With the increasing development and usage of mobile apps and websites, the amount of data generated has grown exponentially. To organize, manage, and store this data effectively, you need robust database management systems (DBMS). The performance and scalability offered by these platforms directly impact the user experience and the application’s ability to accommodate ever-increasing traffic.
While many options, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Cassandra, are available in the market, this article particularly explores Firebase vs MongoDB. By comparing them, you can gain a better understanding of which tool is the best fit for your projects.
Understanding Firebase
Firebase is a Google-developed serverless platform that offers an entire ecosystem for building scalable web and mobile applications. It supports programming languages like Java, C++, JavaScript, Swift, NodeJS, and Objective C, making it accessible to a larger audience.
This comprehensive solution provides essential backend services, including cloud storage (Firestore), Realtime Database, hosting, and authentication. However, we will focus on Firebase’s two database types—Realtime Database and Firestore.
While Firebase is proprietary software, many of its components are open-source. It is best suited for applications that require real-time data synchronization across multiple devices. Popular companies like Duolingo, The Economist, Instamart, Alibaba, and Shazam rely on Firebase for their backend infrastructure.
Key Features of Firebase
Some of the unique features of Firebase’s Firestore and Realtime Database include:
- Structured Data Model: With Firestore, you can organize complex data in a scalable, hierarchical structure—collections and subcollections of documents. In Realtime Database, your data gets stored as a large JSON tree, where new data becomes a node identified using an associated key.
- Expressive Querying: Firestore offers indexed queries with compound sorting and filtering capabilities to help you retrieve documents from a collection. Meanwhile, the Realtime Database provides limited sorting and filtering but with deeper query execution that returns the entire subtree.
- Low-Latency Solution: Both Firestore and Realtime Database are optimized for low-latency solutions. If you’re using Firestore, the typical response times are no greater than 30 milliseconds, and if you prefer Realtime Database, your response times are not more than ten milliseconds.
- Offline Support: Firestore and Realtime Database provide local data storage, enabling your apps to function without internet connectivity. With offline persistence, they automatically cache a local copy of data and sync the changes to the cloud backend when your device is back online.
- Writes and Transactions: Realtime Database supports basic writes through set and update operations and atomic transactions on a specific data subtree. Firestore, on the other hand, offers advanced write and transaction operations. It allows you to perform batched writes and data transformations.
When to Use Firebase?
Here are some use cases where you can use Firebase:
- Real-time Chat Applications: Firestore and Realtime Database both support real-time updates, enabling your end users to transfer messages instantly, with changes reflected across devices in real-time.
- E-commerce Platforms: The Firebase databases can help you handle product catalogs, inventory tracking, and order management. You can leverage their structured data model and real-time synchronizations for efficient data organization.
- IoT Device Monitoring: Firebase’s scalability makes it easy to store the high-volume, high-velocity data flowing in from IoT devices. It also provides features to track and monitor sensor readings and receive status updates in real time.
Understanding MongoDB
MongoDB is a NoSQL database management system known for its scalability and flexibility. Unlike conventional relational databases, MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents, eliminating the risk of SQL injection, a common security vulnerability in relational databases. This document-oriented approach also offers a dynamic schema, making it easier for you to handle data with varying structures.
While MongoDB lacks the ecosystem facilitated by Firebase, it focuses on data storage and provides powerful querying and indexing capabilities. This makes MongoDB ideal for large-scale applications that require high performance and the ability to manage significant traffic. Top companies like BOSCH, eBay, CoinBase, Uber, SEGA, and Adobe leverage MongoDB as a robust data storage solution.
Key Features of MongoDB
Some of the unique features of MongoDB include:
- Real-Time Data Analytics: The MongoDB aggregation framework allows you to analyze and report on data in real-time. This helps you increase productivity, identify anomalies, trends, and patterns, and optimize processes.
- Sharding: Sharding in MongoDB enables horizontal scaling. Each shard functions as an independent database, storing a portion of the overall dataset. This empowers you to handle high-traffic loads while ensuring continuous availability.
- Ad-Hoc Queries: Ad-hoc queries are unpredictable and require a flexible schema. You can efficiently process these dynamic queries by utilizing MongoDB’s indexes, BSON documents, support for aggregation framework, and the MongoDB Query Language.
- Load Balancing: MongoDB automatically distributes the incoming traffic across multiple servers and provides top-notch concurrency control and locking protocols. This ensures enhanced data consistency and eliminates the need for external load balancers.
- Indexing: Proper indexing offers quick access to data and reduces the time it takes for the database to process queries. With MongoDB, you can create on-demand indexes to accommodate changing query patterns and application requirements.
When to Use MongoDB?
