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Firebase vs. Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Firebase

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AGoogle 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

    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/AVisual Studio App Center was a solution used to build, test, release, and monitor mobile and desktop apps, as well as to continuously monitor real-time performance. The product was discontinued in March 2025, and is no longer available.

    $40

    per month per build concurrency

    Pricing
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    Phone Authentication
    $0.01
    Per Verification
    Stored Data
    $0.18
    Per GiB
    Builds
    $40
    per month per build concurrency
    Standard Test Plan
    $99
    per month per build concurrency
    Enterprise Test Plan
    $499
    per month per build concurrency
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    Considered Both Products
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    83%
    Would buy again
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    19 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Azure DevOps
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Azure DevOps Server
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.5
    (31 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    7.1
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    FirebaseVisual Studio App Center (discontinued)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Honestly, it's an all around solution that needs some enhancements. Need to build an app, check! Need to test that app, check! Need to debug that app, check! Visual Studio App Center is a well rounded platform for multiple types of builds and services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • It supplies the right native integration for test cases both IOS and Android
    • Constant device updates means you are working with the right builds to support product use cases
    • Excels in automated test cases that are easy to implement, monitor, and digest results
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Webview support was lacking
    • User management seems a bit disconnected from the standard Microsoft ecosystem. Almost feels like you are managing local users and sharing access more than an enterprise solution
    • Price could be better
    • Buggy on some of the latest versions of windows
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Google
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    The biggest benefit is in integrations and plug-ins, as well as the fact that it's not open source. I know open source is popular, but we have all been on the downside of open source and waiting for things to be voted up or a contribution to fix an issue. This alone makes VSAC a nice solution! Plus, it comes with a complete IDE integration of services, documentation, and is light weight
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Cut down on time to delivery enhancements and overall builds to users
    • Helps test new proposed releases with ease
    • Cuts down on local build issues as it does do a good job with local development environments as well
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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