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
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Qubole
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Qubole is a NoSQL database offering from the California-based company of the same name.
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Pricing
Firebase
Qubole
Editions & Modules
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$0.01
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Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Firebase
Qubole
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
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Community Pulse
Firebase
Qubole
Features
Firebase
Qubole
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
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.
I find Qubole is well suited for getting started analyzing data in the cloud without being locked in to a specific cloud vendor's tooling other than the underlying filesystem. Since the data itself is not isolated to any Qubole cluster, it can be easily be collected back into a cloud-vendor's specific tools for further analysis, therefore I find it complementary to any offerings such as Amazon EMR or Google DataProc.
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).
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.
Providing an open selection of all cloud provider instance types with no explanation as to their ideal use cases causes too much confusion for new users setting up a new cluster. For example, not everyone knows that Amazon's R or X-series models are memory optimized, while the C and M-series are for general computation.
I would like to see more ETL tools provided other than DistCP that allow one to move data between Hadoop Filesystems.
From the cluster administration side, onboarding of new users for large companies seems troublesome, especially when trying to create individual cluster per team within the company. Having the ability to debug and share code/queries between users of other teams / clusters should also be possible.
Personally, I have no issues using Amazon EMR with Hue and Zeppelin, for example, for data science and exploratory analysis. The benefits to using Qubole are that it offers additional tooling that may not be available in other cloud providers without manual installation and also offers auto-terminating instances and scaling groups.
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.
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.
Qubole was decided on by upper management rather than these competitive offerings. I find that Databricks has a better Spark offering compared to Qubole's Zeppelin notebooks.
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.
We like to say that Qubole has allowed for "data democratization", meaning that each team is responsible for their own set of tooling and use cases rather than being limited by versions established by products such as Hortonworks HDP or Cloudera CDH
One negative impact is that users have over-provisioned clusters without realizing it, and end up paying for it. When setting up a new cluster, there are too many choices to pick from, and data scientists may not understand the instance types or hardware specs for the datasets they need to operate on.
