When comparing Express.io vs Google Firebase, the Slant community recommends Express.io for most people. In the question“What are the best Meteor alternatives for realtime JS apps?” Express.io is ranked 6th while Google Firebase is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Express.io is:
Being built from two of the oldest Node libraries where each of them has had several releases and constant bug fixes and patches means that express.io is a rather mature solution for building realtime web applications.
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Pros
Pro Mature
Being built from two of the oldest Node libraries where each of them has had several releases and constant bug fixes and patches means that express.io is a rather mature solution for building realtime web applications.
Pro Large userbase
Express is the most used Node.js web framework and this brings a large number of learning resources, guides, tutorials and many libraries available for it.
Pro Can easily be upgraded from an Expressjs app
Since Express.io is basically just the Express framework + socket.io, it's very easy to upgrade an express app to an express.io app.
First run: npm install express.io
Then swap require('express')
to require('express.io')
and it will run the same as before.
Pro Flexible Pricing
The Blaze Plan is a pay-as-you-go plan, which is, you pay for what you use, without overhead or upfront costs.
Pro Straightforward hosting
Powered by Google's Cloud Platform, Firebase allows you to deploy static web pages or web applications with a nifty Node.js-based CLI Tool.
Pro Super fast CDN
All static website content is hosted on the Fastly CDN making your website really fast.
Pro More than just hosting web applications
In the core of Firebase allows you to do testing for Android apps, Analytics, Real-time Database, and many more. It's centered mostly for progressive web applications and mobile applications with real-time connectivity to your service.
Pro Almost free if you add Cloudflare in front (no bandwidth costs) and cache effectively
The built-in CDN is great too, but if you're concerned about bandwidth costs, using it with Cloudflare is an excellent option option.
Cons
Con Working with relational databases can be a hassle
Not only express, but every Node framework has this problem. While there exist plugins and libraries that allow developers to use relational databases in their web applications, they are not very good and usually it's a hassle and more trouble than it's worth to use a relational database with Node and express.
Con Google blocks Access
Some Google services, software and cloud systems, are not available to certain countries. blocked access by google following USA Policies.
Con Linked to Google Cloud Platform
If you don't have a Google Account, you won't be able to access Google cloud services, including this one.
