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
Heroku Platform
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on
a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric
approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and
workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku
Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime.
Heroku Developer Experience (DX)
Developers deploy directly from tools like…
I haven't played much with Heroku beyond deploying projects from GitHub. It looks to be very similar in providing a cloud-based platform for developing and deploying web apps as quickly as possible. I would look at comparing both of these before choosing a solution. I am just …
Firebase and Heroku Platform are platforms for applications development and continuous delivery. Firebase offers a more abstracted backend setup, requiring less server-side expertise from developers. Heroku Platform gives more control and insight into backend processes, but requires developer effort and knowledge to do so. Both products are used most heavily by small businesses, likely because their pricing allows new users to start for free and scale up as-needed, which makes them attractive options for hobbyists, freelancers, and start-ups.
Features
Both Heroku Platform and Firebase help developers create, deliver, and maintain web-based applications, but they each have their own strengths.
Firebase gives developers a lot of in-service tools to use in their applications. Developers especially appreciate the built-in authentication tools, which handle the entire user authentication process end-to-end. The Firebase Console is a much-appreciated feature that allows developers to deliver app updates, send or schedule push notifications, and monitor their app from a centralized interface. A/B testing tools help teams adjust and optimize the user experience. Solid documentation and strong support from the Firebase community help developers get started and solve problems as they occur.
Heroku Platform makes it quick and easy to test and deliver new applications. Users appreciate the effort that Heroku’s team has put into UX across the board, with an intuitive and useful GUI, API, and command-line interface. Detailed and useful notifications, metrics, and alerts help developers monitor their app and take action when problems arise or usage patterns change. It’s also easy to scale up on server resources as an app’s needs become more demanding.
Limitations
However, Heroku Platform and Firebase might not be suited for all applications, as each platform has its drawbacks.
Heroku Platform can be expensive, especially when developers need to scale up. Important features might be gated behind advanced subscription tiers, and repeated attempts to upsell extra resources and features can be frustrating. Other users found Heroku Platform’s notifications about server status and downtime to be overzealous, generating too many irrelevant alerts with no effective way to filter them. For free users, their server goes to sleep if its application is not used frequently enough, and it can be slow to reboot when used again.
Firebase users primarily complain about the user experience. The interfaces can be unpleasant to use and unintuitive, especially for the included Firestore database system. Firebase users also found the platform limiting, since its abstraction of some server-side functions makes them difficult to adjust. Other developers wish Firebase had a more robust capability to track user interactions with their app. Although community support for the product is strong, the official support team seems to be hit-or-miss, leaving some users satisfied and other users frustrated with rote, unhelpful responses.
Pricing
Firebase offers two pricing tiers. The Spark Plan is free and includes most of Firebase’s feature set, with data usage caps and restrictions. The Blaze plan is pay-as-you-go for data usage and adds additional features, such as multiple databases per project and access to the Google Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service product. For specific pricing details, refer to the Firebase pricing page, which includes a plan calculator for estimating your cost. Heroku Platform uses a tiered build-a-price model based on type of application, number and tier of app containers, database access, and add-ons. To evaluate your price for Heroku Platform, use the price estimation tools on the Heroku website.
Features
Firebase
Heroku Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service 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.
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
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).
Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
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.
Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
It is simple to use overall, the console's main menu is divided into Develop, Quality, Analytics and Grow - which have further subdivisions by their set of features and tools. Develop and Quality are relevant for product and tech. Analytics is relevant for product, analytics and Grow is relevant for marketing. This makes the overall use very easy.
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
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.
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
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.
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
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.
