Azure Cosmos DB vs Firebase Realtime Database

Overview

Azure Cosmos DB

Stacks594

Followers1.1K

Votes130

Firebase Realtime Database

Stacks107

Followers229

Votes7

Azure Cosmos DB vs Firebase Realtime Database: What are the differences?

Azure Cosmos DB and Firebase Realtime Database are both NoSQL databases that offer real-time data synchronization and global scalability. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Data model: Azure Cosmos DB supports multiple data models, including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table, allowing developers to choose the model that best fits their needs. On the other hand, Firebase Realtime Database uses a JSON-like data model, making it easier to work with for developers familiar with JavaScript's object notation.
Scalability: Azure Cosmos DB can horizontally scale both reads and writes across multiple regions, offering high availability and low latency globally. It utilizes built-in partitioning and multi-master replication to achieve scale and fault tolerance. In contrast, Firebase Realtime Database scales vertically by increasing the machine size, but it doesn't support automatic partitioning or multi-region replication out of the box.
Query capabilities: Azure Cosmos DB provides rich query capabilities, including support for SQL-like queries, stored procedures, and user-defined functions, making it a more powerful choice for complex queries and analytics. Firebase Realtime Database, on the other hand, offers limited querying capabilities with basic filtering and ordering options.
Transactions and consistency: Azure Cosmos DB offers multi-document ACID transactions, providing strong consistency guarantees across multiple documents or collections. It also supports five levels of consistency, allowing developers to choose between strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, or eventual consistency. Firebase Realtime Database, in contrast, doesn't provide built-in support for ACID transactions or strong consistency guarantees.
Integration with other Azure services: Azure Cosmos DB seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure Event Grid, allowing developers to build serverless applications and leverage the full capabilities of the Azure ecosystem. Firebase Realtime Database, while it offers integration with Firebase Authentication and other Firebase services, doesn't have the same level of integration with external services.
Pricing and cost: Azure Cosmos DB pricing is based on the consumed resources, such as storage, throughput, and data transfer, providing flexible options to optimize costs. Firebase Realtime Database has a simpler pricing model based on the number of concurrent connections, storage, and data transfer, making it easier to estimate costs for smaller applications.

In summary, Azure Cosmos DB offers a more flexible data model, superior scalability, advanced query capabilities, ACID transactions, and deeper integration with Azure services. Firebase Realtime Database, on the other hand, provides a simpler JSON-like data model, vertical scalability, basic querying options, and easier cost estimation.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Azure Cosmos DB	Firebase Realtime Database
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.	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.
Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA;Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage);Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes;Globally distributed with multi-region replication;Rich SQL queries over schema-agnostic automatic indexing;JavaScript language integrated multi-record ACID transactions with snapshot isolation;Well-defined tunable consistency models: Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, and Eventual	Real time syncing for JSON data;Collaborate across devices with ease;Build serverless apps;Optimized for offline use;Strong user-based security
Statistics
Stacks 594	Stacks 107
Followers 1.1K	Followers 229
Votes 130	Votes 7
Pros & Cons
Pros 28 Best-of-breed NoSQL features 22 High scalability 15 Globally distributed 14 Automatic indexing over flexible json data model 10 Always on with 99.99% availability sla Cons 18 Pricing 4 Poor No SQL query support	Pros 7 Very fast 0 Casandra Cons 2 Poor query
Integrations
Azure Machine Learning MongoDB Hadoop Java Azure Functions Azure Container Service Azure Storage Azure Websites Apache Spark Python	C++ iOS Unity Firebase Authentication Android OS Cloud Functions for Firebase

What are some alternatives to Azure Cosmos DB, 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.

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.

Google Cloud Datastore

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.

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

Azure Cosmos DB vs Firebase Realtime Database: What are the differences?

Azure Cosmos DB and Firebase Realtime Database are both NoSQL databases that offer real-time data synchronization and global scalability. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Data model: Azure Cosmos DB supports multiple data models, including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table, allowing developers to choose the model that best fits their needs. On the other hand, Firebase Realtime Database uses a JSON-like data model, making it easier to work with for developers familiar with JavaScript's object notation.
Scalability: Azure Cosmos DB can horizontally scale both reads and writes across multiple regions, offering high availability and low latency globally. It utilizes built-in partitioning and multi-master replication to achieve scale and fault tolerance. In contrast, Firebase Realtime Database scales vertically by increasing the machine size, but it doesn't support automatic partitioning or multi-region replication out of the box.
Query capabilities: Azure Cosmos DB provides rich query capabilities, including support for SQL-like queries, stored procedures, and user-defined functions, making it a more powerful choice for complex queries and analytics. Firebase Realtime Database, on the other hand, offers limited querying capabilities with basic filtering and ordering options.
Transactions and consistency: Azure Cosmos DB offers multi-document ACID transactions, providing strong consistency guarantees across multiple documents or collections. It also supports five levels of consistency, allowing developers to choose between strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, or eventual consistency. Firebase Realtime Database, in contrast, doesn't provide built-in support for ACID transactions or strong consistency guarantees.
Integration with other Azure services: Azure Cosmos DB seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure Event Grid, allowing developers to build serverless applications and leverage the full capabilities of the Azure ecosystem. Firebase Realtime Database, while it offers integration with Firebase Authentication and other Firebase services, doesn't have the same level of integration with external services.
Pricing and cost: Azure Cosmos DB pricing is based on the consumed resources, such as storage, throughput, and data transfer, providing flexible options to optimize costs. Firebase Realtime Database has a simpler pricing model based on the number of concurrent connections, storage, and data transfer, making it easier to estimate costs for smaller applications.

Azure Cosmos DB vs Firebase Realtime Database

Overview