Apptopia vs. Firebase

At first the platform was great although after a while we noticed lots of inconsistencies when we compared with other platforms and confirmed when speaking with publishers. The coverage for iOS was also not great. Overall the coverage was not sufficient. The UI was beautiful looking although if it's not accurate it is pointless.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Apptopia not only allows you to see what technologies are being used in an app, but also when an technology is removed, inactive or installed.
• You can create alerts to help you stay on top of changes in the market, SDK, revenue, user base and more.
• The benefits of working with an SMB company is you get their full attention at any point in the customer lifecycle. Early on to our usage of Apptopia we had the Chief Product Officer getting on calls and video shares with us to hear our feedback, ask for suggestions and to showcase new/upcoming features. They have excellent customer support and are constantly updating and adding to their already amazing product.
• The employees that work there are very receptive and helpful as well. I was reviewing another tool for my company to use and noticed one of their managers had left a review about the given tool. I personally reached out to her asking for her opinion and feedback before buying and she responded within a day.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• very inaccurate in my team's experience.
• the beautiful traffic map breakdown was also very inaccurate
• Needs more app coverage. Did not have information for alot of large publishers we are looking to contact.

Incentivized

• Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
• While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
• Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.

Incentivized

Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.

Incentivized

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

Incentivized

We initially went to Datanyze for email hunting and list building. As we learned more about the feature they offer we realized their data was not as accurate as we needed. During our evaluation of the product there were lots of promises of Beta features or things in the future and not a ton of focus or confidence in what they offered currently. We did leverage and benefit from Datanyze for a decent amount of time, but when we evaluated a side by side comparison, Apptopia came out on top. Datanyze is a little different where they can pull lists of contacts, but at the end of the day we saw App data more important than those lists

Incentivized

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

• Apptopia gave our sales team insight on growing apps and mobile SDK information.
• We did not see an adequate ROI with regards to Apptopia. The data was not accurate enough to move forward with the partnership.

Incentivized

• Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
• From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
• From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.

Incentivized