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
New Relic
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
New Relic is a SaaS-based web and mobile application performance management provider for the cloud and the datacenter. They provide code-level diagnostics for dedicated infrastructures, the cloud, or hybrid environments and real time monitoring.
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Pricing
Firebase
New Relic
Editions & Modules
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
Free (Forever)
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Telemetry Data Platform
$0.25
per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
Incident Intelligence
$0.50
per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
Standard
$99
per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
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.
It is perfect for observing our energy platforms during high-load situations, such as grid demand spikes, or our real-time ingest of sensor data, allowing us to respond in real time to anomalies. And it’s a good way to monitor API performance in client dashboards, too. But it’s not as conducive for low-budget/low-code work or deep customization that doesn’t get ample development support given its complexity and expense.
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).
Capturing Front end Metrics specially web vitals and setting up alerts for violations really helps.
NRQL is great tool to fetch the data you need. With queries you can pull the data and put the data by table or by chart. You can even trend graphs and create dashboards.
Synthetic Monitoring is very helpful for proactive monitoring. You can use it for user journeys by using scripted browser monitor type or just check availability using PING type.
ASk AI is great addition that can fetch details you need with natuaral language
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.
The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
As an engineer, New Relic has been very quick and easy for me to pick up/install/use. It has been less easy for some of the less technical-minded folks in our organization and their UI still is inconsistent multiple years after refactoring their platform to be New Relic One.
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.
The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed
It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.
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.
New Relic is the most full-featured offering that we've found, and is incredibly easy to start using with a PHP app. The New Relic agent is installed as a PHP extension so it is able to monitor and track the performance of any PHP app being run by the web server. Other tools required the installation and setup of a PHP dependency at the application level.
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.
