When it comes to Firebase for newcomers, the first point of confusion in what is quite a simple platform is what should you choose for your database: Firestore or Realtime Database?

As someone who has been using Firebase for quite a few years, there was a time when Firestore never even existed. Initially, it used to just be Realtime Database and that was that. A couple of years ago, Firebase introduced the Firestore database which is the next evolution of databases on Firebase.

While Firestore has been in beta for some time, I can tell you based on experienced that it is anything but a beta product. The difference between Firestore and Realtime Database used to be the reliability. For a while after introduction, Firestore’s reliability was terrible, regularly going down.

In 2020, Firestore seems to be quite stable. I use it for several applications, including a highly trafficked cryptocurrency exchange and I have not witnessed a period of downtime with Firestore.

The ability to query data in more flexible ways is more appealing than Real-Time. Previously, you would have to pull down entire trees of data (which could be massive) and then sort through them in either Node.js or on the client because of the lack of querying, this is why Firestore was created.

Even so, Firestore still has its limitations when it comes to complex querying and you should absolutely read up on what those are. You can’t do everything that a normal RDBMS allows you to do or even completely what NoSQL solutions like MongoDB offer, but all limitations have workarounds.

Rather than reiterate the technical differences between the two, there is already a great official post on the Firestore site that details the differences between the two.

Without delving too deeply into the specifics, you should choose Firestore and I would not recommend anything else. It offers way more powerful querying (which is important in a database), more flexible ways of storing data (Real Time can get messy) and it is still quite cheap.