firebase-vs-heroku-platform

Firebase and Heroku Platform are platforms for applications development and continuous delivery. Firebase offers a more abstracted backend setup, requiring less server-side expertise from developers. Heroku Platform gives more control and insight into backend processes, but requires developer effort and knowledge to do so. Both products are used most heavily by small businesses, likely because their pricing allows new users to start for free and scale up as-needed, which makes them attractive options for hobbyists, freelancers, and start-ups.

Features

Both Heroku Platform and Firebase help developers create, deliver, and maintain web-based applications, but they each have their own strengths.

Firebase gives developers a lot of in-service tools to use in their applications. Developers especially appreciate the built-in authentication tools, which handle the entire user authentication process end-to-end. The Firebase Console is a much-appreciated feature that allows developers to deliver app updates, send or schedule push notifications, and monitor their app from a centralized interface. A/B testing tools help teams adjust and optimize the user experience. Solid documentation and strong support from the Firebase community help developers get started and solve problems as they occur.

Heroku Platform makes it quick and easy to test and deliver new applications. Users appreciate the effort that Heroku’s team has put into UX across the board, with an intuitive and useful GUI, API, and command-line interface. Detailed and useful notifications, metrics, and alerts help developers monitor their app and take action when problems arise or usage patterns change. It’s also easy to scale up on server resources as an app’s needs become more demanding.

Limitations

However, Heroku Platform and Firebase might not be suited for all applications, as each platform has its drawbacks.

Heroku Platform can be expensive, especially when developers need to scale up. Important features might be gated behind advanced subscription tiers, and repeated attempts to upsell extra resources and features can be frustrating. Other users found Heroku Platform’s notifications about server status and downtime to be overzealous, generating too many irrelevant alerts with no effective way to filter them. For free users, their server goes to sleep if its application is not used frequently enough, and it can be slow to reboot when used again.

Firebase users primarily complain about the user experience. The interfaces can be unpleasant to use and unintuitive, especially for the included Firestore database system. Firebase users also found the platform limiting, since its abstraction of some server-side functions makes them difficult to adjust. Other developers wish Firebase had a more robust capability to track user interactions with their app. Although community support for the product is strong, the official support team seems to be hit-or-miss, leaving some users satisfied and other users frustrated with rote, unhelpful responses.

Pricing

Firebase offers two pricing tiers. The Spark Plan is free and includes most of Firebase’s feature set, with data usage caps and restrictions. The Blaze plan is pay-as-you-go for data usage and adds additional features, such as multiple databases per project and access to the Google Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service product. For specific pricing details, refer to the Firebase pricing page, which includes a plan calculator for estimating your cost.
Heroku Platform uses a tiered build-a-price model based on type of application, number and tier of app containers, database access, and add-ons. To evaluate your price for Heroku Platform, use the price estimation tools on the Heroku website.