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Firebase

Firebase

Overview

What is Firebase?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Light and fast

10 out of 10
March 24, 2022
Firebase has been used in a lot of projects that our firm has developed, it has many great features that we use, but the most important …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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Phone Authentication

$0.01

Cloud
Per Verification

Stored Data

$0.18

Cloud
Per GiB

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

Firebase Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.3.

The most common users of Firebase are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(134)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 27)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Jose Perri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As manufacturers of electronic equipment interconnected through the IoT Cloud, we needed a robust backend technology that could easily scale as our user base grew. The solution that we needed was to include a real-time database as well as the possibility of executing functions in the cloud according to that database received the data of our clients, for example, sending push notifications.
  • Increase in real time the processing capacity according to the demand.
  • The realtime database is surprisingly fast running efficiently on Android and IOS.
  • Although the functionality of the real-time database is complete through code, the functionality of the WEB console is limited.
  • In the case of cloud functions, although there is a method of testing operation, its implementation is not very practical, and programs must be downloaded to run on the local PC; being a platform in the cloud, it would be great to be able to test functions from the WEB console directly.
Firebase has been excellent for us when we have to update information in real-time between our IoT hardware devices, and our users' mobile applications, integration with ANDROID and IOS is excellent. In addition, given that our client base is constantly growing, FIREBASE adapts the processing capacity automatically. Being a payment platform that bills each operation, for example, writing, reading a database, bandwidth used, etc. I do not suggest its use in projects that are not lucrative since as the user base grows, the bill to pay will also grow!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase together with its documentary base called Firestore to execute all the transactional processes of our web app, using both its authentication and user administration system, as well as its potential as a backend for the application that we have developed in Angular and Node Js. It's one of the main reasons we went for GCP instead of AWS or Azure
  • User authentication
  • Server-less application management
  • Performing searches in documentary datasets
  • Searches/filters using multiple conditions
  • Detailed analytics/metrics
It is an excellent tool for the fast and simple development of web app-type applications, with a very intuitive handling and a very comfortable UI to manage and maintain applications. Its main virtue is that it allows you not to have to worry about scalability or instance management, which makes it a different product from what we find in other cloud providers.
Osama Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Firebase to keep track of the attendance of students in our class. The database is relatively fast for storing attendance. It doe take a little while to set up. User authentication works well. It takes some time to set up it. One thing about the authentication that bothers us is that you can not reset the password directly. When a user creates their account, Firebase gives the user the ability to set the initial password. But afterward, Firebase only lets you reset the password by email.
  • database
  • user authentication
  • file storage
  • easier to setup
  • direct reset password
  • more free storage
Firebase provides a backend for your mobile app. It's good platform to start your app and provides a way to scale your app. You can use the free authentication with phone numbers and email. You will need some technical skills and time to setup. You may even require someone to help you setup the database because there are many options. However, after a few times, the setup is easy. There is a learning curve.
April 01, 2022

Google Firebase

PRABHAT MISHRA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Firebase Authentication for backend services authentication and for users to authenticate on our app. We were facing an issue with backend services authentication.
  • Authentication for Services.
  • Authentication for users on the app.
  • It is a very easy to use SDKs.
  • I feel its pricing should be taken as a part of consideration.
  • We faced issue with the ingestion logs.
  • Some of the sources apart from google are not able to send data.
Firebase is very well suited for authenticating backend services & for authenticating users on your app.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase as a supplemental product to Google Analytics. We have some pains around Google Analytics not being the best tool when it comes to user behavior analytics across platforms & devices. Firebase solved this issue for us and we're now able to get a holistic picture of our users engage with our product.
  • Cross platform/device tracking
  • Easy authentication
  • Release management
  • Onboarding could be more simple
  • Explanation of the key differences between GA and Firebase
  • Microservices integration
Well suited for product & engineering teams looking to increase development velocity and add additional personalization touch points throughout the user journey. Also allows the team to get a holistic picture of how the users are interacting with our product across devices.

