What is Firebase Realtime Database and what are its top alternatives?
Firebase Realtime Database is a NoSQL cloud database that allows developers to store and sync data between users in real-time. Its key features include real-time synchronization, offline data support, authentication, and cloud messaging. However, it has limitations such as scaling issues with large data sets, lack of support for complex querying, and higher costs for larger applications.
MongoDB: MongoDB is a popular open-source NoSQL database that provides high scalability and flexibility. Key features include support for complex queries, indexing, and sharding. Pros include flexibility and scalability, while cons include a learning curve for beginners.
Amazon DynamoDB: DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by Amazon Web Services. Key features include automatic scaling, low latency, and seamless integration with other AWS services. Pros include scalability and performance, while cons include cost for high traffic applications.
Google Cloud Firestore: Cloud Firestore is a flexible, scalable database for mobile, web, and server development from Google Cloud Platform. Key features include real-time updates, offline data support, and automatic scaling to handle traffic. Pros include real-time updates and compatibility with Firebase ecosystem, while cons include pricing structure.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB: Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service from Microsoft Azure. Key features include global distribution, multiple data models, and guaranteed low latency. Pros include global scalability and multiple data models, while cons include pricing and complexity for small projects.
Couchbase: Couchbase is an open-source, distributed NoSQL document-oriented database that offers scalability, high performance, and flexible data modeling. Key features include JSON document support, caching, and high availability. Pros include performance and scalability, while cons include complexity in setting up clusters.
Firebase Cloud Firestore: Cloud Firestore is a flexible, scalable database from Firebase that offers real-time updates and offline support. Key features include serverless data syncing, automatic scaling, and real-time updates. Pros include simplicity and real-time updates, while cons include limitations in querying capabilities.
Realm: Realm is a mobile database platform that provides offline-first database solutions for mobile applications. Key features include real-time sync, offline data support, and cross-platform compatibility. Pros include fast performance and simplicity, while cons include limited scalability for large applications.
Apache Cassandra: Cassandra is a distributed NoSQL database that offers high availability and scalability for large-scale applications. Key features include linear scalability, fault tolerance, and tunable consistency. Pros include high availability and scalability, while cons include complexity in configuration and management.
RethinkDB: RethinkDB is an open-source distributed database built for real-time applications. Key features include JSON document storage, real-time push architecture, and automatic scaling. Pros include real-time functionalities and automatic scaling, while cons include lack of advanced querying features.
PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is a powerful open-source relational database system that offers scalability, data integrity, and extensibility. Key features include support for complex queries, indexing, and ACID compliance. Pros include reliability and extensibility, while cons include limited support for real-time applications.
Top Alternatives to Firebase Realtime Database
- Parse
With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured app in record time without ever worrying about server management. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code. ...
- AWS AppSync
AWS AppSync automatically updates the data in web and mobile applications in real time, and updates data for offline users as soon as they reconnect. AppSync makes it easy to build collaborative mobile and web applications that deliver responsive, collaborative user experiences. ...
- Firebase Cloud Messaging
It is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably deliver messages at no cost. You can notify a client app that new email or other data is available to sync. You can send notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention. For use cases such as instant messaging, a message can transfer a payload of up to 4KB to a client app. ...
- MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software. ...
- Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams. ...
- MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding. ...
- Amazon DynamoDB
With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use. ...
- Cloud Firestore
Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that lets you easily store, sync, and query data for your mobile and web apps - at global scale. ...
Firebase Realtime Database alternatives & related posts
- Easy setup118
- Free hosting78
- Well-documented62
- Cheap52
- Use push notifications in 3 lines of code47
- Fast41
- Cloud code39
- Good for prototypes32
- Cloud modules31
- Backed by facebook27
- Parse Push7
- Cross Platform7
- Parse Analytics6
- Multiplatform6
- Parse Core6
- Quick chat and profile capabilities5
- Cloud Based5
- Free Tier5
- Nice security concept4
- Free4
- Backbone Models3
- Local Datastore3
- Backend as a service3
- Geopoints3
- Easy to use2
- Anonymous Users2
- About to Die2
related Parse posts
- GraphQL9
- Real-Time6
- Offline3
- Apollo3
- Fully managed and scalable GraphQL Resolver!2
- Backed by Amazon2
- BaaS2
- AWS2
- Enterprise Security1
related AWS AppSync posts
- Free18
- Lack of BI tools8
related Firebase Cloud Messaging posts
- Sql800
- Free679
- Easy562
- Widely used528
- Open source489
- High availability180
- Cross-platform support160
- Great community104
- Secure78
- Full-text indexing and searching75
- Fast, open, available25
- SSL support16
- Reliable15
- Robust14
- Enterprise Version8
- Easy to set up on all platforms7
- NoSQL access to JSON data type2
- Relational database1
- Easy, light, scalable1
- Sequel Pro (best SQL GUI)1
- Replica Support1
- Owned by a company with their own agenda16
- Can't roll back schema changes3
related MySQL posts
We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.
We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).
And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.
I can't recommend it highly enough.
