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Alibaba Cloud vs Google Firebase comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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)
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Google Firebase
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Firebase is 3.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Google Firebase3.4%
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
Other91.4%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
Himash Careem - PeerSpot reviewer
Intermediate Software Engineer at Xelleron Pty
Analytics integration has improved how I manage user identity and understand customer behavior
I face difficulties with the authentication parts in Google Firebase when it goes with iOS applications. With Android applications, that is easier because Google owns it. When it goes to iOS applications, there should be a much more straightforward, smoother way. I mostly faced that with Flutter because with Flutter, there are two sides with Android and iOS. The Android part was pretty much easier for me, but when it goes to the iOS part, there was more work on that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Otherwise, the cost of Alibaba Cloud is reasonable, and service-wise, it's also good because it has many available services worth trying."
"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"
"The installation is easy."
"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features, and ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable; it's quite inexpensive and the solution is very secure."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"The authentication features have made things a lot easier for our organization. About five years ago, developers had to create authentication systems from scratch. Now, services like Google Firebase provide secure and accurate authentication solutions. We can implement authentication quickly by following their documentation."
"If you are selling an app with extensive Firebase use, costs may go up."
"The most valuable feature of Google Firebase authentication and deployment."
"It is a stable solution...It is a very scalable solution."
"It helps me understand user behavior more effectively with Google Analytics."
"If I were to make a chatting application I would use this product because it is easy to learn and implement."
"The connection between Firebase and the integrated development environments, especially when using Android Studio, is crucial as it saves time."
"The Realtime Database feature is the most important for us since we are able to see changes in the database the moment they are happening."
 

Cons

"Alibaba Cloud has some problems related to latency and connection issues. If you go for a cloud solution provider, you will need to access the Internet, which may result in latency and bandwidth issues, leading to slowness in operations."
"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."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."
"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"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."
"The initial setup is not exactly straightforward."
"I would prefer Google Firebase to focus more on its integration capabilities since it is an area in the solution with certain shortcomings."
"The platform's bandwidth is quite expensive. Its price could be better."
"I would like to see faster data migration and some support for other languages in the next release."
"Google Firebase's app testing feature for Android, where you can upload your APK, needs improvement because it's not working very well."
"You can use this solution for lightweight use but I would not recommend being dependant on it."
"The solution's notification system could be much better."
"Scheduling the import was very difficult with Firestore; we had to use a couple of other tools to create schedulers to import, but the import on the Google BigQuery and the Firestore component was still a manual process, which was a bit annoying."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
"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 cost is better than similar solutions."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The price is perfect and very clearly defined. The price during the trial setup is free and then you move to a paid service."
"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 moment you go into volumes, then you work on a pay-per-volume basis."
"It is an expensive tool."
"The tool is affordable."
"The pricing plans indicate it can get very expensive."
"Google Firebase is an expensive solution."
"The more the number of reads and writes, the more one gets charged."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
Thanks for sharing these insights! I completely agree that Microsoft Azure provides IT administrators with strong centralized management, robust security controls through RBAC, and tools for cost o...
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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Firebase?
The pricing structure needs improvement since it uses cloud billing. We do not know how the pricing is calculated as it is all on the cloud. They could have implemented credits based on usage so th...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Fabulous, Pic Collage, Shazam, SkyScanner
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Firebase and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.