Cloud Firestore vs Reatime Database

Real-time Database

Cloud Firestore

Realtime and offline support

Offline support for only the Android and iOS mobile clients.

Offline support for Android, iOS and web clients as well.

Data model

Data stored as one large JSON tree.

Data is stored in the form of documents and are organised in collections.

Querying

Provides deep queries with limited sorting and filtering functionality. The developers can either sort or filter on a property in a single query.

Provides shallow queries. It indexes query with compound filtering and sorting. Allows filtering and sorting in a single query.

Writes and transactions

Provided basic writes and transaction options.

Provided advanced writes and transaction options.

Scalability

Sharding is required for scaling.

Shards data over 100000 concurrent connections. Requires sharding data across multiple databases.

Scaling will be automatic without the need of sharding.

Security

The firebase database rules are the only security options. Developers need to validate data separately using ‘validate’ rule.

Uses Identity and Access Management (IAM). Data validation happens automatically.

Pricing

Charges only for bandwidth and storage at a higher range.

Charges primarily on operations performed in database (Read, write, delete) , bandwidth and storage at a lower range. supports daily spending limits for Google App Engine projects.