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Azure Event Grid vs Firebase

This Azure Event Grid vs Firebase comparison was created based on reviews from developers and our best attempts to perform analysis by looking at documentation and other publicly available resources.

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Azure Event Grid

Firebase

Getting started and developer experience

Time to "hello world"

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Ratings were given based on the average amount of time it takes to sign up to a new account and publish the first message.

4 / 5

5 = <30 min
4 = 30 min - 1 h
3 = 1-2 h
2 = 2-4 h
1 = 4+ h

View code example
3 / 5

5 = <30 min
4 = 30 min - 1 h
3 = 1-2 h
2 = 2-4 h
1 = 4+ h

View code example

Demos / Tutorials

A selection of online demos and tutorials so you can test and see the code in action.

Explore Ably's tutorials for our pub/sub messaging platform

Documentation

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Explore Ably's documentation for our pub/sub messaging platform
4.50 / 5

Getting started guides / 5

Information architecture and developer journey / 5

API reference documentation / 5

Readability, design and navigation / 5

Quality of code / 5

Breadth and quality of tutorials / 5

“Azure Event Grid documentation is well organized in terms of information architecture, and the navigation is intuitive. The docs largely consist of quickstart guides, tutorials, samples, and Event Grid concepts. There’s also a useful comparison page with other similar Azure messaging services - Service Bus and Event Hubs. The tutorials are well written, with print screens and code samples throughout. However, they don’t cover the entire breadth of event sources and handlers that can communicate through Event Grid, which would have been incredibly helpful.“

4 / 5

Getting started guides / 5

Information architecture and developer journey / 5

API reference documentation / 5

Readability, design and navigation / 5

Quality of code / 5

Breadth and quality of tutorials / 5

“Good getting started guides, across various languages. The API reference documentation is very detailed, but it lacks any interactivity, which is not great, considering that there's a lot of content. There are a few Codelabs and several multi-feature samples of apps built with Firebase, to showcase functionality, but nothing else that can be regarded as a tutorial. Documentation could be enhanced by including some extra code samples throughout. You can find a lot of samples on GitHub, but you have to do some digging. Including more end-to-end use cases directly in the docs would improve the overall developer experience.”

Dashboard or dev console

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Sign up for free and explore Ably's pub/sub messaging platform
4.33 / 5

Ease of use / 5

Stats and reports / 5

Functionality / 5

“Azure Portal allows you to configure and monitor event pipelines built with Event Grid. Adding new events and handlers and managing them is easy enough, and the workflow is intuitive most of the time. You can also configure various logs, metrics, and alerts. All in all, the experience is good, but some tooltips would be good, so you don’t have to dig through the documentation if it’s the first time you’re using the service.“

4.67 / 5

Ease of use / 5

Stats and reports / 5

Functionality / 5

“The dev console has a wide range of features available, grouped into five main categories: Project Overview (basically your dashboard), Develop - where you handle everything from auth to storage and serverless functions invocation, Quality - where you can view crash reports and latency stats, Analytics - which includes various stats, including GA, and, finally, Grow - where you can do stuff like A/B testing. Navigation is intuitive, but all the functionality available can be a bit too much if you're new to Firebase, and it takes some time to be able to master it all.”

SDKs

Note: Only official SDKs were taken into account.

Explore Ably's 25+ SDKs for our pub/sub messaging platform

6 data plane SDKs

Including:

  • .NET

  • JavaScript

  • Go

9 SDKs

Including:

  • JavaScript

  • Android

  • Unity

API structure

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

4.25 / 5

API consistency across SDKs / 5

Well structured / 5

Intuitive / 5

Simple / 5

“Event Grid APIs are split into data plane APIs and management APIs. The management APIs enable you to create, update, and delete Event Grid topics and subscriptions, while the data plane APIs enable you to post events to topics and consume events. The APIs are largely intuitive and consistent across SDKs. They’re also quite easy to use, but you need to familiarize yourself with them first, as there are tens of operations you can perform.“

4.50 / 5

API consistency across SDKs / 5

Well structured / 5

Intuitive / 5

Simple / 5

“APIs are well documented (even if it’s in a boring way), and the methods are generally easy to read through and can be understood fairly quickly. APIs are straightforward and easy enough to use; there are however slight inconsistencies across SDKs“.