Not very well suited for tech stacks that utilize a lot of microservices.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Firebase is used to create new native applications with a NoSQL code base. The platform allows to create any type of applications like social networks, games, news and applications like streaming video and music thanks to its video player plugin.
  • Helps build and run apps.
  • Building NativeScript apps just got a whole lot easier with Master Verbruggen's new Firebase plugin.
  • Reading data from Firebase is easy and only requires a few lines of JavaScript code.
  • Firebase is only based on NoSQL database.
Firebase is a scalable, flexible, and secure solution that you can trust. It uses a NoSQL database to monitor in real time the traffic of visits to your web application.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase for SMS Authentication and settings management. It's great because it allows us to do that at the same time we send notifications to Android and iOS users. In like an all-in-one platform/service.
  • Notifications
  • Authentication
  • Settings management
  • The UX is not always clear
  • Environments per app
If you have an Android mobile application or even an iOS one, Firebase is a must-have. Notifications and authentication are two areas that you can tackle easily with it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase as a company portal for the creation, execution, authentication, and development of web and mobile applications. The implementation of the platform is fast and simple, it offers excellent functions so that the process with our applications is functional and effective. It currently integrates with more than 100 platforms, such as Slack, Google Ads, Play Store, and BigQuery, tools that we frequently use for different processes.
  • Simple, scalable and intuitive UX/UI.
  • Multiple interactions, including social media platforms.
  • Creation and successful execution of applications.
  • Ability to supervise and monitor application performance.
  • Firebase is a powerful platform, it provides simple and intuitive access control.
Firebase works very well with other tools, thanks to its many integrations. We frequently integrate it with Slack and Jira, our team's main project planning and communication tools. The implementation is simple and we use it for projects such as application modernization, that is, to convert applications to microservices or container-based applications.
March 24, 2022

Light and fast

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Firebase has been used in a lot of projects that our firm has developed, it has many great features that we use, but the most important ones are the web hosting, the authentication, and the lighting fast real-time database. This tripled allow the fast development of robust and scalable applications and web applications.
  • Makes easy the social media authentication.
  • Empower users to manage their own account password reset.
  • Facilitates the relationship between the database and the authentication.
  • Storage cost may be a little high for some users.
  • Domain transfers are a bit complicated.
  • It needs more email templates.
Firebase is well suited for the development of fast applications that require a light database integration with a couple of relationships. However, it is not well suited if your application requires many relationships, or if you need an offline database.
March 24, 2022

Firebase is on Fire!!

Yash Trivedi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Firebase is used as a storage service in the organization. There is less time required for managing the servers. It is a managed service. It is very easy to integrate with the blackened. The user login feature uses firebase as the blackened. It is also integrated with the google cloud function service.
  • Database storage.
  • Config store.
  • Authentication.
  • Real time data base.
  • Paging in web application.
  • Versioning and dependency.
Firebase is well suited for applications that the user wants to use for authentication, web storage, or real-time storage for web applications. It works really well for backend storage for web applications. It is less suitable for use cases for big data analytics or running ETL pipelines. It is not suitable for machine learning pipelines for storing vectors.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase as our complete solution for authentication, analytics, testing, and monitoring for our Android, iOS, and macOS apps. We chose Firebase over all other competing solutions because of its excellent documentation, helpful community, widespread adoption, scalability, and broad platform support. Firebase enables us to use one framework for all of this across multiple platforms, devices, and languages, which has not only simplified our codebase and support footprint, but has also meant that new features and mechanisms can be rolled out more quickly across all platforms than if separate libraries and frameworks were used on each platform.
  • Analytics
  • Reporting
  • Cross-platform
  • Authentication
  • macOS support for all iOS Firebase features
  • Windows support for all features
  • Improved integration with all Google products (such as Admob and Adsense)
  • More sample applications and snippets to help developers rapidly add functionality
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The moment you say you want to develop cross platform applications and you want a smooth implementation no matter which platform you want to deploy to, please consider FIREBASE. You see todays generation is so much obsessed with the front end part, they forget that the actual power of their application would be released when your back end support system is really backing you up. There are numerous services, and to be honest you really cant use all of them in one go.. but primarily I recommend making the start with Authentications, Databasing, CloudFunctions and Notifications. Authentications will take care of all the extra code you have previously written with how to manage users- from signing in to changing passwords. Databasing is highly efficient with the realtime Db especially when you want to listen to changes that happen to your data in realtime. The Clound FUnctions is your step towards serverless architecture, when all you have to do is keep functions to do with your project ready to fire on the cloud... rather than maintaining an entire server! And if you have a mobile user base, you have to see how easy it is to send notifications via firebase
  • Databasing
  • CloudFunctions
  • CloudMessaging
  • Crashalitics
  • Authentications
  • in App messaging
  • Analytics
  • RemoteConfig
  • Hosting
  • Cloud Functions: its a terrible let down. It is the sole reason for Firebase not to become the leader in the Cloud Wars. And that is because of only 1 single problem they dont wish to address. They want your credit card information because if you ever cross the free limits, you have to be billed. But they have provided no easy way to stop your cloud function incase there is a problem. They have provided numerous work arounds and twisted versions of what could be done to avoid the situation. But they are all nothing short of giving you a run around. Its not acceptable. The Firebase team cant expect to show "how easy and efficient" firebase is... while at the same time making stopping your CloudFuctions a nightmare! Not fair and Unacceptable.
  • They need to be more supportive of Googles very own cross platform tool Flutter.
  • No support for teachers who really want to promote Firebase in their locality. They have a twisted idea of Google developers around your city to help you out. When in numerous cases the guys at the google developer groups are really not that into firebase, and why should people who are less passionate about training the next generation, have the call about how it should reach the grass roots.
From all the Cloud systems I totally recommend Firebase. How ever, with regards to where you should not use it... I want to be very clear. DONT ever use the firebase Cloud Functions if you dont have enough knowledge in NodeJs and return values/promises. You will be billed and you wont be able to immediately stop your project. This is a terrible downside and truly costs Firebase the No.1 spot in the cloud services world.
But lets say you have a scenario- where you have to sign up users, manage them, authenticate which user can access whose data, store and retrieve data in realtime, be notified about such updates or changes... and have them presented to your users, irrespective of the platform your users are using. Then this problem can be tackled like Childs play with firebase. Your steps would be to implement Authentications, RealTime Db, Cloud Functions & Clound Messaging. This is where Firebase shines. Their documentation is crisp. Their implementations are superb, no matter which platform you are developing on.. or targeting... its all a charm.
November 12, 2021

