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Breeze vs Firebase

This Breeze 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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Breeze

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.

3 / 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 / 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

The Breeze documentation is detailed and clear with examples and links to source code. The docs feature a ‘Get Started’ section where you can learn how Breeze works, discover more features, and read the FAQ. The Getting Started guide is well-structured to provide step-by-step guidance on how to set up Breeze and use the APIs, learn how Breeze works, try the Breeze live tutorial, discover features, learn about deploying apps to mobile devices, read the FAQs, and guide you through some of Breeze’s basic capabilities with an emphasis on querying data.

There’s the "Breeze Live Tutorial" which is a quick way to learn basic Breeze interactively – follow the instruction, type in some code, and see the results immediately. The live tutorial page features four (4) panes, consisting of the instruction panel, JavaScript and HTML panels, and Output panel. There’s an extensive API reference and comprehensive individual release notes for each Breeze technology (chat & server).

However, although Breeze is well documented, the developer journey is not straightforward because each Breeze JavaScript library – Angular, Aurelia, Knockout, Backbone, etc. – requires a different setup for its promise and AJAX implementation. API reference documentation is not detailed and seems to only exist on GitHub and be relatively short. The readability and design are mostly good, but they could benefit from a revamp. There’s no demo embedded in the doc.

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

N/A

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

5 SDKs

Including:

  • JavaScript 

  • .NET

  • C#

9 SDKs

Including:

  • JavaScript

  • Android

  • Unity

API structure

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

3.50 / 5

API consistency across SDKs / 5

Well structured / 5

Intuitive / 5

Simple / 5

Breeze APIs are consistent across SDKs – same order of operations. The API references are well documented, structured, detailed and extensive – there are examples for some SDKs on GitHub which is a nice thing. However, Breeze APIs are quite complex, so you need to thoroughly study the documentation to learn your way around it.

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“.

Breeze

Firebase

"Hello world" code example
// ViewModel
var viewModel =  {
    items: ko.observableArray(),
    errorMessage: ko.observable(""),
    reset: reset
};

// Datacontext
var serviceName = "http://sampleservice.breezejs.com/api/todos";
var manager = new breeze.EntityManager(serviceName);

fiddleHelpers.isCorsCapable();
getAllTodos();

ko.applyBindings(viewModel, document.getElementById('view'));

/***  supporting functions ***/
function getAllTodos() {
    var query = breeze.EntityQuery.from("Todos");    
    log("Getting Todos");
    return manager.executeQuery(query)
    .then(succeeded).fail(failed);
}

function succeeded(data) {
    var count = data.results.length;
    log("Retrieved " + count);
    if (!count) {
        log("No Todos"); return;
    }
    viewModel.items(data.results);
}

function failed(error) {viewModel.errorMessage(error);}

function reset() {
    viewModel.items([]);
    manager.clear();        
    $.post(serviceName + '/reset', afterReset);

    function afterReset() {
        log("Database reset");
        getAllTodos();
    }
}
function log(text) {
    console.log(text);
    document.getElementById('log').innerHTML += '<li>' + text + '</li>';
}
// 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);
  });

Breeze

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

Unknown

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

Limited

There’s EntityManager.saveChanges that you can call multiple times to force Breeze to save a set of entities in the backend database in the same order as they appear.

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

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 Breeze 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  

Unknown 

Maximum message size

Unknown 

Maximum number of topics

Unknown 

Maximum number of connections

Unknown

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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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/

No specific uptime SLA

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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze 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 Breeze and Firebase consist of?

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

Quite limited

The Breeze free package provides access to documentation, tutorials, Stack Overflow, and UserVoice for a few days. The vendor directly contacts you through their Apple computer to notify you when your free trial will come to an end and if you’d like to extend your free trial a little longer.

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 Breeze and Firebase pricing models calculated?

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

Breeze pricing model is subscription-based, of which there are three categories:

Developer package for 1 developer:

$95.00 per month or $999.00 for 1-year subscription (prepaid) 

Team package for 5 developers:

$495.00 per month or $4,999.00 per 1-year subscription (prepaid)

Corporate Package for 20 developers:

$1,995.00 per month or $19,999.00 per 1-year subscription (prepaid)

Find out more about Breeze Subscriptions

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 Breeze and Firebase enterprise packages offer?

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

The Enterprise/Corporate package key benefits include:

  • Same-day response times 

  • 4 Advisory hours  

  • Email support  

  • Phone support

  • Bug fix patches  

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
5 / 5

Presence on multiple channels / 5

Size and activity / 5

“Breeze has a strong community presence on various different channels, such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Pluralsight, NuGet, Bower, and more. There are many GitHub repos created by the community with hundreds of stars and about a hundred forks. There are over 2000 questions on Stack Overflow under the tag ‘’breeze’’, some of which have hundreds of thousands of views. The community is a big, active, and approachable one. However, there’s no community presence on Slack, Discourse, Gitter, or Events.”

“Breeze has a strong community on various popular channels such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, npm, NuGet, bower, Pluralsight, and more. There are hundreds of thousands of questions on Stack Overflow with the tag ‘Breeze,’ some with large numbers of comments, likes, and views. There are 546 stars and 99 forks on GitHub, with many repositories created by the community. No presence on Slack, Discourse, Gitter, and events”.

“There’s a community forum on GitHub with many repositories, over 500 stars, and about one hundred forks. There’s also a strong presence on Stack Overflow under the tag ‘Breeze’ with over 2000 questions, with some having hundreds of thousands of views. Breeze also has a presence on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pluralsight, Twitter, bower, npm, and NuGet”.

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 Breeze and Firebase offer?

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

General support options

Email, technical documentation, community support (e.g. GitHub or Stack Overflow).

Enterprise/Corporate support 

24/7 email and phone support, 4-hours advisory support, and bug fix patches support.

Response time

2-Day response times for Developer package

24-Hour response times for Team package 

Same-day response times for Corporate package

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 Breeze was last updated on 28 February 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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