Flutter vs Firebase | Which is the best?

Developing an app in the traditional sense is quite expensive because it requires a significant investment in software and hardware.

However, technological advancements have enabled developers to create awesome apps with high complexity without investing much money in critical hardware and software.

App developers leverage very resilient and feature-rich cloud infrastructure for app development.

Multiple platforms in the market provide the end-to-end infrastructure that app developers need to create and deploy an app online in a highly secure and easy-to-use system.

In that case, you can check out two popular platforms—Firebase and Flutter. Let us examine the attributes of each of these two platforms to determine which one you should select based on your needs.

Flutter Overview

Flutter is a Google Cloud-based framework that is quite popular amongst app developers worldwide to create highly sophisticated cross-platform apps.

It provides an open-source mobile UI framework for app developers to develop apps for the Android and iOS platforms by writing just one codebase.

Flutter Core Features

Flutter is a highly robust platform with multiple features, making app development easy. Some of the features of Flutter include the following:

• Flutter is an open-source platform.  

Creating highly customized Flutter apps is relatively easy as the open-source framework gives app developers more control over it. 

• Hot reload  

If you make any modifications to your app’s code and want to see the change in real time, then you will find the hot reload feature of Flutter extremely useful.

The hot reload lets you see the change instantly whenever you make changes in the app’s code, significantly shortening the development time. 

• Cross-platform support for creating apps  

One of the biggest USPs of this platform is that it allows you to create highly sophisticated iOS and Android apps with a single code. As a result, if you intend to develop apps for both iOS and Android, Flutter is an excellent solution.  

• A huge widget library  

One unique feature of the Flutter framework is that a widget represents every function. For example, suppose you want to design a menu, add icons, or change the color.

In that case, you will find a specific widget purposely built for that task only. The widgets significantly fasten the app development process.  

• Google Firebase to create the backend  

The Flutter framework also allows Firebase support. The app developers can use Firebase support to build the backend of the app and use Flutter to design and develop the front end.

This way, the developers can create a highly scalable and feature-rich mobile app that will provide a fantastic user experience.

Firebase Overview

Cloud Firebase is a powerful application development platform supported by Google. This framework allows app developers to easily create highly complex and feature-rich iOS, Android, and web apps. 

Firebase Core Features

The Firebase app development platform has a plethora of capabilities that allow app developers to build apps faster and add any required functionality. Some of the core features of Firebase include the following:

• Provide authentication  

The Firebase framework allows app developers to include authentication features in the app. Go to the Firebase console and verify all the authentication providers, then select the ones you wish to add to the app. 

• Crashlytics

Firebase has an extremely powerful analytical feature called crashlytics. Suppose a crash happens in a Firebase app.

In that case, the crashlytic immediately sends the crash report straight to the Firebase console. This crash report provides a detailed report about the reasons behind the crash.

This crash report is beneficial in immediately finding a solution so that the user does not experience such a crash again.

• Cloud-based database  

Firebase provides a NoSQL document database known as Firestore. This cloud-based database is immensely beneficial as it helps in automatically scaling up the application as per the requirements, makes app development more manageable, and improves the app’s performance.

In addition to Firestore, Firebase also offers a second database, the Realtime database, in which the data is stored in JSON format.

• Firebase functions in the cloud.  

One of the numerous benefits of using Firebase to build your app is that you can run and modify the backend code whenever you want for specific purposes.

Furthermore, this framework is on the cloud, so you don’t have to spend any money scaling your server. If the traffic to your app increases, the scaling up is done automatically.

Firebase Pricing

Firebase has two different pricing plans: the free Spark plan and the Blaze plan, which is modelled on pay-as-you-go. These plans include the following:

• The Spark Plan

In the Spark plan, you get 10 GB of hosting storage, 100 simultaneous connections, 360 MB/day of data transfer, 20 K writes/day, 50 K documents read every day, and 5 GB of data storage in the cloud.  

• The Blaze Plan

In the Blaze plan, you get all the benefits of the Spark plan. In addition, you get a 200 K/database connection; for every additional 10 GB of hosting storage, you have to pay $ 0.026/GB.

After using your 360 MB/day data transfer, you must pay $ 0.15/GB for any additional usage. In this plan, you will get 5 GB of cloud storage and pay $0.026/GB for further storage needs. You must pay $0.05 for phone verification to subscribe to this plan. 

There are additional pricing features of the Firebase platform; to know more about it, you should visit their website.

Firebase vs Flutter Comparison

Conclusion

Flutter and Firebase are outstanding development technologies. These two platforms provide numerous features to assist app developers in swiftly and affordably creating a very complex and feature-rich app.

Google fully backs both platforms. You can also use these two platforms in sync. You can use Firebase to support the app’s backend and the Flutter framework to design and develop the app.

This will make your app robust in its functionalities and provide a fantastic user experience.

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