Firebase is okay

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's being used by the customer success team, data, and engineering team. We are able to track all of the data that is stored from our system/app.
  • Able to delete data within the system in the production environment.
  • More simple interface, so it doesn't complicate the navigation.
  • Needs more support for ios as it's limited.
  • As I am aware, the data is not yours - it's still owned by Firebase.
The integration with our system was pretty seamless, so the setup is not very difficult to do. The real-time database is actually accurate and updated in a timely manner, so that's another plus to using Firebase. I would say that if you have large amounts of data, it will be more difficult to manage and copy.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Firebase provides one bucket solution for all platforms. We have connected firebase for the last two years by using it for mobile application development, real-time database, [and to] engage services for our whole organization. It uses a great authentication mechanism without any interpretation. The best thing about the user's feedback [is that] they are very satisfied with a very seamless and smooth experience. They provided very detailed documentation that helps a person code with basic skills also.
  • Provides logs for error monitoring that to very easy to track
  • Provides smooth and different types of authentication mechanism
  • Provides Realtime database, Cloud services
  • Console is the one of the best features
  • Cost effective
  • For [the] free version, they kept some constants for the users [but] they can't connect simultaneously.
  • Sometimes face challenges [with] integrating with third party plugins.
Suited for
  • App development for all the platforms including Engage services, real-time database, and cloud plugins.
  • Game development from unity.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our mobile team is currently using Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics and very recently expanding our usage to include RemoteConfig. <br><br>With the RemoteConfig, we are using to configure feature flags remotely. The online console is very intuitive and the SDK is easy to implement. This address the problem of being able to toggle on/off features remotely without having to make a new release.<br><br>Likely for Crashlytics and Analytics, we find the SDK incredibly easy to use and with plenty of public resources/tutorials available. <br>
  • SDK is incredibly well documented and stable
  • Excellent public resource on stackoverflow
  • Most app already uses a part of Firebase in one way or another, so adding the other toolsets is incredibly straightforward.
  • Part of the source code may still be written in Obj-C it would be nice to migrate over completely to Swift.
Firebase is well established in the mobile space, SDK is easy to implement, and documentation is well written. I would strongly recommend Firebase for any production application where the developer is interested in trucking crashes, their occurrence frequencies.

