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Cloud Firestore VS DynamoDB

Compare Cloud Firestore VS DynamoDB and see what are their differences

Cloud Firestore logo Cloud Firestore

Use our flexible, scalable NoSQL cloud database to store and sync data for client- and server-side development.

DynamoDB logo DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed cloud database and supports both document and key-value store models.
  • Cloud Firestore Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-07
  • DynamoDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-18

Cloud Firestore features and specs

  • Real-time Updates
    Cloud Firestore offers real-time data synchronization, which ensures that any changes to the database are immediately reflected across all connected clients.
  • Scalability
    Firestore can handle massive amounts of data and traffic, scaling automatically as your app grows without requiring manual intervention.
  • Ease of Use
    Firestore provides a simple and intuitive API, which is easy to use for developers, especially those already familiar with Firebase services.
  • Offline Support
    Cloud Firestore allows your application to remain functional and retain data even when offline, synchronizing changes when the connection is restored.
  • Security
    Firestore uses Firebase Authentication and security rules to protect data, which is crucial for ensuring that your data is safe and that only authorized users can access it.
  • Flexible Data Model
    It allows you to store data in a flexible, hierarchical structure which can adapt to various use cases and data requirements.

Possible disadvantages of Cloud Firestore

  • Pricing Complexity
    Firestore uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on operations and data storage, which can become expensive and complex to manage as application usage scales.
  • Query Limitations
    While Firestore supports a range of queries, there are limitations compared to SQL-based databases, such as the lack of JOIN operations and complex queries.
  • Data Hierarchy Constraints
    Though it offers flexibility, the JSON-like data structure may require a rethink of data architecture, especially for complex relational data models.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using Cloud Firestore ties your application to Google's ecosystem, which can make it challenging to migrate to another platform or database in the future.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers new to NoSQL or real-time databases might encounter a learning curve, as Firestore’s data modeling and querying concepts differ from traditional relational databases.

DynamoDB features and specs

  • Scalability
    DynamoDB automatically scales up and down to handle your application's needs, with no intervention required. This allows for easy handling of traffic spikes and growth over time.
  • Performance
    With its fast, predictable performance at any scale, DynamoDB ensures low-latency responses, even with large volumes of data.
  • Fully Managed
    As a fully managed service, DynamoDB handles hardware provisioning, setup, configuration, replication, software patching, and backups, letting you focus on your application.
  • Flexible Data Model
    DynamoDB supports both document and key-value store models, providing flexibility in how you structure your data.
  • Security
    DynamoDB integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide fine-grained access control and encrypts data at rest and in transit.
  • Global Tables
    You can create multi-region, fully replicated tables for high availability and globally distributed apps with low latency reads and writes.
  • Event-Driven Architecture
    DynamoDB integrates with AWS Lambda for automatic triggering and the creation of event-driven architectures.

Possible disadvantages of DynamoDB

  • Pricing Complexity
    DynamoDB's pricing model, which charges based on read and write capacity units, storage, and data transfer, can be complex and difficult to predict.
  • Limited Query Capabilities
    DynamoDB does not support complex queries as well as traditional SQL databases. Querying capabilities are limited primarily to primary key attributes.
  • Secondary Indexes
    While DynamoDB supports secondary indexes, their use can be limited and complex to manage effectively compared to relational databases.
  • Consistency
    DynamoDB offers eventual consistency by default. While strongly consistent reads are available, they can be more expensive and slower.
  • Data Size Limitations
    Each item in a DynamoDB table must be 400KB or less, limiting the amount of data you can store in a single item.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using DynamoDB heavily ties your application to AWS, which can be a downside if you want to maintain flexibility in your cloud infrastructure choices.

Analysis of DynamoDB

Overall verdict

  • DynamoDB is a highly recommended NoSQL database option, especially for applications and services built on the AWS ecosystem. Its ability to handle large-scale applications with minimal manual configuration and strong performance metrics makes it an excellent choice for developers seeking a reliable and efficient database solution.

Why this product is good

  • DynamoDB is praised for its fully managed nature, allowing developers to focus on application development rather than complex infrastructure management. It offers high scalability with seamless data partitioning, replicates data across multiple availability zones, and provides built-in security features. DynamoDB is particularly effective for applications requiring rapid background processing of large data sets, with quick read and write performance due to its low-latency nature. Its serverless architecture ensures automatic scaling, so it adjusts easily to accommodate changing workloads without any manual intervention.

