Convex vs Firebase: A Developer's Complete Guide

So, you've been using Firebase for a while now, but you've heard there's a new kid on the block called ComX. You're not sure what makes it different or whether it's worth spending your time looking into. Perfect, because today I'm going to break down exactly how these two platforms compare and why you might want to choose one over the other. Now, full disclosure, I have now joined Convex. Surprise. But I promise to try and keep things as balanced and neutral as possible as we go through this. In fact, I'm actually going to point out some areas where Firebase might be the better choice over Convex right now because let's be honest, no tech solution is perfect. Trust me, I've learned this the hard way. And I should probably just mention that I'm going to be keeping things fairly high level throughout this video since both platforms are pretty extensive. But if there's a particular aspect you'd like me to explore in more detail in the future, then just drop a comment down below and I might make a deep dive video on it. So grab yourself a lovely cup of tea and let's dive into this Firebase versus Convex showdown. Two players remain. Gentlemen, the showdown. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's get on the same page about what these tools actually are. Firebase is Google's comprehensive app development platform that's been around since about 2011. It offers a vast suite of tools including authentication, databases, cloud functions, hosting, analytics, and so on. Convex, on the other hand, is the newer contender that launched just a handful of years ago. It's a back-end platform focused specifically on building reactive web apps with real-time data syncing. Both aim to solve kind of similar problems, helping developers build applications without managing complex infrastructure. Um, but they both go about it in pretty different ways. So, let's break this down feature by feature. To keep it simple, I'm going to keep a running tally of this chart for us to refer back to at the end. There's lots to cover here, so let's get started. To begin with, let's dive into perhaps the most fundamental difference between these two platforms, how they handle data. Firebase offers two databases, the real time database and fire store. Real time DB provides simple distributed synchronized JSON data, while file store offers more complex document-based storage with richer querying and data architecture capabilities. For the rest of this video, I'm only going to talk about fire store as I think it's the one that more closely matches convex's database. So, Fire Store is a NoSQL document store where data lives in collections of JSON-like documents. It's schemalous and it gives you complete flexibility in how you store your data. Convex on the other hand takes a more structured approach. While you can store your data as unstructured JSON documents, it strongly encourages organizing your data into tables like users, posts, etc. with defined relationships between them. So, convex is kind of like a document database like Firebase, but also kind of like a relational database like Postgress. So, just like Postgress, Convex is going to automatically validate all rights to the database. This means that if someone tries to write data that doesn't match the schema, whether it's a missing required field, incorrect data type or invalid value, Convex will just reject the right operation immediately. In schemalless systems like Firebase, it's all too easy to put invalid or malformed data into the database. I personally have encountered situations where undefined values, incorrect types, and missing values made it into my Firebase collection, which has led to some pretty subtle bugs that surfaced later when I was trying to read the data back. So, for these reasons, I think I'm going to give Convex a big W on this one. I guess this is not surprising given it's probably one of the biggest selling points for Convex is the is the database. So, now we have our data in our database. How do we access it? Firebase encourages a client first approach. You typically access your data directly from the client side using the SDK. While you can use cloud functions to access the database, you are generally going to be doing it from the client, not the server. So here's an example of what that might look like on Firebase. So here we're creating a reference to a collection, then creating a query object that references that collection, and then we're executing the query to get the document. And here's how we might do the same thing in convex. You see, convex approach is a bit different. All data access happens through serverside queries. So here we have this serverless query list completed that queries the database uses an index for efficient filtering and then returns the results. Then the client side accesses it like this. Note that the API.tasks.list completed part is autogenerated for us as part of the convex CLI. So that means that we have a nice strongly typed interface between our back end and our front end. And we can just control-click like this to jump right to the server side query. And I want to take a quick tangent at this point to talk about something that might not be immediately clear here. So if we just bring up that query again, what's really important to note here is that this part right here where we're actually querying the database. You see this is a bit different from what you might be used to if using Google functions or AWS Lambda or something. This DB query isn't actually roundtpping to the database and back. its entire function is actually running inside the database itself. So it would probably be better to think of convex functions as super powerful store procedures rather than serverless lambda functions except the store procedure is written in TypeScript rather than SQL. So what this means is we can do things like joins