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Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. Firebase

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon SNS

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.

    $0.01

    per 1 million

    Firebase

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AGoogle offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.

    $0.01

    Per Verification

    Pricing
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Editions & Modules
    API Requests & Payload Data
    $0.01
    per 1 million
    API Requests
    $0.50
    per 1 million requests
    Notification Deliveries
    $0.50
    per million notifications
    Phone Authentication
    $0.01
    Per Verification
    Stored Data
    $0.18
    Per GiB
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon SNS
    We use AWS and becasue Amazon SNS can be easily integrated with AWS.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon SNS
    Our clients are mostly on AWS, so it was easy for us to use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and to integrate it with current applications.
    Incentivized
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    20 Answers
    81%
    Would buy again
    17 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    18 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    90%
    Happy with the feature set
    19 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    81%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    13 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    19 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    NativeScript
    Score4.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    SAP Extension Suite (discontinued)
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Google Cloud Pub/Sub
    Score9 out of 10
    Qlik Analytics Platform
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (25 ratings)
    7.0
    (28 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.4
    (14 ratings)
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon SNSFirebase
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem.
    • Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls.
    • Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required.
    • Can be used in many regions, same configs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
    • When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
    • Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
    • Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
    • You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
    • More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
    • City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the
    more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.

    SNS’s core advantages are –

    · no setup/no maintenance

    · either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)

    · various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)

    · limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still
    achieving high throughputs would be expensive

    · SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.

    · no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
    • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
    • Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
    • Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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