Firebase vs. MongoDB Atlas

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

I would recommend MongoDB Atlas to every company who have a significant need in the NoSQL database and do not want to manage their infrastructure. Using MongoDB Atlas can significantly reduce your management time and cost, which saves valuable resources for other tasks. It also suits a smaller company as MongoDB Atlas scales up and down very quickly.

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

• Generous free and trial plan for evaluation or test purposes.
• New versions of MongoDB are able to be deployed with Atlas as soon as they're released—deploying recent versions to other services can be difficult or risky.
• As the key supporters of the open source MongoDB project, the service runs in a highly optimized and performant manner, making it much easier than having to do the work internally.

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

• For someone new, it could be challenging using MongoDB Atlas. Some official video tutorials could help a lot
• Pricing calculation is sometimes misleading and unpredictable, maybe better variables could be used to provide better insights about the cost
• Since it is a managed service, we have limited control over the instances and some issues we faced we couldn't;'t know about without reaching out to the support and got fixed from their end. So more control over the instance might help
• The way of managing users and access is somehow confusing. Maybe it could be placed somewhere easy to access

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

I would give it 8. Good stuff: 1. Easy to use in terms of creating cluster, integrating with Databases, setting up backups and high availability instance, using the monitors they provide to check cluster status, managing users at company level, configure multiple replicas and cross region databases. Things hard to use: 1. roles and permissions at DB level. 2. Calculate expected costs

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 love MongoDB support and have great relationship with them. When we decided to go with MongoDB Atlas, they sent a team of 5 to our company to discuss the process of setting up a Mongo cluster and walked us through. when we have questions, we create a ticket and they will respond very quickly

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

In general, they all compete against each other, and each solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. While MongoDB Atlas was the way to go for some cases, however, other databases were more fit for some services that MongoDB Atlas, especially if they were managed by us, which means less cost, like Redis for example

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

• Positive - Faster provisioning so we don't have development teams waiting.
• Positive - Automated backups and server management - eliminates need for dedicated DBAs.

Incentivized