Recommended for

  • Applications requiring high availability and scalability
  • Real-time analytics and caching
  • Web applications with unpredictable workload patterns
  • Mobile backends and serverless applications
  • IoT applications needing fast and frequent data access

Cloud Firestore videos

What is a NoSQL Database? How is Cloud Firestore structured? | Get to know Cloud Firestore #1

More videos:

  • Review - Cloud Firestore Data Modeling (Google I/O'19)

DynamoDB videos

#13 - Amazon DynamoDB Basics In Under 5 Minutes [Tutorial For Beginners]

More videos:

  • Review - AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401)
  • Review - What is Amazon DynamoDB?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cloud Firestore and DynamoDB)
NoSQL Databases
36 36%
64% 64
Databases
18 18%
82% 82
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Cloud Firestore and DynamoDB

Cloud Firestore Reviews

We have no reviews of Cloud Firestore yet.
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DynamoDB Reviews

Top 5 Dynobase alternatives you should know about - March 2025 Review
Dynomate offers a comprehensive solution with native AWS SSO support, advanced multi-tab functionality, and Git-based collaboration features. NoSQL Workbench is a valuable free tool from AWS, excellent for designing and visualizing data models. The JetBrains DynamoDB Plugin brings DynamoDB into your IDE with helpful autocomplete and query-saving features.
Source: www.dynomate.io
9 Best MongoDB alternatives in 2019
Amazon DynamoDB is a nonrelational database. This database system provides consistent latency and offers built-in security, and in-memory caching. DynamoDB is a serverless database which scales automatically and backs up your data for protection
Source: www.guru99.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, DynamoDB should be more popular than Cloud Firestore. It has been mentiond 122 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cloud Firestore mentions (46)

  • How to write clean, typed Firestore code
    Ever since I started using Firestore more than 7 years ago, I have been wanting to find a better way to type my code and reduce boilerplate. In this article I will describe my journey, and how I finally found a way to write clean, strongly-typed code with abstractions that are easy to use and adopt in any Typescript project. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Unlocking the Power of JSON Patch
    Weird, you work at Mozilla and haven't heard of JSON in DBs. A few resources to get you started: https://www.mongodb.com/ https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-json.html https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Are Sync Engines The Future of Web Applications?
    If you've been following trends in the web-dev world, you'd know that sync engines have been a centrepiece in several of them, namely: progressive web apps, offline-first apps, and the lately trending term: local-first software. You might have even looked into some of the databases that offer a built-in sync engine such as PouchDb or online services that do the same (e.g., Firestore). I have too, but my general... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • 5 Best Instant Messaging APIs
    Firebase is an app development platform backed by Google that famously replaces the need for a backend. It accomplishes this by providing developers with a variety of services, including authentication, push notifications, and a database called Cloud Firestore that can be adapted to store and broadcast chat messages in realtime. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How do you handle different user roles?
    Within the Firebase system, I use Firestore. To minimize queries of multiple collections ( keep server costs down ) I keep users in one collection. Within each user object I have a "roles" property that is a sub-object referencing the different roles available:. Source: over 1 year ago
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DynamoDB mentions (122)

  • MCP Client: Building a Smart and Robust Integration to DynamoDB with DynamoDB-Toolbox
    However, integrating them with a database like DynamoDB can be challenging. DynamoDB’s schema-less design makes schema discovery and querying difficult, and its strict reliance on well-defined access patterns means that even a small misstep can break your application. - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • Serverless Backend: A New Era for Developers
    Database: It helps storing, managing and retriving data in a structured manner (e.g. NeonDB, PlanetScale, DynamoDB). - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Quarkus 3 application on AWS Lambda- Part 1 Introduction to the sample application and first Lambda performance measurements
    In this application, we will create products and retrieve them by their ID and use Amazon DynamoDB as a NoSQL database for the persistence layer. We use Amazon API Gateway which makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs and AWS Lambda to execute code without the need to provision or manage servers. We also use AWS SAM, which provides a short syntax optimised for defining... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Deploy AWS Lambda Functions and Amazon DynamoDB with AWS CDK on LocalStack
    In this example, we need to set up two AWS Lambda, AWS Secrets Manager and Amazon DynamoDB resources. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Query Optimization and Performance in DynamoDB: Partition Key and Sort Key
    Amazon DynamoDB revolutionized the NoSQL database world with its flexible data model and high performance. At the core of its architecture, we find two fundamental concepts: Partition Key (PK) and Sort Key (SK). This article explores how these elements not only structure data but also significantly impact application performance and scalability. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cloud Firestore and DynamoDB, you can also consider the following products

Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.

Firebase Authentication - Application and Data, Application Utilities, and User Management and Authentication

Amazon S3 - Amazon S3 is an object storage where users can store data from their business on a safe, cloud-based platform. Amazon S3 operates in 54 availability zones within 18 graphic regions and 1 local region.