TrustRadius Insights for Firebase are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Real-time Processing Capacity: Users have appreciated the increased real-time processing capacity based on demand, finding it beneficial for efficient operations and seamless performance across platforms. This enhanced capability has enabled users to handle dynamic workloads effectively.
Efficient Realtime Database: Reviewers have highlighted the surprisingly fast and efficient nature of the realtime database on both Android and IOS platforms, enhancing user experience with quick data retrieval and storage capabilities. The speed and reliability of the database have positively impacted overall system responsiveness.
User Authentication and Management: Customers value the ease of use provided by user authentication features and server-less application management, making interactions convenient while ensuring secure access control. The streamlined process of managing user authentication has simplified account security measures for users.
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Firebase Reviews
4 Reviews
Marketing
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It's mainly being used by our Product, UA, and Developer Teams. The Product Team uses it to A/B test push notifications and the subscription trial period. UA team mainly uses to track users across various events as well as Google UAC campaigns. The Developer team mainly uses the crashlytics to troubleshoot and fix stability issues. This allows them to help prioritize their task better based on their priority.
Pros
Google Ads: tracks users across UAC campaigns.
A/B Testing: in-app, push, and trial period.
Cons
Not so great at tracking traffic sources outside of Google Ads and organics.
Firebase UI can be slow sometimes if you're working with large data, loading issues, or an overall sluggish system.
Likelihood to Recommend
Firebase is great for anyone looking into getting into the mobile app business or ones that already have an app and needs an extra layer of analytics along with additional added features. Firebase helps with troubleshooting the most common issues along with making sure your app remains stable. It goes much further than that if you're interested in running experiments and A/B testing to optimize the user experience you can set that up easily. It gives you the ability to discover a lot of great things about your users and their usability of different features (UI, purchases, engagement, retention, etc.) and helps you identify if the experiment is likely to succeed or not.
Firebase is being used by multiple departments across the organization, namely Technology, Product, Marketing, Analytics, etc. While the Tech team uses this for monitoring crashes and performance, the product team uses this for user funnel and user behavior analysis. The marketing team uses this for AB testing, in-app messaging, push notification, etc. Analytics uses this for creating dashboards and pulling user analytics.
Pros
Crash reporting: it does a detailed and real-time analysis of crashes, with great insights that pinpoint the developers to the issue.
User funnels and behavior analysis: it helps us track audience data, funnels, retention cohorts and all kinds of key events in the user journey on app and web.
Notifications: both in-app, as well as push notifications via Firebase Cloud Manager, have the best delivery rates across the industry, this is the best tool to send out marketing notifications to users.
Cons
Email and notifications system need to be set up, it is not plugged and play, needs some development changes on the app side too if we use Firebase, unlike other email and push CRM tools.
User management and access controls: these are complex to manage, can be simplified.
Nothing else specifically, overall it's a good tool.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's best suited for tech and product monitoring, as well as marketing teams to send out user notifications. Less appropriate for a detailed use by tech or marketing, for instance, it will not have pre-set templates for email notifications that can be used by marketing; or it will not have daily summary reports for key parameters that tech can use to circulate amongst key stakeholders etc.—these need to be built on top of Firebase by your own team.
Our marketing team and product development team uses Firebase to solve several of our mobile app problems. First, our product development team mainly uses Firebase for their crash reporting (Crashlytics), while our marketing team utilizes Firebase for multiple analytics and growth features. For analytics, we specifically utilize the Funnel, Retention, Events, and MAU features. As for growth features, we have been able to utilize their Dynamic Links, A/B Testing, Predictions, and Remote Configurations.
Pros
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).
Cons
If you are looking for a mobile app analytics platform that has extremely high-quality tracking (down to an ad level), then Firebase may not be for you. While they do track basic UTMs source, medium, and sometimes campaign, Firebase's attribution only scratches the surface of what other competitors are able to do.
Firebase has room for improvement when it comes to its Cloud Messaging aka Push Notifications. The room for improvement lies in its user segmentation capabilities. Currently, Firebase does not allow for platform users to segment app users based on in-app events, except for their predictive user events (Firebase predicts which events users will take). Rather Firebase primarily allows for app user segmentation based on demographics and locations. Also, Firebase doesn't allow for automated push notifications or adding images to the push notifications.
While Firebase can export data into Google Analytics, it does not allow for direct data exports to a data visualization tool like Google Data Studio, or mobile app engagement platforms, etc. This would be a more advanced feature, that would ideally be in their paid plan.
Likelihood to Recommend
Firebase is really well-suited for beginner apps that are run by a small team, with a low marketing budget. The platform gives you the 80 / 20 of mobile app analytics with some cool features such as cloud messaging, A/B testing, in-app messages, crash reporting, etc. While if you are looking to grow and scale, then Firebase is most likely not the solution for you as attribution, cost ingestion, data export, web-to-app, journey banners, and webhooks are more suitable to your plan.
Firebase for us, unlike most companies, was used in the Marketing department as a data analytics, attribution, and deep linking platform. Its main uses were for weekly customer activity reports, early stage attribution reports on downloads and in-app actions (although not the best for this use case), sending push notifications and in-app messages, and deep linking/dynamic sharing functionality.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
I recommend it for every mobile application that I know solely because it's free. Yes, it's a one size fits all kind of platform so it doesn't get super granular into any specific region of your data but can give you quick and accurate high-level overviews in an instant with extremely easy implementation through cocoa pods.
This is also me talking from a marketer standpoint. From the developer side (I use to be an iOS developer and would always use Firebase as my DB for side projects) it's an absolute dream to work with. Super intuitive with a great front-end UI so you can actually visualize your Non-SQL database with easy and watch it update in real-time. Then with it being one size fits all and owned by Google it has so many integrations and simple one-liners of code to implement complex functions such as file saving, social login, sharing, and more.
Absolutely love Firebase and would recommend for any mobile application and a small team.
