Firebase is one of the very few products to offer controllable client data replication for full offline first functionality.
For apps that have significant offline requirements, this functionality can save a significant amount of time and significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and more importantly maintained.
One of my clients just recently seriously considered going with Firebase. The choice came down to Firebase and Couchbase, which has an even better offline functionality. After reading this post I am glad that we didn't going with Firebase.
Of course Couchbase has their own problems. The supported version of Couchbase is prohibitively expensive for small organizations and Couchbase themselves strongly recommended against deploying the community edition. (The community edition also artificially lags behind the supported edition 6 months. Couchbase even delays critical security fixes that same 6 months.)
Thanks for the kudos. The team works very hard to make the offline first capabilities best in class.
I'm not sure who at Couchbase is "strongly" recommending against the Community Edition. Of course we'd like to have people on the Enterprise Edition, but I think the information is out there to make an informed decision. You should only be getting a hard push away from CE if they really believe you'll need the support. Anyway, this is good feedback.
For apps that have significant offline requirements, this functionality can save a significant amount of time and significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and more importantly maintained.
One of my clients just recently seriously considered going with Firebase. The choice came down to Firebase and Couchbase, which has an even better offline functionality. After reading this post I am glad that we didn't going with Firebase.
Of course Couchbase has their own problems. The supported version of Couchbase is prohibitively expensive for small organizations and Couchbase themselves strongly recommended against deploying the community edition. (The community edition also artificially lags behind the supported edition 6 months. Couchbase even delays critical security fixes that same 6 months.)