Our most popular (& controversial!) article to date on the Uber Engineering blog in 3+ yrs. Why we moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. In essence, it was due to a variety of limitations of Postgres at the time. Fun fact -- earlier in Uber's history we'd actually moved from MySQL to Postgres before switching back for good, & though we published the article in Summer 2016 we haven't looked back since:
The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence. Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms. Specifically, in many of the cases where we previously used Postgres, we now use Schemaless, a novel database sharding layer built on top of MySQL (https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/). In this article, we’ll explore some of the drawbacks we found with Postgres and explain the decision to build Schemaless and other backend services on top of MySQL:
- Performance886
- Super fast542
- Ease of use513
- In-memory cache444
- Advanced key-value cache324
- Open source194
- Easy to deploy182
- Stable164
- Free155
- Fast121
- High-Performance42
- High Availability40
- Data Structures35
- Very Scalable32
- Replication24
- Great community22
- Pub/Sub22
- "NoSQL" key-value data store19
- Hashes16
- Sets13
- Sorted Sets11
- NoSQL10
- Lists10
- Async replication9
- BSD licensed9
- Bitmaps8
- Integrates super easy with Sidekiq for Rails background8
- Keys with a limited time-to-live7
- Open Source7
- Lua scripting6
- Strings6
- Awesomeness for Free5
- Hyperloglogs5
- Transactions4
- Outstanding performance4
- Runs server side LUA4
- LRU eviction of keys4
- Feature Rich4
- Written in ANSI C4
- Networked4
- Data structure server3
- Performance & ease of use3
- Dont save data if no subscribers are found2
- Automatic failover2
- Easy to use2
- Temporarily kept on disk2
- Scalable2
- Existing Laravel Integration2
- Channels concept2
- Object [key/value] size each 500 MB2
- Simple2
- Cannot query objects directly15
- No secondary indexes for non-numeric data types3
- No WAL1
related Redis posts
We use MongoDB as our primary #datastore. Mongo's approach to replica sets enables some fantastic patterns for operations like maintenance, backups, and #ETL.
As we pull #microservices from our #monolith, we are taking the opportunity to build them with their own datastores using PostgreSQL. We also use Redis to cache data we’d never store permanently, and to rate-limit our requests to partners’ APIs (like GitHub).
When we’re dealing with large blobs of immutable data (logs, artifacts, and test results), we store them in Amazon S3. We handle any side-effects of S3’s eventual consistency model within our own code. This ensures that we deal with user requests correctly while writes are in process.
I'm working as one of the engineering leads in RunaHR. As our platform is a Saas, we thought It'd be good to have an API (We chose Ruby and Rails for this) and a SPA (built with React and Redux ) connected. We started the SPA with Create React App since It's pretty easy to start.
We use Jest as the testing framework and react-testing-library to test React components. In Rails we make tests using RSpec.
Our main database is PostgreSQL, but we also use MongoDB to store some type of data. We started to use Redis for cache and other time sensitive operations.
We have a couple of extra projects: One is an Employee app built with React Native and the other is an internal back office dashboard built with Next.js for the client and Python in the backend side.
Since we have different frontend apps we have found useful to have Bit to document visual components and utils in JavaScript.
- Document-oriented storage827
- No sql593
- Ease of use553
- Fast464
- High performance410
- Free257
- Open source218
- Flexible180
- Replication & high availability145
- Easy to maintain112
- Querying42
- Easy scalability39
- Auto-sharding38
- High availability37
- Map/reduce31
- Document database27
- Easy setup25
- Full index support25
- Reliable16
- Fast in-place updates15
- Agile programming, flexible, fast14
- No database migrations12
- Easy integration with Node.Js8
- Enterprise8
- Enterprise Support6
- Great NoSQL DB5
- Support for many languages through different drivers4
- Drivers support is good3
- Aggregation Framework3
- Schemaless3
- Fast2
- Managed service2
- Easy to Scale2
- Awesome2
- Consistent2
- Good GUI1
- Acid Compliant1
- Very slowly for connected models that require joins6
- Not acid compliant3
- Proprietary query language1
related MongoDB posts
Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.
We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient
Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:
We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.
We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.
In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.
Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.
In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!
We use MongoDB as our primary #datastore. Mongo's approach to replica sets enables some fantastic patterns for operations like maintenance, backups, and #ETL.
As we pull #microservices from our #monolith, we are taking the opportunity to build them with their own datastores using PostgreSQL. We also use Redis to cache data we’d never store permanently, and to rate-limit our requests to partners’ APIs (like GitHub).
When we’re dealing with large blobs of immutable data (logs, artifacts, and test results), we store them in Amazon S3. We handle any side-effects of S3’s eventual consistency model within our own code. This ensures that we deal with user requests correctly while writes are in process.
- Predictable performance and cost62
- Scalable56
- Native JSON Support35
- AWS Free Tier21
- Fast7
- No sql3
- To store data3
- Serverless2
- No Stored procedures is GOOD2
- ORM with DynamoDBMapper1
- Elastic Scalability using on-demand mode1
- Elastic Scalability using autoscaling1
- DynamoDB Stream1
- Only sequential access for paginate data4
- Scaling1
- Document Limit Size1
related Amazon DynamoDB posts
We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.
To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas
To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS
#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless
Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.
I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.
For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.
Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.
Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.
Future improvements / technology decisions included:
Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic
As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.
One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.
- Easy to use15
- Cloud Storage15
- Realtime Database12
- Easy setup12
- Super fast9
- Authentication8
- Realtime listeners6
- Could Messaging5
- Hosting5
- Google Analytics integration5
- Performance Monitoring4
- Crash Reporting4
- Sharing App via invites3
- Test Lab for Android3
- Adwords, Admob integration3
- Dynamic Links (Deeplinking support)2
- Robust ALI0
- Doesn't support FullTextSearch natively8
related Cloud Firestore posts
Fontumi focuses on the development of telecommunications solutions. We have opted for technologies that allow agile development and great scalability.
Firebase and Node.js + FeathersJS are technologies that we have used on the server side. Vue.js is our main framework for clients.
Our latest products launched have been focused on the integration of AI systems for enriched conversations. Google Compute Engine , along with Dialogflow and Cloud Firestore have been important tools for this work.
Git + GitHub + Visual Studio Code is a killer stack.
We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?