Firebase vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Discover how Firebase compares to Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
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.
What is Google Cloud Pub/Sub?
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service. Pub/Sub is used for asynchronous messaging between different systems, and services, within your applications. It enables developers to build robust and scalable real-time applications.
Compare Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Let’s compare Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub, 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 Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. The content was last updated on 18 Nov 2024 for Firebase and on 1 Aug 2024 for Google Cloud Pub/Sub. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Firebase Partial Firebase does not natively support Pub/Sub messaging. However, this can be implemented with Google's Pub/Sub service. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Firebase Yes You can build chat capabilities on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Chat features such as group chat, emojis, and file sharing are not supported by Google Pub/Sub out of the box, which is intended to be used for service-to-service communication. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Firebase Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub recommends using other Google services like Firebase Realtime database to build applications that require functionalities like collaboration. Read more |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Firebase Yes The Firebase Realtime Database lets you store and sync data between your users in real time. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub does not support a state sync feature out of the box, but this can be achieved in combination with a realtime database. |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Firebase | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
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. | 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub provides monitoring dashboards that can be used to monitor subscriptions. Subscriptions can also be monitored through the Cloud Monitoring API. Read more |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Firebase Partial Message interactions are not natively supported in Firebase. However, you can programmatically build interactions on top of Firebase's Realtime Database. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Pub/Sub can't retrieve acknowledged messages. You can use the Seek feature to mark them as unacknowledged and redeliver them or delete unacknowledged messages. Read more |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Firebase | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes You can create a push subscription workflow for push notifications using Google Pub/Sub. Read more |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Firebase Yes Firebase projects can be managed programmatically using the Firebase Management API. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
| 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. | Firebase Yes The Spark plan (free plan) realtime database is limited to 100 simultaneous connections and 1 GB of storage. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
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. | Firebase Firebase has a free plan and a pay-as-you-go plan:
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub has usage-based pricing, based the number of published, delivered, and stored bytes. Read more |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Firebase
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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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. | Firebase
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub None. Google Pub/Sub does not natively support any real-time protocols. However, you can implement WebSockets using other Google services like Google's Compute Engine. |
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. | Firebase
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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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. | Firebase Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Firebase Yes Using Firebase Performance Monitoring you can monitor your application performance based on location, device, or version. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes The Google Monitoring, Alerting and Logging integration provides observability services. Read more |
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. | Firebase Yes Supports:
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Supports:
|
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub is built to be scalable and reliable. Google uses the service for their products to send billions of messages per day. You can read more about their architecture and limitations in their documentation. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
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. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub supports message ordering, but cannot always guarantee it even when this is enabled - for example, when dead-letter topics are enabled on subscriptions. Read more |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports exactly-once delivery based on a Pub/Sub-defined unique message ID. Read more |
| 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. | Firebase 99.95%. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Firebase Yes Firebase benefits from Google's global edge network. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
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. | Firebase No Multi-region data replication is currently not supported in Firebase Realtime Database, but it is supported in Firestore databases. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports synchronous data replication across three zones. |
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. | Firebase No Each Realtime Database instance is tied to a single region chosen at the time of creation. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Firebase Unknown. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 100ms round trip |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Firebase No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub only supports gcloud CLI credential and Application Default Credentials (ADC). Read more |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Firebase | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Firebase Yes SSO in a Firebase application can be implemented using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes SSO authentication in Pub/Sub is supported through Google Cloud IAM, OAuth 2.0, and Workforce Identity Federation, allowing integration with external identity providers like Azure AD or Okta. Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Firebase Yes Using Firebase Realtime Database Security Rules you can set who has access to your database. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Rules for permissions and operation can be configured using Identity and Access Management (IAM). 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. | Firebase No Data in transit is encrypted using HTTPS in all Firebase services, but this does not include end-to-end encryption. Read more | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | 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 | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Firebase
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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Alternatives to Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
While both Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 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.
Alternatives to Google Cloud Pub/Sub
AWS SQS is a message queuing solution for decoupling apps, services & architectures.
Apache Kafka is an open-source realtime data streaming platform.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message service with message queues and Pub/Sub topics.
Discover how Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Firebase and Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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