like this. So here is our modified query function. We get our tasks as before, but now instead of simply returning those, we want to get the author document for each of those tasks too. To do that, we can simply map over each task and fetch the author and return it as part of the object. We can then do all of this in parallel using our JavaScript familiar promise.all. And all of this is super performant because the entire query is running within the database. So it's effectively just doing in-memory lookups without having to do network roundships. Yeah. And if you try to do something like this on Firebase, it would involve like a whole heap of network requests to the database and back, which would be horribly inefficient. Okay, so now let's look at one area where both Firebase and Convex truly shine, and that is real-time data [Music] syncing. So what this means is that when any of the data that the queries rely on changes, then those changes are immediately synced back to the client and shown to the user. So with Firebase you can subscribe to updates to a query like this. So here we take our query from before and pass it to the on snapshot function. So now whenever one of the documents within that query range is updated we will get a new snapshot back. And on convex we can do something similar like this. We use the on update function on the client to get back a nice type-S safe list of tasks from our query. Now although you could access your data like this, convex is very much more react focused in Firebase. So you would typically do something more like this instead. So here we have a task list component that uses the use query hook. If the value is undefined, then it's loading. Otherwise, we can just render those tasks nice and clear and simple in my opinion. One other quick thing I want to mention before we wrap up the query section is that if we take a look at that convex join query from before, I I just want to point something else out. You see, if any of the documents referenced here change, such as any of the tasks in the query or any of these users referenced here, then this query is going to be rerun and any clients are going to be automatically updated for us. I just think this is so cool cuz this is actually a really hard technical problem to solve. Trust me, I have tried. Now, there are lots of details I'm glossing over here when it comes to accessing your data on both Firebase and Convex. Um there's like lots of nuance between what you can do with queries on one platform but not on the other like how mutations work etc etc etc. But in the interest of keeping things fairly high level and not turning this video into a multi-hour epic I'm just going to call it a tie at this point. Both platforms do a good job on the real-time update side of things but I personally prefer the convex way of doing things. Probably biased [Music] though. So, I touched on security earlier, but it's worth digging into a little bit more as it represents one of the most significant architectural differences between the two platforms. Because with Firebase, you typically do all of your querying from the client side. You need a way to restrict who can access what data. For example, you don't want one user to be able to read the data or change the data from another user. So, this is achieved on Firebase with something called security rules. So each rule is a custom domain specific language that looks a bit like reax and a bit like JSON. So here in this example we're saying that we want to allow read and write access to any documents that live under this path if the currently logged in user matches the user that lives under this path. And you would typically enter a rule like this directly onto the Firebase dashboard. But you can also write them locally and then upload them via the Firebase CLI if you like. Now Convex approaches security quite differently. Let's take a look at this as an example. So here we can see we have a query get private data that first checks the or status of the user. If they aren't authenticated then we error out. But if they are then we can use the ID of the user to query our data. Now both approaches have their merits. Firebase's security rules are great for simple projects. Um, they provide like a declarative way to securely access your data that works well for really basic access patterns. Convex approach of using TypeScript might feel more familiar to developers who are used to writing backend code or for people who want more control over how your data is accessed. So, I guess the choice between them comes down to your team's experience and specific requirements. Having said that though, I think Firebase's approach of exposing the entire database to the client and then trying to protect that after the fact in the security rules is it's you're just kind of asking for security issues. The security researcher reveals catastrophic security flaw vulnerability in the Arc browser. The exploit relied on a misconfiguration in the browser company's implementation of Firebase, a database, as a backend service for storage of user info, including Arc Boosts, a feature that lets users customize the appearance of websites they visit. I've spoken to quite a few developers who have had an absolute nightmare when trying to build and then grow and evolve Firebase projects, and primarily their main complaint has just been the limitations of security rules. comx approach of explicitly defining what the client can access through queries just feels much more secure and flexible and just less errorprone in general. Also, writing these rules as plain TypeScript means I can create helper functions that I can then reuse throughout my codebase. So, for that reason, I think I'm going to have to give the big W to Convex here. Okay, let's talk about authentication. Something that just about any app is going to need at some point. Firebase really shines here as it provides