ConfigCat vs. Firebase

If you are looking for an experimentation/feature flag style tool that is quick to adopt and provides enough functionality for light/medium use cases, then this is the tool for you. Additionally, they are growing and expanding their functionality and feature set so they can grow alongside you and your needs. The publicly accessible roadmap is also a great benefit to see where time is being spent on which feature next.

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

• Fast and easy feature toggling that gets developers developing
• World class support in both speed and quality for how to best use the service
• Great ear for customer needs and fast paced development

• 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

• Make it easier to pull all configs in a snapshot with a timeout so apps can use this as a precursor to allowing the user access.

• 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

ConfigCat has done the job, and has been great to work with.

Just everything from the website to locating what i need (docs) specific to my platforms is super easy. Not to mention the support articles answering previous questions

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

They have a community Slack channel that is open to anyone. They always seem to have people in there, even over the weekends and are always happy to answer any questions you have,

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

At iBinder we searched for and vetted several suppliers of a feature toggle service to handle feature toggling in our production environment. In addition to our functional requirements, it was crucial for us to find a partner that could deliver an EU-compliant service. We finally decided to sign a service agreement with ConfigCat. This has been a real success story for us – in addition to being compliant, ConfigCat delivers an amazing, flexible, and reliable service. They continue to impress by also being very transparent and having a fantastic support and they are very solution oriented and accommodating when it comes to our feature requests etc. We have now used ConfigCat for approximately 2 years and we give our warmest recommendations to anyone who needs a stable, reliable and EU-compliant feature toggle service.

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

• Allowed us to migrate seamlessly from a major customer communication system to another, reducing end-user friction and production bugs by being able to turn features off if they didn't work as intended.
• We went from zero experimentation to running 10-20 experiments concurrently across systems. Engineering teams are thinking in an experimentation mindset.

• 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