Analytic is another one of those tools where it's been used in almost every production app that I work on.
Marco Carnevali | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The technical and marketing department is using Firebase. The technical department is using it for users authentication, no-SQL database, remote configuration, push notifications, and crash log. Marketing team use the analytics dashboard to get the insights into our product
  • Authentication
  • Database
  • Remote Config
  • Cloud Functions
Firebase is the best tool for startups that don't have many resources and team members while creating the product. It's straightforward and cheap to have proper authentication and database. Firebase database Is not suitable for a company that needs a SQL database while I recommend it for analytics.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Firebase for handling our mobile push notifications. It was our platform for both sending push notifications and measuring the success of those pushes. It was used mostly by the content team, producers specifically. That was the one group that sent pushes. Our analytics folks used the platform as well. It gave us a solution for sending push notifications and measuring the impact of our pushes.
  • Sending push notifications in real time
  • Scheduling push notifications in advance
  • Clunkiness of the platform
  • Some analytics we found not to be 100 percent accurate
Some scenarios where Firebase is well suited would be specifically to news organizations who regularly send push notifications to a mobile app. If organizations have an IOs or Android app, then Firebase would be suitable for them. It's less ideal for companies that don't send pushes at all, or for companies that want in-depth and highly accurate analytics.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's mainly being used by our Product, UA, and Developer Teams. The Product Team uses it to A/B test push notifications and the subscription trial period. UA team mainly uses to track users across various events as well as Google UAC campaigns. The Developer team mainly uses the crashlytics to troubleshoot and fix stability issues. This allows them to help prioritize their task better based on their priority.
  • Google Ads: tracks users across UAC campaigns.
  • A/B Testing: in-app, push, and trial period.
  • Not so great at tracking traffic sources outside of Google Ads and organics.
  • Firebase UI can be slow sometimes if you're working with large data, loading issues, or an overall sluggish system.
Firebase is great for anyone looking into getting into the mobile app business or ones that already have an app and needs an extra layer of analytics along with additional added features. Firebase helps with troubleshooting the most common issues along with making sure your app remains stable. It goes much further than that if you're interested in running experiments and A/B testing to optimize the user experience you can set that up easily. It gives you the ability to discover a lot of great things about your users and their usability of different features (UI, purchases, engagement, retention, etc.) and helps you identify if the experiment is likely to succeed or not.
Jeff Burslem | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's being used mainly by our analytics and mobile teams. We were forced to migrate from Google Analytics, which is bad from an analytics standpoint (because Firebase has an inferior interface and is more restrictive in terms of tracking App interactions) but good from a mobile diagnostics point of view (because it has better diagnostics than Google Analytics).

It helps us understand Mobile App Version adoption, as well as gauge the success of new feature rollout and/or experience changes.
  • Diagnostics (e.g. app updates, removals, adoption of new mobile versions).
  • The Firebase interface is terrible. Vastly inferior to Google Analytics - even if you create a Web + App Firebase View, it's still poor experience. It's very hard to get non-analytics stakeholders to use Firebase.
  • Heavy restrictions on the number of Events that can be used to track App interactions. Even heavier restrictions on the number of parameters you can associate with those Events.
  • Poor customer support - Not just in terms of advice, but also in terms of its limited scope
  • Firebase Analytics technically isn't free (which is what was so great about Google Analytics) - If you want to do anything meaningful you have to pay to use BigQuery.
If you have a basic app that doesn't have a lot of interactions/touchpoints and you just want some topline numbers, it does an okay job. It's pretty easy to tag your screens, although using Events to tag the interactions can be a bit of a head-scratch.

If you have an App where you want to learn a ton of things about your users, forget it. I'd strongly advise you to choose something else. There are too many constraints in terms of configuring the tagging to capture what you want.

You're going to struggle with adoption across the company. The Interface is terrible (even the Web + App view in Google Analytics is pretty poor) and it's hard to get product/marketing managers to log in and play around with the data.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Firebase is being used by multiple departments across the organization, namely Technology, Product, Marketing, Analytics, etc. While the Tech team uses this for monitoring crashes and performance, the product team uses this for user funnel and user behavior analysis. The marketing team uses this for AB testing, in-app messaging, push notification, etc. Analytics uses this for creating dashboards and pulling user analytics.
  • Crash reporting: it does a detailed and real-time analysis of crashes, with great insights that pinpoint the developers to the issue.
  • User funnels and behavior analysis: it helps us track audience data, funnels, retention cohorts and all kinds of key events in the user journey on app and web.
  • Notifications: both in-app, as well as push notifications via Firebase Cloud Manager, have the best delivery rates across the industry, this is the best tool to send out marketing notifications to users.
  • Email and notifications system need to be set up, it is not plugged and play, needs some development changes on the app side too if we use Firebase, unlike other email and push CRM tools.
  • User management and access controls: these are complex to manage, can be simplified.
  • Nothing else specifically, overall it's a good tool.
It's best suited for tech and product monitoring, as well as marketing teams to send out user notifications. Less appropriate for a detailed use by tech or marketing, for instance, it will not have pre-set templates for email notifications that can be used by marketing; or it will not have daily summary reports for key parameters that tech can use to circulate amongst key stakeholders etc.—these need to be built on top of Firebase by your own team.
Robert Foreman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am using Firebase as a realtime database and backend as a service for a prototype real estate application I am building. I first used Firebase while I was attending a coding boot camp: we used it for one of our big projects. There are a number of advantages to using this.
  • JSON storage
  • Serverless
  • Pretty secure
  • Limited querying capability
I think for app development, it is advantageous to use Firebase. It's a real-time, cloud-based database which synchronizes continually across all users. It's really good for creating user authorization for apps which require this. As far as hosting your application, I think it's pretty fast and secure. And it's Google.
July 11, 2019