Below are some use cases where you can use MongoDB:
- IoT Applications: You can use MongoDB for efficient data storage, analysis, and integration with applications to gain valuable insights from IoT devices. Its distributed data architecture lets you process data from millions of connected devices in real-time.
- Payment Processing: MongoDB's data format is also the standard for payment data, including SWIFT, Open Banking API, and BIAN. This enables you to process payment-related information in real-time.
- Mainframe Modernization: To modernize legacy systems, you can transition from mainframes to an operational data layer (ODL) powered by MongoDB. Offloading queries reduces mainframe costs, boosts agility, and ensures regulatory compliance.
Comparative Analysis: Firebase Database vs MongoDB
The main difference between Firebase and MongoDB is that Firebase is a backend-as-a-service platform offering real-time databases, authentication, and hosting, while MongoDB is a flexible, document-oriented NoSQL database suitable for diverse use cases and self-managed deployments.
Firebase and MongoDB are both post-relational databases offering unique advantages and use cases. According to a survey by Stack Overflow, 5.8% of developers used Firebase, and 24.8% used MongoDB as their preferred database environment.
This section provides a brief comparison between Firebase vs MongoDB to help you understand why and when you should choose one over the other.
Firebase vs MongoDB: Performance
MongoDB generally outperforms Firebase in terms of pure performance due to its customizability and scalability. While Firebase is also scalable, MongoDB's flexible nature and support for complex query execution allow you to optimize heavy data workloads effectively. Additionally, when it comes to stability, MongoDB's servers are more reliable than Firebase, offering a performance advantage.
MongoDB vs Firebase: Scalability
Firebase offers automatic scaling through its managed infrastructure. This simplifies the process and enables you to handle growing workloads without any complex configurations. However, achieving scalability in Firebase is comparatively more difficult than in MongoDB.
Apart from MongoDB's sharding capabilities, its multi-cloud database service, Atlas, provides manual and auto-scale features to facilitate vertical and horizontal scaling.
Firebase vs MongoDB: Use of Service
Firebase allows you to authenticate anonymous users of your application through temporary accounts and provides easy access while protecting their stored data. Once your users decide to sign up, you can link their sign-in credentials to the anonymous account, enabling work continuity.
Contrarily, only authorized users with proper identification can secure access to the data stored in MongoDB. While Firebase focuses on quick access, MongoDB ensures the implementation of strict data security measures.
Firebase Database vs MongoDB: API Support
Firebase is a versatile tool that supports multiple API and database access methods, including Android, iOS, Javascript API, and RESTful HTTP API. However, with MongoDB, you can only rely on JSON-based APIs.
MongoDB vs Firebase: Pricing
MongoDB pricing plan offers three options for you to get started. This includes a free plan, a pay-as-you-go Dedicated plan starting at $0.08/hour, and a pay-per-operation Serverless plan starting at $0.10/1M reads. On the other hand, Firebase offers only two plans: Spark and Blaze, where Spark is the free plan, and Blaze is the pay-as-you-go version.
Firebase vs MongoDB: Other Aspects of Comparison
Below is a brief comparison table between MongoDB vs Firebase:
Streamlining Data Integration with Airbyte
Unifying your data residing in multiple sources is an error-prone and time-consuming process. Airbyte, an AI-enabled data integration tool, can help you with this. It can automate the process of building and managing data pipelines from Firebase Realtime Database to MongoDB or any other source-destination combination you prefer. Airbyte enables you to consolidate your data into a centralized location to perform further downstream data operations or analysis.
Here are some features of Airbyte that can streamline your data integration and replication efforts:
- Smoother Data Movement: Airbyte offers 400+ pre-built connectors to help you extract and load data from disparate sources to a centralized destination. You can also develop custom connectors using low-code, Python, or Java connector development kits (CDKs).
- Developer-Friendly Pipelines: PyAirbyte is a Python library that allows you to use Airbyte connectors to extract data from different sources. You can easily use consolidated data with AI frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex to create LLM-powered applications.
- Data Pipeline Automation: With Airbyte’s Terraform provider, an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solution, you can automate the setting up of your sources, connections, and destinations. Here is the link to a YouTube series with a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Airbyte’s Terraform provider.
To learn more about leveraging Airbyte in your project implementations, contact an Airbyte expert or go through the official documentation.
Wrapping It Up
The choice between Firebase and MongoDB largely depends on your project's specific requirements. You should consider several key factors, such as performance, API support, scalability, and flexibility when drawing your conclusion. Firebase is a great choice if you are developing small-scale mobile or web applications that require real-time response.
If your application demands high performance and large-scale storage, then MongoDB should be your go-to solution. The best way to determine the right fit for your project is to experiment. Since both tools offer a free plan, you can explore their features, get a feel of their accessibility, and choose the most convenient and affordable option.