The One Stop Shop For Everything Your Mobile App Needs!
April 10, 2019
The One Stop Shop For Everything Your Mobile App Needs!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Firebase
Firebase for us, unlike most companies, was used in the Marketing department as a data analytics, attribution, and deep linking platform. Its main uses were for weekly customer activity reports, early stage attribution reports on downloads and in-app actions (although not the best for this use case), sending push notifications and in-app messages, and deep linking/dynamic sharing functionality.
- Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
- Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
- Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
- FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.
- 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.
- Firebase was our sole data analytics platform through our Beta period which was crucial to make business decisions and adjust our application.
- Because it was free it allowed us to focus on high priority issues instead of adding in a costly data analytics platform (which we finally did - Appsee and Appsflyer - which costs us now over $500 month so it saved us $500/month for about 4 months).
- There's no way to directly correlate this to ROI but without Firebase's basic app analytics we would have never made core changes to our app or business and possibly still wouldn't be producing revenue today.
- Mixpanel and Branch
It's tough to pick out competitors against Firebase as I'm really unsure and doubt there's another product exactly like it. As mentioned before Firebase literally does everything you can imagine for a mobile application but doesn't get insanely deep in one feature or action. It involves analytics, notifications, database, cloud storage, CRM, attribution, deep linking, dynamic linking, crash reporting, and so much more. It's not amazing at any specific thing (except maybe their database which is AWESOME) but good at all of it.
We used Firebase for everything in the beginning as it was free and got the job done then as we grew, we started to pay for and integrate with more advanced systems but will always have Firebase in there as well.
We used Firebase for everything in the beginning as it was free and got the job done then as we grew, we started to pay for and integrate with more advanced systems but will always have Firebase in there as well.