a complete or system with email, password, social login, phone authentication, all built into the same project. Many people, myself included, often just use the Firebase or par in their apps as it's so good and it costs nothing up to 50,000 monthly active users. After some short setup process on the Firebase dashboard, you are good to go. And here's how the Firebase signin process might look like on the client. It's as simple as calling signin with email and password or sign in with pop-up or one of the other orth functions. Convex on the other hand offers two different paths for orth. You can choose to use a third party or provider like or zero or clerk or you can use their own in-house or library. Now I'm not going to go into all the details here as the docs do a pretty good job about listing all the steps required. It's not too bad but it's definitely more involved than Firebase though. And the second option for orth and convex is using their in-house convex orth library which is in beta right now. Once again the setup is more involved than firebase but it does give you the ultimate control and flexibility for all in your app. I personally like both for different things. I do like the external or solution as it is less setup work as the third party provider takes care of a lot of the nitty-gritty details for you. On the other hand, rolling your own orth with a convex orth is also great because it means I can store my data alongside my the rest of my data in my database rather than having it spread out with different third parties here and there. Overall, I'd say that Firebase still has a bit of an advantage when it comes to developer experience around authentication right now. So, I'm going to give them the W. Some apps are going to need storage, others not. I'll just touch on this briefly as both Firebase and Convex offer file storage as part of their platform and quite frankly are both quite similar. So here's how you might upload a file on Firebase. First we get access to the storage object. Then we create a reference to the file we want to store. Then we upload it using the Firebase provided helper function. Pretty simple. And this is how you would do the same thing on Convex. First we have to define a mutation that runs on the server. This gives us a unique upload URL. Then on the client side, we use that URL to upload our file or bytes to the convex storage provider. So it's a little bit more work on the for the Convex side because you have that server side implementation required. Both platforms handle common file operations like uploads, downloads, and deletions with built-in security controls to manage access to this. The main difference is that Firebase offers more direct client side operations while Convex roots everything through their backend functions. Neither of the platforms provide CDN functionality out of the box, which is a bit of a shame, but you can bolt it on later without too much difficulty. So, in general, I think they're both pretty similar to each other when it comes to file storage. But if I was forced to, I'll probably have to give a slight W, tiny little one to Firebase as it has some nice client side utils for uploading and just a nicer developing experience in general. It's 2025, so it would be remiss of me if I didn't talk about what the AI experience is when working with both these platforms, as let's be honest, we're going to be doing a lot of accept all this year, right? Commex has done quite a bit of research lately trying to ascertain what exactly makes one platform better than the other for AI coding assistance. The TLDDR from this report is that the end-to-end safety plus tight feedback loops with the agent plus a simpler mental model make for a really conducive environment for AI coding assistance. And this just so happens to be all the things that Convex is really good at. And effectively what this means is what's good for humans is also good for AI. If you're interested in the full rundown and the results, then check out the blog post or the video I have linked down below. So although admittedly I haven't run the AI benchmarks of Firebase, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I suspect the results will be fairly similar to Superbase. I suspect that the lack of type safety in Firebase, plus that the security rules are separated from the code will cause the agent to frequently trip up. So all in all, for me, I think this is a clear W for Convex for AI coding. So okay, let's now explore what it feels like for humans when using these platforms. This one is probably going to be a bit more subjective than the others, but I have quite a bit of experience with both platforms. So, I'm going to give you my highle take here. So, as you know with Convex, everything is just TypeScript. This means you get full autocomplete and type checking as you write your queries, making it much harder to introduce bugs. The validation of input parameters is also baked right into the query definition. This gives me much more reassurance that I'm not going to run into strange runtime bugs later on. So without going too far into details, the way that convex forces you to split your functions up into queries, mutations, and actions can feel a little bit frustrating and cumbersome at first, but I found that over time it just helps reduce the spaghetti that can accumulate over time, and it also enables like super cool features like automatic query caching. Firebase, I think, just doesn't have such a great story when it comes to the day-to-day experience. But what it does have is a huge array of additional features and services and obviously the whole Google Cloud ecosystem is all neatly integrated. And one extra thing for Convex is that the development experience and dashboard there is really cool. So you on the dashboard you have real-time insights into your queries, mutations. So this lets me see which ones have been