Firebase Realtime Database vs Google Cloud Datastore

Overview

Google Cloud Datastore

Stacks290

Followers357

Votes12

Firebase Realtime Database

Stacks107

Followers229

Votes7

Firebase Realtime Database vs Google Cloud Datastore: What are the differences?

Introduction

Firebase Realtime Database and Google Cloud Datastore are two popular NoSQL databases offered by Google that offer real-time data synchronization and persistence. While they have similarities, there are key differences between the two.

Data Structure: Firebase Realtime Database uses a JSON-like data structure, where data is stored as a large JSON tree. It allows for flexible, hierarchical data modeling. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore uses an entity-group data model, where data is stored in entities with properties. This allows for more structured and indexed data storage.
Scalability and Scaling Model: Firebase Realtime Database provides automatic scaling and handles high concurrency well. It can scale up to millions of simultaneous users. In contrast, Google Cloud Datastore offers a finer-grained control over scalability through entity groups. Sharding data across multiple entity groups allows for scalability to handle high write rates.
Querying and Indexing: Firebase Realtime Database supports only limited querying capabilities such as ordering by a single attribute or filtering on a single value. It doesn't provide advanced querying or indexing capabilities out of the box. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore provides powerful querying features including filtering, sorting, and pagination. It also supports automatic indexing of properties for efficient queries.
Transactions and Atomicity: Firebase Realtime Database supports simple transactions for maintaining data consistency, but it doesn't provide full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) guarantees. Google Cloud Datastore, on the other hand, provides fully ACID-compliant transactions to ensure data integrity and consistency.
Pricing and Cost: Firebase Realtime Database offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the amount of data transferred and stored. It also includes a free plan with limited usage. Google Cloud Datastore has more complex pricing based on operations, storage, and network egress, and it doesn't have a free tier, which can result in higher costs for larger deployments.
Integration with Other Google Cloud Services: Google Cloud Datastore is part of the Google Cloud ecosystem and offers seamless integration with other services like App Engine, Compute Engine, and BigQuery. It can leverage the capabilities of these services for enhanced functionality. Firebase Realtime Database, while it can be used with Google Cloud services, is primarily designed for real-time client-side applications and has tighter integration with Firebase services like authentication and hosting.

In Summary, Firebase Realtime Database offers a flexible JSON-like data structure, automatic scaling, and real-time synchronization, while Google Cloud Datastore provides a more structured data model, powerful querying capabilities, ACID-compliant transactions, and seamless integration with other Google Cloud services.

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Detailed Comparison

Google Cloud Datastore	Firebase Realtime Database
Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.	It is a cloud-hosted NoSQL database that lets you store and sync data between your users in realtime. Data is synced across all clients in realtime, and remains available when your app goes offline.
Schemaless access, with SQL-like querying;Managed database;Autoscale with your users;ACID transactions;Built-in redundancy;Local development tools	Real time syncing for JSON data;Collaborate across devices with ease;Build serverless apps;Optimized for offline use;Strong user-based security
Statistics
Stacks 290	Stacks 107
Followers 357	Followers 229
Votes 12	Votes 7
Pros & Cons
Pros 7 High scalability 2 Serverless 2 Ability to query any property 1 Pay for what you use	Pros 7 Very fast 0 Casandra Cons 2 Poor query
Integrations
No integrations available	C++ iOS Unity Firebase Authentication Android OS Cloud Functions for Firebase

What are some alternatives to Google Cloud Datastore, Firebase Realtime Database?

Amazon DynamoDB

With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development.

Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that lets you easily store, sync, and query data for your mobile and web apps - at global scale.

Cloudant

Cloudant’s distributed database as a service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing databases on their own.

Google Cloud Bigtable

Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.

CloudBoost

CloudBoost.io is a database service for the “next web” - that not only does data-storage, but also search, real-time and a whole lot more which enables developers to build much richer apps with 50% less time saving them a ton of cost and helping them go to market much faster.

restdb.io

RestDB is a NoSql document oriented database cloud service. Data is accessed as JSON objects via HTTPS. This gives great flexibility, easy system integration and future compatibility.

Amazon DocumentDB

Amazon DocumentDB is a non-relational database service designed from the ground-up to give you the performance, scalability, and availability you need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. In Amazon DocumentDB, the storage and compute are decoupled, allowing each to scale independently, and you can increase the read capacity to millions of requests per second by adding up to 15 low latency read replicas in minutes, regardless of the size of your data.

Amazon SimpleDB

Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.

Datomic Cloud

A transactional database with a flexible data model, elastic scaling, and rich queries. Datomic is designed from the ground up to run on AWS. Datomic leverages AWS technology, including DynamoDB, S3, EFS, and CloudFormation to provide a fully integrated solution.

Related Comparisons

Firebase Realtime Database vs Google Cloud Datastore: What are the differences?

Introduction

Data Structure: Firebase Realtime Database uses a JSON-like data structure, where data is stored as a large JSON tree. It allows for flexible, hierarchical data modeling. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore uses an entity-group data model, where data is stored in entities with properties. This allows for more structured and indexed data storage.
Scalability and Scaling Model: Firebase Realtime Database provides automatic scaling and handles high concurrency well. It can scale up to millions of simultaneous users. In contrast, Google Cloud Datastore offers a finer-grained control over scalability through entity groups. Sharding data across multiple entity groups allows for scalability to handle high write rates.
Querying and Indexing: Firebase Realtime Database supports only limited querying capabilities such as ordering by a single attribute or filtering on a single value. It doesn't provide advanced querying or indexing capabilities out of the box. On the other hand, Google Cloud Datastore provides powerful querying features including filtering, sorting, and pagination. It also supports automatic indexing of properties for efficient queries.
Transactions and Atomicity: Firebase Realtime Database supports simple transactions for maintaining data consistency, but it doesn't provide full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) guarantees. Google Cloud Datastore, on the other hand, provides fully ACID-compliant transactions to ensure data integrity and consistency.
Pricing and Cost: Firebase Realtime Database offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the amount of data transferred and stored. It also includes a free plan with limited usage. Google Cloud Datastore has more complex pricing based on operations, storage, and network egress, and it doesn't have a free tier, which can result in higher costs for larger deployments.
Integration with Other Google Cloud Services: Google Cloud Datastore is part of the Google Cloud ecosystem and offers seamless integration with other services like App Engine, Compute Engine, and BigQuery. It can leverage the capabilities of these services for enhanced functionality. Firebase Realtime Database, while it can be used with Google Cloud services, is primarily designed for real-time client-side applications and has tighter integration with Firebase services like authentication and hosting.

Firebase Realtime Database vs Google Cloud Datastore

Overview

Firebase Realtime Database vs Google Cloud Datastore: What are the differences?