't work for hosting dynamic websites built in PHP, such as WordPress or Drupal. It works very well with static sites with a git codebase on something like GitHub. It has automatic deployments, which include preview websites. It works very well with this workflow. There are solutions for allowing content authoring on static websites on Netlify, but I would probably reach for something like WordPress or Drupal for that.
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).
I can connect Github/Gitlab repos or drag and drop code folders directly to host them onto the platform, and can customize build and publish details. It handles all granular details itself, so I don't have to worry about configuring everything like I would have to do on an IaaS like AWS
Netlify Platform has inbuilt scalability support - meaning automatic upgrading of servers to handle traffic, without us needing to do anything at all, again, unlike IaaS, where we'd have to manually configure scaling
It has a built in CDN, meaning static applications can be served blazing fast over the web without worrying about traffic or latency
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.
We interact with the CLI via our CI/CD pipeline. It was very straightforward to get set up, and their documentation is thorough. There are a ton of examples online of various setups. We needed to deploy a React SPA, so we required redirects, which was straightforward with Netlify.
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.
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.
Netlify Platform is the first choice that we are using in this organization continuously and it's been a very promising platform to use. It also maintains the things very well. it also giving a very good updates. It is very easy to use and very easy to learn. overall it is good.
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.