accessed, how many times, and how they're performing. So all in all, in my subjective opinion, I'm going to have to give Convex the big W here. as the day-to-day coding experience with Convex just feels much [Music] better. So, I thought I would just mention this one here as I think vendor lockin can be a big concern particularly if you're going to take a dependency on a relatively new platform like Convex. You see, you don't want to build your cool new project one day and then the next day discover that the infrastructure for the app just disappears. So, the good news is that for Convex, this isn't a problem as it's entirely open source. So you can just take the Docker files or even a single binary file and then just post it on the platform of your own choosing. You probably want to do that all the time though as you lose out on a lot of benefits that the managed service provider gives you like scaling and logging and insights and etc. But it's definitely reassuring to have it there. Firebase on the other hand doesn't really have an option when it comes to self-hosting. They do provide something called the Firebase local emulator suite that lets you run the Firebase services locally for development and testing, but they strongly recommend that you don't attempt to use it for actually hosting your apps. So, when it comes to self-hosting and avoiding vendor locking, I think Convex is definitely going to take the W here. [Music] So this one is a bit of a grab bag of stuff as it really is going to depend on how much you care slash want slash need all of the things here and whether you think it's a good idea to bundle all of this with your backend platform or not. So on the Firebase side we have analytics which provides detailed user behavior and app performance metrics to help you understand how your users interact with the application. Ads which is an integrated advertising platform that helps you monetize your app. Crash reporting, which provides real-time crash reporting and diagnostics information. Push messaging, which allows you to send notifications to users, whether they're on mobile or desktop. AB testing, which provides tools that lets you run experiments for different app variants to optimize your user experience. And hosting, which is a website hosting service that they provide. And on the comic side, we have chron jobs, which allows you to run your comics mutations or actions at a given time or interval. Components, which are a collection of independent modular TypeScript building blocks for your back end. and performance insights. This is a built-in monitoring and debugging tool that lets you work out where there might be performance or bottlenecks in your application. So, in general, Firebase has a much larger suite of additional goodies here. Again, it really does depend on whether you think having all these features baked into your backend platform is is important, but um I guess I'm going to have to give Firebase the big W here as more features equals betterer, right? Both platforms are designed to automatically handle your application scaling needs all the way from zero users to a bajillion without requiring any manual intervention. Firebase leverages Google's global infrastructure which is obviously pretty big. And comics on the other hand operates currently just from a single region. So this means that users from region that might be further away might experience higher latency although this limitation may change in the future. Having said that, comics could potentially deliver better performance depending on how you structure your application through serverside queries. You can often cut down many round trips that you would have to do on Firebase into just one convex query. So on the scalability front, suspect it's really going to have to depend on how you architect your application. So I'm just going to give it a tie on this one. And now for everyone's favorite topic, the bill. Now, how much you're going to be charged very much depends upon your app and its usage patterns. But here is a table based upon the data as of the time of this recording. There's a lot of numbers here, but in general, Firebase tends to charge more for database storage and bandwidth usage, while Convex offers more generous free tiers and generally lower per unit costs. However, Convex's professional plan does come with a base monthly fee per team member, whereas Firebase is a purely pay as you go model. So, for small applications outside of the free tier, Firebase might be more cost effective. But as your application scales, convex pricing model could result in significant savings, especially if you're dealing with high database usage. So, it's hard to say who gets to win on this one. So, I'm just going to call it a tie again. got my tea. Oh, it's gone cold. Forget it. Uh, let's wrap this up by taking a look at our final tally. So, if we tally up all the W's for both Convex and Firebase, we can see that through this highly scientific and rigorous and totally not biased analysis that Convex comes on top. More seriously though, I would say that you should choose Convex if you want a truly fantastic developer experience that is proven to be awesome for both humans and AI. It will scale with you as your project grows and do it in a clean and secure way that you aren't going to regret in 6 months time. But you should go Firebase if you want the entire Google Cloud ecosystem and if you want a heap of additional services and features baked right in. Remember, both platforms are going to be great depending upon your project and how you implement things. Your best bet is to arm yourself with as much informed knowledge as you can. So, I hope this video helps with that. If it has helped, please don't forget to like and subscribe and drop a comment down below if you'd like me to explore any other specific aspect of these platforms in more detail. Until next time, cheerio. [Music]