Review Of Firebase

Sam Randika | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Firebase was a great choice for us to build our apps. Since it provides Mobile Backend as a Service it helps us to save our time. For our project, we needed a remote database in the cloud. After comparing most of the cloud solutions, finally, we decided to go with firebase because of its good with overall performance, great documentation and, of course, its a product by the Google brand. It was easy to use and just needed basic coding skills. It is powerful enough to make you satisfied.
  • Data is structured in a simple understandable manner.
  • The free version is nearly similar to premium version.
  • Provides authentication services such as Google, Facebook, and email to authenticate user.
  • In the free version there are a limitations on number of simultaneous connections.
  • If u need relational, complicated queries, its not the best solution.
Best cloud solution for mobile application development. It made it so easy to build real-time apps. It's the ultimate solution for so many problems that we've been going through for a long time. It is really easy to integrate with the development application. There are a lot of guides and tutorials to learn Firebase in less time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Firebase to provide push notification services for mobile applications and some internal business tools. For us, it is used to provide push services to internal employees, and to provide push services to end users of our mobile applications. We find it to be simple to use, effortless to maintain, and effective at its job.
  • Reliability - We have not noticed any significant outages or delays as long as we have used Firebase.
  • Ease of use - Setting up or changing Firebase services has been nearly effortless for us.
  • Organization - It feels like Firebase should be part of Google Cloud Console, but it is its own tool. This isn't a big issue, but it would be great if we could access our Firebase services within Google Cloud Console.
For any app or service that requires push services, there really isn't anything easier to use than Firebase. Also, the free tier allows a great amount of usage. For us, we have found that our usage has remained below the free tier threshold even with considerable usage as we scale our services. Once we surpass the free tier allowance, the cost will be reasonable, so growth is not really a concern here.
Sanyam Jain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Firebase is one and only tool for all of the mobile backends, especially Android. Most of the times when creating mobile applications in the Android studio it is recommended to use Firebase. We use Firebase for JSON data pushing and parsing from Firebase bucket. We use it every place possible, for web apps, smartphone apps, push notifications and many authorization protocols.
  • Web apps storage for real-time pushing and parsing for users.
  • Android apps which have features like push notifications, online storage, authentication, and OAuth tokens.
  • Firebase is mostly used when you have real-time data collection and traffic generation. Firebase bucket makes possible to store images, Text data and use cases like URL shorteners.
  • You have to restrict yourself on single storage bucket for all of the users.
  • High costs for storage. There are very limited connections in one single transaction.
  • Since Firebase stores data to different servers in the world, it may take time to retrieve in real-time. Thus the latency and throughput downgrade.
Well suited for cases when you are dealing with Android or iOS backend and OAuths, or when data storage is a smaller concern than authorizations or push notifications.
Not suited if you have a large user base and each transaction of the data exchange involves several users. It will cost too much.
Sam Lepak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our marketing team and product development team uses Firebase to solve several of our mobile app problems. First, our product development team mainly uses Firebase for their crash reporting (Crashlytics), while our marketing team utilizes Firebase for multiple analytics and growth features. For analytics, we specifically utilize the Funnel, Retention, Events, and MAU features. As for growth features, we have been able to utilize their Dynamic Links, A/B Testing, Predictions, and Remote Configurations.
  • 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).
  • If you are looking for a mobile app analytics platform that has extremely high-quality tracking (down to an ad level), then Firebase may not be for you. While they do track basic UTMs source, medium, and sometimes campaign, Firebase's attribution only scratches the surface of what other competitors are able to do.
  • Firebase has room for improvement when it comes to its Cloud Messaging aka Push Notifications. The room for improvement lies in its user segmentation capabilities. Currently, Firebase does not allow for platform users to segment app users based on in-app events, except for their predictive user events (Firebase predicts which events users will take). Rather Firebase primarily allows for app user segmentation based on demographics and locations. Also, Firebase doesn't allow for automated push notifications or adding images to the push notifications.
  • While Firebase can export data into Google Analytics, it does not allow for direct data exports to a data visualization tool like Google Data Studio, or mobile app engagement platforms, etc. This would be a more advanced feature, that would ideally be in their paid plan.
Firebase is really well-suited for beginner apps that are run by a small team, with a low marketing budget. The platform gives you the 80 / 20 of mobile app analytics with some cool features such as cloud messaging, A/B testing, in-app messages, crash reporting, etc. While if you are looking to grow and scale, then Firebase is most likely not the solution for you as attribution, cost ingestion, data export, web-to-app, journey banners, and webhooks are more suitable to your plan.
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