When comparing RethinkDB vs Google Firebase, the Slant community recommends RethinkDB for most people. In the question“What are the best non-relational databases for web apps?” RethinkDB is ranked 3rd while Google Firebase is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose RethinkDB is:
Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy install
Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own.
Pro Changefeeds (change listeners)
You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes.
Pro Powerful query language
RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queries are just "natural" Javascript functions in the same way you would use lodash to handle your collections.
Pro Auto master promotion
Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer.
Pro CLI and web administration tools
RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db.
Pro Horizontal scalability
RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency.
Pro Ease of cluster setup
You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth.
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 Cannot run queries from its CLI
Con No user accounts
This is just the database, you need to setup your own auth and user accounts (such as using Auth0).
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.