If your business is serious about growth and digital transformation, you’d better have your sights set on mobile and web app development. With a solid mobile app available to consumers, clients, and other stakeholders, your company is better accessible, more efficient, and can wind up more profitable.
Developing a new web or mobile application isn’t all that hard. The challenge really surfaces when you attempt to make the life cycle of those apps as efficient as possible. For such optimizations, you’re going to want to empower your developers with the right tools and services to simplify the process.
After all, the faster your developers can deliver, the easier it is for your business to grow and evolve.
If you look at the market, you’ll find plenty of available services, all of which offer different features, languages, support, interconnection, speed, reliability, and flexibility. Two such services are AWS Amplify and Google Firebase. What are these tools, and which is best suited for your project?
Let’s dive into both of these and answer the questions to see who comes out on top (for you) in the Amplify vs Firebase challenge.
| Topic | Amplify | Firebase |
|---|---|---|
| Creation Year | 2017 | 2011 |
| Creator | Amazon Web Services (Wikipedia) | Firebase (Wikipedia) |
| Documentation | Amplify Docs | Firebase Docs |
| Language Type | Compiled Language | Interpreted Language |
| Typing | Statically Typed | Statically Typed |
| TIOBE Rating | Not ranked in TIOBE index | Not ranked in TIOBE index |
| Popularity | Growing rapidly (Google Trends Data) | Growing rapidly (Google Trends Data) |
| Applications | Web and mobile app development, serverless applications | Web and mobile app development, real-time databases, authentication |
| Performance | Both Amplify and Firebase offer good performance for their respective use cases. However, the performance may vary depending on specific application requirements and architecture. | Both Amplify and Firebase offer stable and reliable performance for a wide range of applications. |
| Stability | Amplify is known for its stability, but as a relatively newer service, it may have occasional updates and changes. | Firebase has been stable over the years, with Google providing continuous support and updates. |
| Learning Curve | Moderate – AWS services and configuring CLI tools | Moderate – Understanding Firebase APIs and real-time database |
| Community Support | Amplify has a growing community with numerous online learning resources, AWS documentation, and active forums. | Firebase has a large and active community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and Stack Overflow support. |
| Development Time | Amplify offers a faster development time due to its integration with AWS services and Amplify CLI. | Firebase also provides a fast development experience with its built-in features and real-time database. |
| Key Advantages |
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| Key Disadvantages |
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| Famous Companies | Airbnb, Philips, Lyft, Volkswagen | Alibaba, Pinterest, Shazam, Duolingo, The New York Times, many startups |
| Cross-Platform Support | Yes (through AWS services and SDKs) | Yes (through Firebase SDKs) |
What Is AWS Amplify?
Let’s first examine AWS Amplify. This tool is a complete solution that lets web and mobile developers build, ship, and host full-stack applications on AWS without having to be a cloud expert. With the ability to leverage a wide range of AWS services through a visual interface or the command line, AWS Amplify makes it relatively easy to integrate backend features with Android, React, React Native, iOS, Ionic, and Angular applications.
With AWS Amplify, your developers can craft cloud-native applications that deliver a near-native experience. Your team will spend more time focusing on an application’s functionality, instead of having to deal with tooling and retooling the backend, which can be extremely demanding.
One thing to understand, however, is that AWS Amplify is used to develop and deploy mobile and web applications to the AWS ecosystem. Because of that, your developers will be limited to deploying only to the AWS infrastructure.
The different pieces of AWS Amplify include the following.
Amplify Studio
Amplify Studio is a visual interface that offers a point-and-click environment for building full-stack applications (both front and backend).
Amplify CLI
Amplify CLI is a toolchain for configuring and managing an application backend.
Amplify Libraries
Amplify Libraries is an open-source set of client libraries used to build cloud-native mobile and web apps.
Amplify UI Components
Amplify UI Components is an open-source design system that uses cloud-connected components to enable the efficient building of applications.
Amplify Web Hosting (Managed CI/CD and Hosting)
Amplify Web Hosting is a fully-managed CI/CD service for hosting static and server-side rendered applications.
Key Features of AWS Amplify
Further features and benefits of AWS Amplify include:
- Fully integrated with AWS infrastructure and services
- Offline sync via device datastore
- Supports GraphQL and REST API development
- Highly scalable
- Supports AppSync and AWS Lambda
- GUI tools for easier app building
- AR/VR support
- Near-native performance
- Automated testing tools
What is Google Firebase?
Google Firebase is a BaaS (Backend as a Service) app development platform, which means your developers (and IT staff) won’t have to bother managing and administrating complicated backend servers or write APIs for your apps to communicate with those servers. Google Firebase offers NoSQL and real-time hosting for databases, content, authentication, notifications, and services.
With Google Firebase, your company can build, release, monitor, and engage with your apps and those who use the apps. And, because Firebase is maintained by Google, the platform seamlessly interacts with the Google ecosystem, which means services like Google Ads, Google Marketing, Google Play, Data Studio, and Big Query are built right in.
Firebase also makes it very easy to roll out new features with uninterrupted service. That perk alone makes the platform incredibly enticing to businesses who see downtime as a failure.
Google Firebase was written in such a way that everything can be easily modified to fit just about any need.
The different pieces of Google Firebase include the following.
Crashlytics
Crashlytics is a real-time crash reporting tool to help developers track, prioritize, and address issues.
Analytics
Firebase integrates with Google Analytics for unlimited reporting of multiple Firebase SDK events.
Performance Monitoring
Performance Monitoring is a service to help gain real-time insight into mobile and web app performance.
Test Lab
Firebase Test Lab is a cloud infrastructure environment used for app testing that features screenshots, logs, and videos within the Firebase console.
App Distribution
Firebase App Distribution gives you a comprehensive view of your beta testing program for both Android and iOS.
Key Features of Google Firebase
The more important features to be found with Google Firebase include:
- Supports two real-time databases: Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database
- Includes Firebase ML that harnesses the power of Google machine learning
- Authentication supports phone numbers, passwords, and third-party providers (such as Google, Twitter, Facebook)
- Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is a cross-platform message service
- Scalable hosting
- Cloud storage
- Emulators for Authentication, Cloud Functions, Firestore, RTDB, hosting, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Pricing
AWS Amplify pricing is similar to most of the Amazon developer products. There is a free plan, which gets you 5GB of storage, 1,000 builds, and expires after 12 months. The other plan is a pay-as-you-go that runs $0.01 per build minute and $0.023/GB/month.
Google Firebase pricing is similar and offers a free plan (Spark Plan), which is ideal for developing smaller apps. Their Blaze Plan is a pay-as-you-go model with a handy pricing calculator, so you can get an idea of what using the platform for your project might cost.
Conclusion
In the end it’s a bit like the Nest JS vs Express JS question, which platform you choose will depend on your needs and which ecosystem you plan on using. If your company is an AWS shop, AWS Amplify is an obvious choice. If, on the other hand, you lean more toward the Google ecosystem, Firebase is where it’s at.
