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
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The Tealium Customer Data Hub powers capabilities across the data supply chain. Tealium universally collects customer data from any source including; websites, mobile applications, devices, kiosks, servers, and files. Data collected is then standardized in the data layer, which drives usage of data for customer engagement and analysis.
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.
For more suited, I'll say highly regulated industry around data like healthcare, insurance, finance, where Tealium can be very helpful and for clients that don't have much different channels where they interact with their clients. So companies that only sell on internet and are a small company, I can see Tealium being the best usage for these clients, for these companies.
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).
Simple tag management that is tough to beat. So many solutions that are incredibly simple to setup and gather data for.
Security around the data is key and Tealium excels in this area.
The speed impact of the tag setup is key to optimizing and allowing our web properties to run more effectively, which is a better experience for the end user.
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.
Audiences—don't they technically exist in Tealium? They are just streamed—no count, no backfill, etc.
Working backward to identify issues involves lots of clicking in the UI, going from audience to audience attribute, badge to event attribute, and so on.
You have to wait for a Real-Time event to see the payload. There is no sample or other option.
I already know that my company has no plans to discontinue use of Tealium. We are heavily reliant on it due to a huge number of product teams and developers we would have to work with to place tags across many pages. Tealium is already there on the pages, and our application/product teams are familiar with how to integrate it. It is just the simplest way to ensure that new data requirements are implemented in a timely manner.
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.
Tealium iQ Tag Management System does exactly what it is intended for, it manages vendortags. Changes can be made to websites and apps in minutes. The frontend is well structured, updates are easy to carry out, and Tealium support is available at all times.
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 often is so quick to respond and so helpful when it comes to working with the needs of my clients and being able to resolve potential shortcomings or technical issues or surrounding the tool. There have been times more recently that I’ve gotten more generic service rather than the tailored experience that I have come to expect.
Implementation had some bumps in the road and it was new for all of us, but for the most part, it was easier than many other implementations we've done with other technologies.
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.
Tealium Customer Data Hub can do it all in one. Whereas, I think by using multiple Tealium Customer Data Hubs, we can utilize what each tool is really good at. In an ideal world, we'd like to use Tealium Customer Data Hub for everything, but one thing that we struggle with is Audience Segmentation, and we are looking for a one touch solution, without a lot of the work since the data is already there.
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.
There has been a near immeasurable return on customer data and improvement of our quality for our physical products due to be in tune with the customer. This has changed our way of doing things for the better to gain a better flow and overall workplace experience.
A negative is that Tealium AudienceStream becomes harder to manuever and use data analytics for when a database has been existing for a fairly large amount of time. It goes from an agile ship to a huge vessel that takes many components to be able to move.
