Firebase vs. Parse

28 Jun 2015

In my last post, I said I was working on a simple Firebase app, well I turned that into a comparison app between Firebase and Parse, to see which was easier to work with. The app is just a simple tableview to view the entries, form to add and edit entries, and then a details view to view all the details of a selected entry (the apps also allow you to upload images). So here’s a brief overview of what I thought about each database.

###Firebase

• Pros
  1. Really easy to use
  2. Fast on database calls
  3. Will automatically update everywhere when something is added or altered.
  4. Uses standard data types (NSArray, NSDictionary, etc)
• Cons
  1. Poor image support. I have to encode images myself.
  2. No tables, just a JSON file of all your data (i.e. can’t have anything too complicated for your database)

###Parse

• Pros
  1. A lot of documentation and examples
  2. Has better image support
  3. A lot of options to make things asynchronous
• Cons
  1. Doesn’t use standard data types (PFObjects and PFQuerys)
  2. A lot of options to make things asynchronous (it’s both a pro and a con). I felt like this made my app kind of complicated to code with how I was making calls to the database.

###Free Account Plan You obviously get a better deal on storage with Parse.

	Database Storage	File Storage	Database Transfer	File Transfer
Firebase	100 MB	1 GB	5 GB	100 GB
Parse	20 GB	20 GB		2 TB

###Overall For simple apps, I think Firebase is the way to go. But if you need to have users or a more complicated database then you should use Parse.