Countly is a product analytics solution and innovation enabler that helps teams track product performance and customer journey and behavior across mobile, web, and desktop applications. Ensuring privacy by design, Countly helps the user to innovate and enhance products to provide personalized and customized customer experiences, and meet key business and revenue goals. Countly empowers companies of any size or location to grow their business by helping them securely process billions of…
N/A
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.
$0.01
Per Verification
Pricing
Countly
Firebase
Editions & Modules
Countly Enterprise Edition
Personalized Plans
per month per data point
Countly Community Edition
Free Forever
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Countly
Firebase
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Customizable, with free Community Edition (free forever) and free Enterprise Edition trial (free for 1 Month).
Countly is wonderful. It mhas affordable options for startups that are experimenting with event and market-tracking services that can't afford more expensive services but do have the cloud credits to operate Countly. For later-stage companies that have the money, but not the time to set up a service like this, a service like Amplitude, Segment, or Mixpanel may be a better alternative.
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.
Bad UI - The UI is quite outdated and poorly designed, which was one of the principal reasons for us moving away from Countly.
Some poor documentation - 3rd-party documentation and tutorials for some of their mobile SDKs are better than Countly's own documentation.
Server requirements can be a bit high - For startups with trial credits on cloud computing services, this may not be a problem. Otherwise, Countly can get as expensive as hosted services like Segment and Mixpanel.
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.
Well, Countly is open-source. It got a very helpful community in its back that will surely help you on your projects. Countly is known for its mobile analytics and marketing platform for businesses. It excels at mobile data analysis and working directly with customers to boost engagement. Its main job in "user retention" is to assist you to comprehend custom activity in any component of your app and communicating that data to the server. Its user-friendly and well-designed app features improve consumer happiness. Unique features like in-app activity tracking and analysis can increase in-app usability and user experience, resulting in higher retention and income.
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.
