Firebase vs RethinkDB: What are the differences?

What is Firebase? The Realtime App Platform. Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.

What is RethinkDB? JSON. Scales to multiple machines with very little effort. Open source. RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

Firebase can be classified as a tool in the "Realtime Backend / API" category, while RethinkDB is grouped under "Databases".

Some of the features offered by Firebase are:

• Add the Firebase library to your app and get access to a shared data structure. Any changes made to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
• Firebase apps can be written entirely with client-side code, update in real-time out-of-the-box, interoperate well with existing services, scale automatically, and provide strong data security.
• Data Accessibility- Data is stored as JSON in Firebase. Every piece of data has its own URL which can be used in Firebase's client libraries and as a REST endpoint. These URLs can also be entered into a browser to view the data and watch it update in real-time.

On the other hand, RethinkDB provides the following key features:

• JSON data model and immediate consistency.
• Distributed joins, subqueries, aggregation, atomic updates.
• Secondary, compound, and arbitrarily computed indexes.

"Realtime backend made easy" is the top reason why over 318 developers like Firebase, while over 46 developers mention "Powerful query language" as the leading cause for choosing RethinkDB.

RethinkDB is an open source tool with 22.4K GitHub stars and 1.74K GitHub forks. Here's a link to RethinkDB's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Firebase has a broader approval, being mentioned in 859 company stacks & 997 developers stacks; compared to RethinkDB, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 25 developer stacks.