Azure Event Grid

Firebase

"Hello world" code example
// PUBLISH TO EVENT GRID
function EventGridSample() {
  // TODO: Enter value for topicKey
  let topicKey = 'enter-topic-key';
  // TODO: Enter value for topic-endpoint
  let topicEndPoint = 'enter-topic-endpoint';

  let topicCreds = new msRestAzure.TopicCredentials(topicKey);
  let egClient = new eventGrid(topicCreds);
  let topicUrl = url.parse(topicEndPoint, true);
  let topicHostName = topicUrl.host;
  let currentDate = new Date();
    
  let events = [
    {
      id: uuid(),
      subject: 'Door1',
      dataVersion: '2.0',
      eventType: 'Contoso.Items.ItemReceivedEvent',
      data: {
        itemSku : 'ContosoItemSku'
      },
      eventTime: currentDate
    }
  ];
  egClient.publishEvents(topicHostName, events).then((result) => {
    return Promise.resolve(console.log('Published events successfully.'));
  }).catch((err) => {
    console.log('An error ocurred ' + err);
  });
}

EventGridSample();

// CONSUME FROM EVENT GRID
module.exports = function (context, req) {
    const SubscriptionValidationEvent = "Microsoft.EventGrid.SubscriptionValidationEvent";
    const StorageBlobCreatedEvent = "Microsoft.Storage.BlobCreated";
    const CustomTopicEvent = "Contoso.Items.ItemReceivedEvent";

    var parsedReq = JSON.parse(req['rawBody']);
    context.log('JavaScript HTTP trigger function processed a request.' + parsedReq);

    parsedReq.forEach(eventGridEvent => {
        var eventData = eventGridEvent.data; 
        // Deserialize the event data into the appropriate type based on event type using if/elif/else
        if (eventGridEvent.eventType == SubscriptionValidationEvent) {
            context.log('Got SubscriptionValidation event data, validationCode: ' + eventData.validationCode + ', topic: ' + eventGridEvent.topic); 
            context.res = {
                    validationResponse: eventData.validationCode
            };
        } else if (eventGridEvent.eventType == StorageBlobCreatedEvent) {
            context.log('Got Blobcreated event data, blob URI ' + eventData.url);
        } else if (eventGridEvent.eventType == CustomTopicEvent) {
            context.log('Got ContosoItemReceived event data, item SKU ' + eventData.itemSku);
        }
    });
    
    context.done();
};
// SUBSCRIBE CLIENT APP TO A TOPIC 
// These registration tokens come from the client FCM SDKs.
var registrationTokens = [
  'YOUR_REGISTRATION_TOKEN_1',
  // ...
  'YOUR_REGISTRATION_TOKEN_n'
];
 
// Subscribe devices to the topic
admin.messaging().subscribeToTopic(registrationTokens, topic)
  .then(function(response) {
    console.log('Successfully subscribed to topic:', response);
  })
  .catch(function(error) {
    console.log('Error subscribing to topic:', error);
  });
 
// SENDING MESSAGES TO A TOPIC
var condition = "'stock-GOOG' in topics || 'industry-tech' in topics";
 
var message = {
  notification: {
    title: '$FooCorp up 1.43% on the day',
    body: '$FooCorp gained 11.80 points to close at 835.67, up 1.43% on the day.'
  },
  condition: condition
};
 
// Send a message to devices subscribed to the combination of topics
admin.messaging().send(message)
  .then((response) => {
    console.log('Successfully sent message:', response);
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    console.log('Error sending message:', error);
  });

Azure Event Grid

Firebase

Realtime features

Pub/Sub messaging

Pub/Sub is a design pattern that lets any number of publishers (producers) push messages to channels (also known as topics). Multiple subscribers (consumers) can subscribe to a channel to consume published messages.

