Firebase

Firebase — Google's app platform: Firestore documents, auth, functions, deep mobile SDKs. Firebase is the original realtime backend and still the most operationally proven. Firestore is a document store with live listeners and genuine offline persistence, wrapped in the best mobile SDKs on this list. Access control is a proprietary rules language evaluated per document. Nothing is self-hostable, there is no SQL, and the managed export format is readable only by Firestore's own importer. Built by Google. Founded 2011. Licensed Proprietary.

We track it in 1 comparison — Convex alternatives — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 10 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Entry price — $0 /mo, tied for best across 3 of 9 tools.
• Function timeout — 60 min, the best figure of the 4 here.
• Backing — big-tech, tied for best across 2 of 11 tools.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Exit cost — 5, the weakest of the 11 here. Neon + Drizzle records 1.
• TS inference — No. Convex records Yes.
• Self-hostable — No. Convex records Yes.
• Full-text search — No. Convex records Yes.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 25 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Firebase, and 15 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-07-20. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Appwrite. Firebase is ahead on Optimistic writes (Yes against No) and Vector search (Yes against No). Appwrite takes Self-hostable (Yes against No) and Exit cost (3 against 5). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Firebase alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Google

Founded

2011

Licence

Proprietary

Fields we track

25 of 26

Last verified

2026-07-20

Still the best offline story and the best mobile SDKs, and still the worst exit on this page by a distance. Reasonable for consumer apps that will never migrate; a liability for anything you expect to restructure later.

Exit cost

511th of 11

Inferred

TS inference

○No11th of 11

Inferred

Self-hostable

○No11th of 11

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-20source

Entry price

$0 /mo1st of 9

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-20source

Full-text search

○No9th of 11

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-20source

Function timeout

60 min1st of 4

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-20source

Backing

big-tech1st of 11

Inferred

Agent fit

210th of 11

Inferred

Firebase is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Consumer mobile apps where offline behaviour is the product.
• Teams already inside Google Cloud with the operational habits to match.
• Prototypes that will be thrown away rather than migrated.
• Entry price is your binding constraint. Firebase records $0 /mo, the best figure in the Convex alternatives roster. We define that field as monthly cost of the cheapest paid tier, excluding usage, in USD.
• Function timeout is your binding constraint. Firebase records 60 min, the best figure in the Convex alternatives roster. We define that field as maximum wall-clock runtime for the longest-running server function the platform will execute, on the lowest paid tier.
• Backing is your binding constraint. Firebase records big-tech, the best figure in the Convex alternatives roster.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Exit cost. Firebase records 5, the weakest of the 11 tools in the Convex alternatives roster. Neon + Drizzle records 1 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• TS inference. Firebase records No on the Convex alternatives table. Convex records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Self-hostable. Firebase records No on the Convex alternatives table. Convex records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Full-text search. Firebase records No on the Convex alternatives table. Convex records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Agent fit. Firebase records 2, 10th of 11 in the Convex alternatives roster. Convex records 5 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 1 of the 26 fields we track for Firebase are still blank: GitHub stars. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.