Firebase Realtime Database or Firestore for very big project?

[Alec Williams]

From the documentation it seems obvious that Firebase will be a lot more invested in the maturing Firestore, rather than the Realtime Database.

However, it's still currently in beta. My questions is, concerning an App that would potentially climb to millions of users in a few months, would it be wise to go for Firestore?

I'm reffering to the current limitations of 100k simultaneous connections (as per documentation) that is meant to be gone by the time Firestore migrates from the Beta status.

Yet it is impossible to say from my point of view, when that is going to be the case - if in 2 or 3 months, well then that's ideal, but if it's going to take much longer or another year or so, I just fear to be stuck in the ecosystem, unable to escape (whereas if I chose the Realtime Database, I could at least try to use more than one database simultaneously).

Does anyone have any idea in terms of when Firestore will officially leave beta status? Or have you faced a similar issue and made the decision? Would be super grateful for responses!

all the best

Alec

[Samuel Stern]

Hi Alec,

I'll start off with the most classic of all firebase-talk responses: we can't comment on timelines.  I think it would be better to compare the two databases for their relative strengths rather than just on one limitation (concurrent users) and their beta/non-beta status.  It's really, really hard to get to 100k concurrent users unless you have many millions of daily active users and an app that leans heavily on the real-time capabilities of these products.

I am sure you've seen this page comparing the two databases.  Here are some general points of comparison (off the top of my head):

• Latency - Realtime Database is currently a lower latency product, and although Cloud Firestore is improving in this category RTDB is likely to keep its edge for a while to due years of optimization and a fundamentally different architecture.
• Offline - Cloud Firestore was built with offline capabilities from day 1 including on the web.  If your app has many offline scenarios you'll find Cloud Firestore to be a better choice.
• Querying - Cloud Firestore supports more complex queries and every query is indexed, so you know your queries will always scale.
• Presence - Realtime Database offers the ability to detect online/offline status of your users, something Cloud Firestore can't do right now.
• Pricing - the two products have completely different pricing models.  Depending on your workload, one could be notably less expensive than the other.
• Much more!

As you can see there's no obvious choice here without knowing more about your app.  It's also completely reasonable to include both databases in your app and use them for their strengths.

I hope that helps you decide!

- Sam

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[Kato Richardson]

Hi Alec,

No ballparks or public release dates we can share. Sorry. 

If I might be permitted to mount the soapbox for a moment, you should plan your architecture according to the tooling, reliability, and SLAs available today and not bet the bank on things outside your control, such as when Firestore will be mature and out of beta. If the current quotas and reliability promises (i.e. none) are not sufficient, then you shouldn't choose that for your production app. If your timeline is short, then you shouldn't depend on releases that haven't happened.

Having said this, I do think you can safely bet on what we already have available continuing to perform as promised. I think there's decent evidence to show that Firebase is deeply embedded in Google's strategy and that we have a track record of doing what makes sense. Given this, and that our mission is to be a platform that helps you succeed at building and growing your apps, I think you can have decent confidence in whichever choice you make, that we're not going to pull the rug out from under you by deprecating anything that doesn't have a sensible replacement. 

Stick with what we've promised and try not to scry too much into the future for your roadmap planning.

☼, Kato

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