Explore Ably's pub/sub messaging implementation

Message queues

A message queue is a form of asynchronous service-to-service communication. Messages are stored on a queue until they are processed. Note that each message is only consumed by one subscriber (consumer).

Explore Ably's message queues implementation

Presence

Presence enables you to track the online and offline status of devices and end-users in real time and to store their state. Essential for chat apps and multiplayer games.

Explore Ably's presence implementation

Message history

Message history provides a means to retrieve previously published messages. For this to be possible, message data must be stored (persisted) somewhere.

Explore Ably's message history implementation

Connection state recovery (stream resume)

In the case of unreliable network conditions, clients may suddenly disconnect.Connection state recovery ensures that when they reconnect, the data stream resumes exactly where it left off.

Explore Ably' s connection state recovery implementation

Guaranteed message ordering

Ordering ensures that messages are delivered to consumers in the same order that producers publish them.

Explore Ably' s guaranteed message ordering implementation

Exactly-once semantics

Exactly-once is a system-wide data integrity guarantee that ensures each message is delivered to consumers exactly-once.

Explore Ably' s idempotent publishing implementation

Message delta compression

Message delta compression enables you to only send the changes from the previous message to subscribers each time there’s an update, instead of the entire message. Useful for use cases where there is a significant degree of similarity between successive messages.

Explore Ably' s message delta compression implementation

Native push notifications

Native push notifications can be used to deliver messages even when clients are offline. Useful for geolocation updates or news alerts.

Explore Ably's push notifications implementation

Webhooks

Webhooks provide a mechanism to get messages and other types of events (such as clients entering or leaving channels) pushed to your servers over HTTP.

Explore Ably's webhooks implementation

Serverless functions

A serverless function is essentially an isolated, single-purpose piece of code that is only executed when it’ triggered by an event. For example, you can use serverless functions to send a welcome message to clients when they become present on chat channels.

Note that serverless functions are usually fully managed by cloud vendors.

Explore Ably's serverless functions implementation

Limited

Only integrates with Azure Functions. Event Grid doesn’t have in-built support for other serverless platforms, such as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions.

Limited

Can only trigger Cloud Functions for Firebase. Does not support other serverless platforms, such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.

Built-in integrations

Which popular services & systems are Azure Event Grid and Firebase integrated with?

Explore Ably's library of integrations

Webhooks

  • Custom
  • IFTTT
  • Zapier

Serverless functions

  • AWS Lambda
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Google Cloud Functions
  • Microsoft Azure Functions

Streaming

  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Pulsar
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • Amazon SQS
  • RabbitMQ
  • AMQP

Webhooks

  • Custom
  • IFTTT
  • Zapier

Serverless functions

  • AWS Lambda
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Google Cloud Functions
  • Microsoft Azure Functions

Streaming

  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Pulsar
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • Amazon SQS
  • RabbitMQ
  • AMQP

Known limits and constraints

Find out practical limits, such as the maximum message size, or the maximum number of concurrent connections.

Explore the practical limits of the Ably pub/sub messaging platform

Publisher throughput 

5.000 events/sec or 1 MB/sec (whichever is met first) per topic

Maximum message size

1 MB

Maximum number of topics

100.000 topics per event domain

Maximum number of subscribers

500 subscriptions per topic

The information below applies to Firebase Cloud Messaging:

Throughput 

240 messages/minute and 5.000 messages/hour to a single device

Maximum message size

4KB

Maximum number of topics

No limit on the total number of topics, but an app instance can be subscribed to no more than 2000 topics.

Maximum number of concurrent connections

2.500 connections per project

Supported development platforms, languages, open protocols and cloud models

Development platforms & operating systems

Which popular development platforms and operating systems do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support via official SDKs?

Explore the development platforms supported by Ably
  • Android
  • Java / JVM
  • iOS
  • macOS
  • iPadOS
  • tvOS
  • watchOS
  • Mono
  • .NET
  • Android
  • Java / JVM
  • iOS
  • macOS
  • iPadOS
  • tvOS
  • watchOS
  • Mono
  • .NET

Languages

Which popular programming languages do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support via offical SDKs?

