Alibaba Cloud vs Google Firebase comparison

Alibaba and Google are both solutions in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category. Alibaba is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.5, while Google is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.4. Alibaba holds a 12.5% mindshare in ISI, compared to Google’s 6.3% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Alibaba users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Google users who would recommend it.

Alibaba Cloud

Read 19 Alibaba Cloud reviews

6,754 Views
5,356 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Google Firebase

Read 45 Google Firebase reviews

6,701 Views
4,427 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Alibaba Cloud

Google Firebase

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Google Firebase and Alibaba Cloud compete in the cloud services category, focusing on app development and infrastructure services. Google Firebase has an upper hand in real-time functionality and user-friendly integration, while Alibaba Cloud is favored for cost-effectiveness, especially in Asia.

Features: Google Firebase is known for seamless backend integration, real-time database capabilities, and robust analytics tools that simplify app development. Alibaba Cloud stands out for its flexibility, offering a wide range of compute instances and storage features that cater to diverse market needs.

Room for Improvement: Google Firebase users seek enhanced control over functions, improved log management, and more SQL-like query capabilities. Alibaba Cloud users face support challenges, need better SDK development, and experience API integration issues. Users also report latency, complicated interface, and pricing transparency concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Firebase provides comprehensive documentation and an active community, easing deployment and reducing support necessity. Alibaba Cloud, while offering rich documentation, struggles with intuitive design, resulting in deployment challenges and less effective customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Google Firebase has a free tier for small projects and scalable pay-as-you-go plans, competitive in pricing though potentially costly with increased traffic. Alibaba Cloud generally offers lower costs compared to AWS and Azure, appealing for budget-conscious users in Asia.

To learn more, read our detailed Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Alibaba Cloud

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

8th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Firebase

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 12.5%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Firebase is 6.3%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Aderonke Adeyegbe

CEO at Comercio Limited

Good storage, great for smaller companies, and has impressive support

We're all aware that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, and we believe that Alibaba, due to its pedigree, has what it takes to take small businesses to the cloud. It's a game-changer, for sure. The storage is very useful. It is easy to set up. Technical support is good. It is quite stable.

Read full review

Shravan Revanna

Vice President at E-Cell Ramaiah

Simple to get started with and offers integration features in multiple programming languages

The product provides integration features in multiple languages, such as Python, JavaScript, Golang, and all other languages. Google Firebase has documentation, which might seem a bit confusing, but one with decent knowledge can easily explore and get started with Firebase quickly. Before jumping into any cloud infrastructure, the tool should analyze how much it would cost to run the database. Google Firebase provides a certain number of reads and writes per day, which is approximately 40,000 reads and writes. If there are more than 200 to 300 active users per day, there will be plenty of reads and writes to the database. In such a case, one can't use Google Firebase and has to upgrade to Spark, which is where it is based on usage. The tool is fairly simple to get started with. Utilize all the features can get very complicated. One must be a pretty good developer who has a lot of experience to be able to utilize the best features. It gets really complicated over time. The basic functionality and basic usage are easy to use and easy to get started. There are plenty of deprecated versions, and frequently upgrading them causes inconvenience. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The installation is easy."

"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."

"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."

"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."

"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."

"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."

"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."

"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"

More Alibaba Cloud pros

"The access to Firestore is very easy."

"Google Analytics for Firebase is the best feature of the solution."

"If there's data added to the solution, there's a good record of it so it's easy to track everything."

"The solution is useful for managing users and user authentication."

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that its storage can be easily used in our mobile applications."

"If I were to make a chatting application I would use this product because it is easy to learn and implement."

"The main part that I like about Firebase is that it provides command line tools."

"The most valuable feature I like is about the realtime. Updates are also very fast."

More Google Firebase pros

Cons

"Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand, Google Cloud is more convenient for new users."

"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."

"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."

"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."

"It is not robust."

"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."

"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."

"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."

More Alibaba Cloud cons

"Firebase's real-time information isn't technically real-time. It takes a while to upload user activity into the app. It's not as fast as Datadog, the other solution we use."

"Integrations and extensions offered by the product are quite limited presently."

"The only thing that I won't do on Firebase is the hosting side of things for a progressive web app because it feels like you actually still need to download the app first before you can actually get into the functionality of the app."

"We had some compatibility issues with Elixir."

"Google Firebase lacks a SQL database."

