Firebase Firestore
Ranked 2 of 3 document databases by recommenders
Recommended for realtime queries, easy setup and lower cost than Postgres for some apps. Critics say costs climb at scale and querying is limited.
Recommended for realtime queries, easy setup and lower cost than Postgres for some apps. Critics say costs climb at scale and querying is limited.
13 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 46%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Costs add up at scale
“All managed services like cloud datastore, firestore all tend to accure lots of costs if you've good size app.”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year” “It's very bad to search stuff, or have structured database, also it costs a lot”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres” Weak querying and search
“It's very bad to search stuff, or have structured database, also it costs a lot”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres” “its querying was sorely lacking”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Unveiling Firestore Pipeline operations – Firestore's powerful new query engine” Teams migrate off to Postgres or SQLite
“Firestore is an acquired taste so we rewrote the OSS backend to Postgres”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud” “migrated a non-trivial firestore app to sqlite”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Our $445M Series D”
Other document databases people recommend
The two most recommended other document databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 3 document databases, rankedWhat people said
12 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“migrated a non-trivial firestore app to sqlite”
“could have just written the data to something like Firestore and been, like, totally fine”
“it's almost like the product gives you the false impression that you're done setting it up”
“CosmosDB, Google Firestore, Kusto, Elastic, Druid, and many columnar formats are in this category of "magically" faster!”
“I ended up leaning on Firestore realtime queries, the harness on the agent VM is subscribed and can interrupt the agentic loop”
“Firestore is an acquired taste so we rewrote the OSS backend to Postgres”
“I went with Firestore over Postgres for the lower cost”
“All managed services like cloud datastore, firestore all tend to accure lots of costs if you've good size app.”
“there's no enforcement layer by default”
“I was kind of surprised on how it's easy to use”
“It's very bad to search stuff, or have structured database, also it costs a lot”
“its querying was sorely lacking”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.