Explore the programming languages supported by Ably
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Go
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Flutter
  • Clojure
  • Scala
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Go
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Flutter
  • Clojure
  • Scala

Open protocols

Which popular open protocols do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support?

Explore the open protocols supported by Ably
  • WebSocket
  • HTTP
  • AMQP
  • MQTT
  • STOMP
  • SSE
  • Webhooks
  • WebSocket
  • HTTP
  • AMQP
  • MQTT
  • STOMP
  • SSE
  • Webhooks

Cloud models

Which popular cloud models do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support?

  • Self-hosted
  • Cloud-managed
  • Serverless
  • Globally-distributed
  • Self-hosted
  • Cloud-managed
  • Serverless
  • Globally-distributed
Global and reliable edge service

Edge messaging network with latency-based routing

Latency-based routing ensures that clients are always routed to the nearest datacenter and point of presence.

Explore Ably's routing mechanism that mitigates network and DNS issues

Limited

Edge-optimized, dynamic datacenter selection is available only for the Cloud Firestore component.

Multi-region data replication (message durability)

Multi-region data replication (storage) protects against single points of failure and ensures message data durability.

Learn how Ably ensures message durability

Uptime SLAs

Here’s what the most common SLAs amount to in terms of downtime over a calendar year:

99.999% SLA = 5m 15s downtime per year

99.99% SLA = 52m 35s downtime per year

99.95% SLA = 4h 22m 58s downtime per year

99.9% SLA = 8h 45m 56s downtime per year

99% SLA = 3d 15h 39m 29s downtime per year

Source: https://uptime.is/

99.99%

99.95% for Firebase Hosting and the Realtime Database.

99.99 % if you are using Cloud Firestore in a single-region configuration.

99.999% if you are using Cloud Firestore in a multi-region configuration.

Unclear what SLAs (if any) are provided for the rest of the Firebase services. 

Quality of Service

What QoS guarantees do Azure Event Grid and Firebase provide natively?

Explore Ably's availability and uptime guarantees for our pub/sub messaging platform
  • Multi-region data replication (storage)
  • Exactly-once semantics
  • Guaranteed message ordering
  • Connection state recovery (stream resume)
  • Multi-region data replication (storage)
  • Exactly-once semantics
  • Guaranteed message ordering
  • Connection state recovery (stream resume)
Security

API key authentication

The simplest way to authenticate. Involves using private API keys that you can usually create and edit via a dashboard. Recommended to be used server-side, as private API keys shouldn’t be shared with untrusted parties.

Explore Ably's implementation of API key authentication

Token-based authentication

Which popular token-based authentication mechanisms do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support?

Note that token-based authentication is usually the recommended strategy on the client-side as it provides more fine-grained access control and limits the risk of credentials being compromised.

Explore Ably's implementation of token-based authentication
  • Ephemeral tokens
  • JWTs
  • Ephemeral tokens
  • JWTs

Configurable rules and permissions

Which types of configurable rules and permissions do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support?

Explore Ably's configurable rules and permissions
  • API keys rules and permissions
  • Operation rules and permissions
  • Admin rights
  • API keys rules and permissions
  • Operation rules and permissions
  • Admin rights

Message encryption

Which types of message encryption do Azure Event Grid and Firebase support?

Explore Ably's message encryption mechanisms
  • Encrypted at rest
  • Encrypted in transit
  • Message payload encryption
  • Encrypted at rest
  • Encrypted in transit
  • Message payload encryption

Formal certifications

Which formal certifications are Azure Event Grid and Firebase compliant with?

Explore Ably's security and compliance for our pub/sub messaging platform
  • SOC 2 TYPE I
  • SOC 2 Type II
  • HIPAA
  • EU GDPR
  • SOC 2 TYPE I
  • SOC 2 Type II
  • HIPAA
  • EU GDPR
Pricing & Support

Free package

What do the free packages offered by Azure Event Grid and Firebase consist of?