"Google Firebase's app testing feature for Android, where you can upload your APK, needs improvement because it's not working very well."

"You need to have some experience with deployment."

"The exploration of the functions within Firebase could be improved."

More Google Firebase cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."

"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"

"The cost is better than similar solutions."

"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."

"The product is not that expensive."

More Alibaba Cloud pricing and cost advice

"The price of Google Firebase is very good."

"It is not easy to calculate the cost per copy, use or if the load rose dramatically we did not know how that would impact the final price."

"The product is free."

"They have a free tier that will cover most projects. For more intensive use, you pay as you use it, but the price is very cheap."

"It is an expensive tool."

"Pricing for Google Firebase is not so expensive, and if you're a start-up with a small amount of data, it will be quite cheap, and there's even a free tier that you can use. If you're doing a pilot with a reasonable amount of data, for example, just a few gigabytes, it's still on the free tier. If you increase the amount of data, Google Firebase pricing is still reasonable."

"The more the number of reads and writes, the more one gets charged."

"The pricing plans indicate it can get very expensive."

More Google Firebase pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Computer Software Company

12%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?

ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alibaba Cloud?

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Alibaba Cloud?

Alibaba Cloud needs to improve emails. Its pricing can also be lower. Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...

See all answers

How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?

I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...

See all answers

Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure

We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Firebase?

Google Analytics for Firebase is the best feature of the solution.

See all answers

Comparisons

Google Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 34% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 30% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Tencent Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

DigitalOcean vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

More Alibaba Cloud Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Google Firebase

Compared 57% of the time

DigitalOcean vs Google Firebase

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Google Firebase

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Google Firebase

Compared 8% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Firebase

Compared 1% of the time

More Google Firebase Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud

March 2025

Download Alibaba Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Firebase

March 2025

Download Google Firebase product report

Overview

Alibaba Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to support growing enterprises worldwide, including data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, and content delivery networks.

Alibaba

Google Firebase is a stable, reliable, and scalable mobile platform that enables you to quickly develop apps, accelerate them, and monitor their performance.

With Google Firebase You Can

Build and run successful apps
Scale globally
Monitor app quality and performance with little effort
Boost user engagement

Google Firebase Features:

Crashlytic
Automatic updates
Fast and easy deployment
Access to Cloud Firestore
Multi-platform sign-in authentication
Flexible drop-in UI
Real-time database
Remote configuration
Firebase machine learning
Cloud messaging
Advanced message targeting
Push messages
Error monitoring

SDKs supported by Google Firebase:

Web SDK
iOS SDK
Android SDK
Admin SDK

Benefits of Google Firebase:

Fast implementation: Google Firebase makes it possible for you to set up your authentication system quickly, using minimal code.
Comprehensive security: With Google Firebase, your systems remain secured; It is backed by Google Sign-in, Chrome Password Manager, and also Smart Lock.
Machine learning capabilities: Firebase offers machine learning capabilities that help you deploy and train custom models.
Eliminate the need to manage servers: Because Google Firebase offers cloud functions, it enables you to run your mobile backend code without having to also manage your servers.
Authentication for any platform: Google’s Firebase authentication makes the sign-in process easier by providing an end-to-end identity solution that works with any platform.
Customized notifications: With cloud messaging, you can customize alerts, defining how and when they are sent, what sounds they should make, and can also select the expiration date for each message. In addition, it gives you the ability to track custom conversion events.
Fast and secure web hosting: Firebase makes it possible for you to have easy and secure web hosting with fast content delivery. Firebase hosting also provides free SSL certificates.
Cloud storage: With Google Firebase you have access to cloud storage that supports robust uploads and downloads, can handle user-generated content, and provides simple and intuitive access control.
Developer-friendly: Developers prefer to use Firebase because it lets them focus on creating frontend code for mobile applications rather than having to concentrate on backend code.

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot user Nilakshi S., technical team lead at AuthentiCode says, “The solution is very stable and very reliable. There aren't any bugs or glitches.”

"What I like most about Google Firebase is that it's one of the easier options to host a website or app quickly," says Craig F., application development manager at a financial services firm.

A senior developer at a consultancy says, “The documentation for Google Firebase is great. Also, what I like about it is the integration to Android, which is the reason I went with Firebase.”

Google

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint

Fabulous, Pic Collage, Shazam, SkyScanner

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase

March 2025

Free Report: Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase

Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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