Cloudflare Durable Objects vs Firebase
Discover how Cloudflare Durable Objects 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 Cloudflare Durable Objects ?
Cloudflare Durable Objects provides an easy way to manage stateful objects with low-latency access and real-time updates. It enables developers to create collaborative, real-time applications using WebSocket connections, ensuring data persistence and consistent performance across distributed clients.
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.
Compare Cloudflare Durable Objects and Firebase
Let’s compare Cloudflare Durable Objects 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 Cloudflare Durable Objects and Firebase. The content was last updated on 10 Oct 2024 for Cloudflare Durable Objects and on 18 Nov 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects does not have built-in pub/sub. However, Cloudflare has an MQTT-powered pub/sub service in private beta which can be integrated with Durable Objects. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can implement some chat features, but some require additional Cloudflare services or custom development. File sharing would require integration with Cloudflare R2 for file storage. | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can support collaboration capabilities, but require integration with storage services like Cloudflare Workers KV for features like avatar stacks and location data. | Firebase Yes |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Cloudflare Durable Objects 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects does not natively support presence; it requires custom implementation. | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Firebase No |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Firebase |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects supports the Brotli and gzip compression algorithms for all responses, rather than delta compression. | Firebase No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Programmatic management is possible through the Durable Objects REST API. | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare Durable Objects is only available on a pay-as-you-go plan. The plan offers 1 million requests and then $0.15/million requests. Connections to Durable Objects are billed as one request. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Firebase
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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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects itself doesn't directly support specific message brokers or streaming platforms. Instead, it provides a runtime environment where you can implement your own logic. | Firebase Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial For observability, Cloudflare Durable Objects can be integrated with Baselime, or can be retrieved with Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Supports:
| Firebase Yes Supports:
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| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Durable Objects scale horizontally across many objects as needed. Each single object can handle up to 1,000 requests per second. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message delivery. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message ordering. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve exactly-once message delivery. Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare offers Business customers a 100% uptime SLA with service credits for any failures, while Enterprise customers have separate agreements. 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Firebase Yes Firebase 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Read more | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Unknown. | Firebase Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes | Firebase No |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Data in transit is encrypted via TLS/SSL. | Firebase No Data in transit is encrypted using HTTPS in all Firebase services, but this does not include end-to-end encryption. Read more |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Cloudflare encrypts all users' data at rest using the AES-256 standard. | 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Firebase
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Alternatives to Cloudflare Durable Objects and Firebase
While both Cloudflare Durable Objects 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 Cloudflare Durable Objects
Amazon API Gateway is a service for building, deploying, and managing APIs.
AWS AppSync enables developers to seamlessly handle and synchronize mobile app data in real-time across multiple devices and users.
Socket.IO is a library that provides realtime, bi-directional communication between clients and servers. It allows the management of connections, sending and receiving messages, and more.
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.
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 Cloudflare Durable Objects and Firebase stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Cloudflare Durable Objects and Firebase on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