Explore Ably's free package for our pub/sub messaging platform

First 100.000 operations free each month.

The Spark plan includes several products from the Firebase suite that are entirely free to use, such as cloud messaging (FCM) or in-app messaging. The Spark plan also allows for free usage of most of the other products, up to certain limits. Some examples: first 125k/month Cloud Functions invocations free, 10 GB of free storage (hosting), and 1 GiB of free storage in Cloud Firestore.

Pricing model

How are the Azure Event Grid and Firebase pricing models calculated?

Explore Ably's pricing model for our pub/sub messaging platform

Azure Event Grid uses a pay-per-use pricing model based on operations performed. 

Operations include ingress of events to Domains or Topics, advanced matches, delivery attempts, and management calls. 

The price per million operations is $0.60 (note that we have used the US as a reference point, but prices may vary across regions).

Firebase offers two pricing plans: the Spark plan (free) and the Blaze plan (pay as you go), which is recommended for building apps at scale.

Most Firebase products are entirely free to use for both plans, with hard limits on some products for the Spark plan (and some missing features, too).  The Blaze plan includes the free usage from the Spark plan and allows access to all Firebase features and products. On top of that, pricing is calculated monthly based on a multitude of factors, such as message ingestion & delivery, document read, write, delete operations, data storage, hosting, or function invocations. For example, Cloud Firestore storage is calculated at $0.18/GiB, and hosting is calculated at $0.026/GB.

Enterprise package

What benefits do the Azure Event Grid and Firebase enterprise packages offer?

Explore Ably's enterprise package for our pub/sub messaging platform

No Enterprise package

The Blaze plan gives access to all Firebase features and products and has enhanced usage limits.

Key benefits

  • Google Cloud Platform integration

  • Multiple databases per project (Realtime Database)

  • Unlimited number of tests (you are charged for test time only. In contrast, with the free Spark plan, you are limited to 15 tests per day)

  • Cloud Vision APIs

Community

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Explore Ably's community support channel for our pub/sub messaging platform
2 / 5

Presence on multiple channels / 5

Size and activity / 5

“Not much seems to be going on in terms of community. There are around 350 questions on Stack Overflow about Event Grid, but they rarely exceed 30 views, and you're unlikely to find more than one answer to each. It is perhaps one of the lesser-used Azure services”.

5 / 5

Presence on multiple channels / 5

Size and activity / 5

“The Firebase community can be found on several different channels: Slack, Stack Overflow, Google Groups, Firebase forums, YouTube. The community is quite active - there are sample apps and codelabs, meetups, podcasts. If you post a question on forums, you are likely to get an answer from the community in a day or so.“

Support

What types of support options and response times do Azure Event Grid and Firebase offer?

Explore Ably's support options for our pub/sub messaging platform

General support options 

Email, support ticket, phone, technical documentation, community support (e.g. forums or StackOverflow). 

Enterprise support

The Professional Direct (ProDirect) plan includes 24/7 support, a Support API (to create & manage support tickets programmatically), and operational & architectural guidance from delivery managers.

Response time

Within 8 business hours for Developer customers

Between 1 and 8 hours initial response time (depending on severity) for Standard and ProDirect customers.

General support options

Email/ticket, community (e.g. Stack Overflow and Slack), FAQs, technical documentation. 

Enterprise support

Enterprise support is available through the GCP support console, which provides a Premium Support package. It includes 24/7 support for critical-impact issues, dedicated technical account manager, and operational health reviews. 

Response time

Unknown for Firebase direct support.

15-minute response time for priority 1 issues when support is provided via the GCP Premium Support package.

Disclaimer: The information presented for Azure Event Grid was last updated on 24 March 2021 and on 6 November 2020 for Firebase. It is possible that some details may now be out of date. If you think that’s the case, please let us know so we can update them. In any case, you should not rely solely on the information presented here and must check with each provider before deciding to integrate or buy any of these two solutions.


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