Appsee is designed to offer mobile teams visual data on their app's user behavior. The vendor says they supply businesses with the actual "why's" behind their users' behaviors.
With Appsee's unique user recordings and touch heat maps, businesses can make better informed decisions regarding their app's user experience and spend less time sifting through mountains of data. Appsee also automatically detects all screens, buttons and user actions within an app without the need to select…
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Firebase
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Google 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.
I used Appsee’s conversion funnel analysis to find out why users drop off in a particular funnel that we’ve built. Not only that I’ve been able to see session recordings of those users who dropped off, but I was also able to see the ones who did come through and compare what they like vs what they didn’t. This is just a small example of the power Appsee has. The options are endless.
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.
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.
The user screen recording was quickly shut down on Apple devices after about a week of us using Appsee. Now it's just basic boxes which aren't nearly as helpful or insightful in bettering our user experience. If we would have known this would happen, or that Appsee didn't have that feature, we wouldn't have gone with them.
No integration with Branch (the world's best and probably biggest attribution platform).
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.
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.
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.
Appsee set itself apart from competitors with the user screen recording, but since that is no longer a good feature on iOS, it makes Appsee's competitive advantage obsolete. Its data analytics, funnels, and crash reporting are relatively basic or haven't lead to any breakthroughs. I would stay away from Appsee, save your money, and go for a platform like Mixpanel if possible, which has analytics, attribution, and engagement for the same if not cheaper price.
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.
It now costs much more than the competitors, and has fewer features/functionality than when it started, so I would say it's a negative impact as we're paying about $300-400 month for this.
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.
