AppsFlyer helps brands make good choices for their business and their customers through privacy-preserving measurement, analytics, fraud protection, and engagement technologies. Built on the idea that brands can increase customer privacy while providing exceptional experiences, AppsFlyer empowers thousands of creators and 10,000+ technology partners to create better, more meaningful customer relationships.
$7
per conversion
Firebase
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
Appsflyer is excellent for running numerous campaigns across many clients and keeping track of real-time performance. Attribution is top-notch and the platform is up to date with the innovations in the area while keeping its effective & trustworthy information. Exporting reports could be a bit more friendly but all in all, a truly great MMP.
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.
Appsflyer does deep linking well. It was reliable and works better than any past partner we've used. We no longer invest time and resources in fielding internal flags about broken links.
Appsflyer does particularly well at telling the story on industry landscape, identifying areas of opportunity for our brand to grow based on the depth and breadth of their experience in mobile.
The Appsflyer team offers best in class customer service. The account managers are knowledgeable, responsive, bright, invested and a pleasure to work with.
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.
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.
The UI can be used by anyone with a little understanding of the business. However, may features are somehow hidden and the UI is a bit confusing for beginners. It's not so easy to know where each feature is. It is also not easy to figure out how certain values are calculated.
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.
Overall support is good, fast to respond and helps us with both tool related queries as well as publisher related escalations when it comes to fraud or attribution, as they step in and help justify on our behalf. They have a very small team though in India, it's time for them to scale up the team probably and assign exclusive support folks to large clients.
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.
Appsflyer is generally a more comprehensive and robust platform offering advanced analytics, detailed attribution, and strong fraud prevention features compared to its competition in the market. Also, Appsflyer is a pretty old and well-known name in the market.
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.
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.
