Firebase alternatives for Data Storage and Data Sync

Data Sync is a typical recurring and typically non-trivial developer challenge. Synchronizing data in offline/online settings, like for example across eventually connected devices, is simply hard. While JSON / REST is great, building Data Sync yourself is time-consuming, risky, and typically considered no fun. Therefore, today, we take a look at the out-of-the-box Data Sync market. If you are rather interested learning about Data Sync in general, check out this article about why data sync technology is more necessary than ever.

Introduction

One of the most well-known Data Sync solutions is Firebase. However, Firebase is purely cloud based and offers no support for local data storage ( as in “data persistence above caching”) and therefore offline usage. With a huge shift happening in computing from the cloud to the edge, offline-first approaches and Edge Computing are getting more and more important. Therefore, we’ve recently taken a comprehensive look at mobile database and edge database offerings on the market. But what options do Mobile and IoT developers working on the edge have for out-of-the-box Data Sync solutions? Very few. While there are more and more cloud-based Firebase alternatives springing up nearly daily (e.g. appwrite and supabase) forcing the user into a centralized cloud setup, there is almost nothing that supports offline Data Sync and / or persistent local data storage. As our focus is on offline / edge Data Sync and local storage, in the following we add all edge / offline Data Sync solutions we know of, but spare you the wealth of cloud options only adding the established ones.

Firebase

Firebase is a cloud backend service ((Mobile) Backend as a Service ((M)BaaS)) that enables developers to build mobile or web applications without needing to take care of the backend. This includes the data synchronization, scalability, network, infrastructure challenges etc. Indeed, Firebase, today, offers many different services (e.g. analytics, crashlytics) and goes well beyond Data Sync. We are looking at Firebase from the Data Sync perspective only. Firebase was one of the first Data Sync solutions available on the market together with Parse and Couchbase, which all started in 2011 (Couchbase through a merger of CouchOne and Membase). In 2014, Firebase was acquired by Google. Incidentally, the same year Parse was acquired by Facebook to be subsequently shut down, and Couchbase raised significant funding. All three are still in use today. 

Firebase Pros and Cons

In the following, we will first look at the advantages and disadvantages of Firebase. Then, we will compare Firebase with Firebase alternatives like Couchbase, Parse and ObjectBox in a comprehensive matrix.  

*** “Firebase has been claimed to be used by Google to track users without their knowledge. On July 14, 2020, a lawsuit was filed accusing Google of (…) logging what the users are looking at in many types of apps, despite the user following Google’s own instructions to turn off the web and app activity collected by the company.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase)anced settings.

Firebase Advantages ++

– Cloud based
– Google: large team that supports and maintains it; very low risk of the company failing; however, Google has a reputation of discontinuing products / services, so there is no guarantee
– Backend as a service (ease of use)
– The Firebase Real-time Database has its own advantages:
– Pay as you go, price scales with usage
– Less iOS support (stronger focus on Android)

Firebase Disadvantages —

– Purely cloud based
– Google: vendor lock-in (no migration tools prevents you from making your app portable), you cannot access your data as it is hosted on the Firebase server
– Less flexibility: You cannot optimize the backend to match your app’s needs
– The Firebase Real-time Database has its own drawbacks
– the whole DB is a huge JSON file
– limited querying capabilities
– no way to efficiently filter data
– Easily disorganized, hard to navigate and search
– Cost insecurities, hard – impossible to predict
– Less iOS support (stronger focus on Android)
– Doesn’t work in the countries that don’t allow Google
– User privacy concerns: “Firebase has been claimed to be used by Google to track users without their knowledge. On July 14, 2020, a lawsuit was filed accusing Google of (…) logging what the users are looking at in many types of apps, despite the user following Google’s own instructions to turn off the web and app activity collected by the company.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase)

Firebase alternatives: A look at out-of-the-box data sync solutions

The majority of offerings for developers that handle Data Sync as defined here, are cloud-based and fall into the category of BaaS (can also be MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) or PaaS (platform as a Service) or DBaaS (Database as a Service). This means that data synchronisation is only a specific part of the whole offering.