AWS AppSync vs Firebase Cloud Messaging
Discover how AWS AppSync compares to Firebase Cloud Messaging, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is AWS AppSync?
AWS AppSync is a fully managed service designed to streamline the process of building and deploying serverless GraphQL and pub/sub over WebSocket APIs. It enables developers to seamlessly handle and synchronize mobile app data in realtime across devices and users. Even when a mobile device is offline, AppSync permits data access and modification.
What is Firebase Cloud Messaging?
Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a free cross-platform messaging service for sending and receiving messages and notifications across platforms like iOS, Android, and the web via cloud-based infrastructure. It supports both upstream and downstream messaging.
Compare AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging
Let’s compare AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging, 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 AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for AWS AppSync and on 30 Oct 2024 for Firebase Cloud Messaging. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | AWS AppSync Yes Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is not a Pub/Sub service. However, you can connect it with Google Cloud Pub/Sub to create more advanced messaging patterns, including asynchronous messaging and scaling. Read more |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | AWS AppSync | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Firebase doesn’t offer a dedicated messaging solution. However, you can build these features using Firebase services such as Realtime Database, Firestore, and Firebase Storage. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | AWS AppSync | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM does not have built-in collaboration capabilities like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. However, you can build these using Firebase Realtime Database or Firestore. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | AWS AppSync Partial Can be built on top of AppSync, but not available out of the box. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not offer state sync capabilities on its own. You can achieve this by connecting it with Firebase Realtime Database or Firestore. Read more |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | AWS AppSync Partial "AWS AppSync does not provide events related to client connections or disconnections" (see source) - but it can be built on top of it by composing multiple AWS products. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not provide presence capabilities on its own. To incorporate presence, integrate with Firebase Realtime Database, which natively supports presence. Read more |
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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM 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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial Message interactions are not natively supported in FCM. 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. | AWS AppSync Partial Looks like you can get message history, but only in combination with other AWS services see source | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM provides message delivery reports that can be viewed in the Firebase console. :cta[Read more(https://firebase.google.com/support/guides/cloud-audit-logging/firebase-cloud-messaging#permission-type): |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | AWS AppSync Yes Find out how | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | AWS AppSync Yes See tutorial | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | AWS AppSync Yes You can perform programmatic management using the AWS SDKs (Software Development Kits), AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation or AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit). | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM offers programmatic management through its APIs. |
| 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. | AWS AppSync Yes 250,000 API requests free per month for 12 months with the AWS Free Tier. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM is free to use. |
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. | AWS AppSync You pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage. You are billed separately for query and data modification operations, and for performing realtime updates on your data. Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM is free to use. |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | AWS AppSync
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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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. | AWS AppSync
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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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. | AWS AppSync
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | AWS AppSync AWS AppSync doesn't directly integrate with streaming and queuing services for data ingress and egress, but you can use the following AWS services alongside AppSync to build scalable and event-driven architectures for your applications: Ingress:
Egress:
| Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | AWS AppSync | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not directly offer built-in observability services, but you can integrate with Firebase Performance Monitoring to 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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | AWS AppSync No published metrics are available. However, this works on top of serverless technology which means theoretically it should scale to millions of concurrent connection with little to no tuning from the customer. | Firebase Cloud Messaging According to FCM, FCM can scale to over 115 billion notifications to more than 400 million users globally. At a recorded peak time, FCM has handled 46 million queries per second (QPS) from its average baseline of 18 million QPS. Read more |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging No FCM does not guarantee message delivery without loss or duplication. It operates on a "best effort" model. |
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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging 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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging 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. | AWS AppSync 99.95 uptime SLA | Firebase Cloud Messaging FCM uptime SLA is unclear. However, Firebase's SLA has a monthly uptime SLA of at least 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. | AWS AppSync No | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM benefits from Google's global edge network. |
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. | AWS AppSync Partial Single region by default - multi region deployment of AWS AppSync would require integration of Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables. | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
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. | AWS AppSync Partial Not available by default - but could be built with the integration of Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes FCM's distributed architecture and implementation of load balancing strategies ensure the re-routing of requests and distribution of message traffic evenly across servers, preventing single points of failure and congestion. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | AWS AppSync Unknown, although reports in forums suggest it is 200-500 ms. | Firebase Cloud Messaging Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | AWS AppSync Yes Learn more | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | AWS AppSync | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | AWS AppSync Yes Can set up auth with AWS IAM, and AWS IAM can be configured with any identity source (e.g. Okta). Learn more | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | AWS AppSync Yes Learn more | Firebase Cloud Messaging Partial FCM does not implement rules for permissions and operations. Firebase's security features manage permissions and security. 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. | AWS AppSync | Firebase Cloud Messaging No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | AWS AppSync Yes Done using AWS Key Management Service keys. This ensures that data in services like AppSync is securely encrypted. Read more | Firebase Cloud Messaging Yes Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | AWS AppSync
| Firebase Cloud Messaging
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Alternatives to AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging
While both AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging 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 AWS AppSync
Amazon API Gateway is a service for building, deploying, and managing APIs.
Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.
Apollo GraphQL is a scalable platform that unifies all your data sources to one GraphQL API.
Alternatives to Firebase Cloud Messaging
Amazon SNS is an AWS service for designed to distribute notifications from applications to subscribers via SMS, email, etc.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, messages, and email sends for businesses to manage communication with their users.
Discover how AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to AWS AppSync and Firebase Cloud Messaging on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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