Amazon EventBridge vs Firebase
Discover how Amazon EventBridge compares to Firebase, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Amazon EventBridge?
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that enables real-time response to state changes in your applications. Using an event bus, it collects data from multiple sources, processes and routes them between other AWS services or external SaaS providers. This simplifies the building of scalable and loosely coupled systems in event-driven architectures.
Suitable for:
- Multiple systems syncing
- Event-driven automation
- Data processing
- Tasks scheduling
- Monitoring and auditing
Not suitable for:
- Two-way communication
- On-premises applications
- Legacy systems
- Complex event processing
Pros:
- Event archive & replay
- Serverless architecture
- Event replay & filtering
- Custom event buses
Cons:
- Vendor lock-in
- Complex access control
- Low throughput
What is Firebase?
Firebase is a cloud-native backend by Google that allows developers to build mobile and web applications. Firebase services include Firebase Realtime data, Firestore database, authentication, and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), among others.
Suitable for:
- Realtime chat applications
- Online collaborative apps
- Multiplayer gaming
- Realtime analytics
- Monitoring services
Not suitable for:
- Complex queries
- Large data sets
Pros:
- Generous free tier
- Multiple SDKs
- Robust documentation
Cons:
- Unexpected cost surge
- Google product lifespan concerns
- Geo-blocking
- Data privacy concerns
Compare Amazon EventBridge and Firebase
Let’s compare Amazon EventBridge and Firebase, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Disclaimer:This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Amazon EventBridge and Firebase. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon EventBridge and on 22 Jul 2024 for Firebase. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.
Core features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase Partial Firebase does not natively support Pub/Sub messaging. However, this can be implemented with Google's Pub/Sub service. Read more |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase Yes You can build chat capabilities on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase Yes |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase Yes The Firebase Realtime Database lets you store and sync data between your users in real time. Read more |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase |
Occupancy | High-level metrics about the clients currently connected to a channel make it simple to show things such as connected user count, or display which channels are the most popular. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase Partial Firebase does not have built-in support for occupancy tracking. However, occupancy tracking functionality can be built on top of the Firebase Realtime Database. |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase Partial Message interactions are not natively supported in Firebase. However, you can programmatically build interactions on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase No |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Amazon EventBridge does not support native push notifications. Notifications can be sent to communication channels by integrating with AWS Chatbot. | Firebase |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase Yes Firebase projects can be managed programmatically using the Firebase Management API. |
Pricing | |||
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Free access to AWS default service events for event buses. Custom events, third-party SaaS, and cross-account events are paid. | Firebase Yes The Spark plan (free plan) realtime database is limited to 100 simultaneous connections and 1 GB of storage. Read more |
Pricing model | The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient. | Amazon EventBridge Amazon EventBridge has a limited free tier and a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the number of events published to EventBridge, the number of invocations, events replayed, and schema discovery. The cost varies based on the event type. You can read more about the pricing plan on Amazon's website. | Firebase Firebase has a free plan and a pay-as-you-go plan:
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Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon EventBridge
| Firebase
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Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon EventBridge
| Firebase
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Serverless functions | Enables integration with third-party cloud providers by facilitating the execution of custom code against messages to perform business logic like on-the-fly translation. | Amazon EventBridge
| Firebase
|
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Available through Amazon SQS. | Firebase Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Amazon EventBridge provides an integration with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring usage and metrics. | Firebase Yes Using Firebase Performance Monitoring you can monitor your application performance based on location, device, or version. |
CI/CD tools | Makes it possible to provision and configure service infrastructure as part of a CI or CD pipeline, enabling repeatable and reliable deployments. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Supports:
| Firebase Yes Supports:
|
Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Amazon EventBridge No published metrics are available. | Firebase Firebase Realtime Database is limited to 200,000 simultaneous connections, 1000 Cloud Functions per write (500 for v2 per region), 1 MB event size, and 10 MB/sec data transfer to Cloud Functions. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge promises at-least-once event delivery. It will try to deliver an event to a target for up to 24 hours. | Firebase No |
Guaranteed message ordering | Maintains the sequence of messages as they were sent. This is particularly important in apps where the chronological order of messages is essential for meaningful communication. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase No |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Amazon EventBridge No Amazon EventBridge does not support exactly-once delivery semantics out of the box. It ensures at least-once delivery, but does not guarantee exactly-once delivery. | Firebase No |
Performance & availability | |||
Uptime Guarantee | An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime. | Amazon EventBridge 99.99%. Read more | Firebase 99.95%. Read more |
Global edge network | By bringing servers (Points of Presence, or PoP) geographically closer to the devices of end users, and routing requests to the nearest PoP, global latency is reduced to a minimum. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase No |
Multi-region data replication (message durability) | By replicating data across multiple regions, the risk of data loss or downtime is greatly mitigated since if data is lost or a server fails in one region, the information can be retrieved from another. | Amazon EventBridge No | Firebase No Multi-region data replication is currently not supported in Firebase Realtime Database, but it is supported in Firestore databases. |
No single point of failure or congestion | Having no single point of failure means a system is resilient and can continue to operate even if one part fails. Avoiding a single point of congestion ensures messages flow efficiently across the system and avoids bottlenecks that could lead to performance issues under load. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase No Each Realtime Database instance is tied to a single region chosen at the time of creation. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Amazon EventBridge 500ms global average latency Read more | Firebase Unknown. |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase No |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge uses the AWS STS (Security Token Service) for token-based authentication. | Firebase |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge supports Single Sign-On (SSO) through AWS SSO. | Firebase Yes SSO in a Firebase application can be implemented using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase Yes Using Firebase Realtime Database Security Rules you can set who has access to your database. Read more |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Firebase Partial Some Firebase services are encrypted at rest while others are not. Firebase Realtime Database and Firebase Cloud Messaging are encrypted at rest. Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon EventBridge
| Firebase
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Alternatives to Amazon EventBridge and Firebase
Whilst both Amazon EventBridge and Firebase are worth considering as options for realtime experiences, they aren’t without their limitations. We suggest evaluating them against the following alternatives to make sure you find the right solution for your needs.
Alternatives to Amazon EventBridge
![tech provider image](https://images.ctfassets.net/ee3ypdtck0rk/1YIsoyCVk6rAla5Qj5cAjq/c37c5649a2de7b9853400490dbd4e04e/triggermesh.png?w=48&h=48&q=80&fm=png)
TriggerMesh is a free and open-source AWS EventBridge alternative.
Azure Event Grid is a Pub/Sub message routing service for creating event-driven architectures using MQTT and HTTP protocols.
![tech provider image](https://images.ctfassets.net/ee3ypdtck0rk/2ngDi0rhFEC8EX3fkrgoft/145ef783f5fa7581fc42e61190753da6/kafka-icon-blue.jpg?w=48&h=48&fl=progressive&q=80&fm=jpg)
Confluent Kafka is a scalable and distributed streaming platform that enables real-time data communications.
Alternatives to Firebase
Supabase Realtime is a globally distributed real-time server network built on PostgreSQL, enabling developers to build applications with real-time data sync.
Amazon SNS is an AWS service for designed to distribute notifications from applications to subscribers via SMS, email, etc.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a scalable messaging service that can be used to send and receive messages from applications or services.
Discover how Amazon EventBridge and Firebase stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon EventBridge and Firebase on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections