Firebase is the only service that provides a nice client-side abstraction for a real-time database. (Fine there's also Meteor and Horizon.io by RethinkDB.) I h

Firebase is the only service that provides a nice client-side abstraction for a real-time database. (Fine there's also Meteor and Horizon.io by RethinkDB.) I highly recommend it for the reading side of things. I agree that writing from the client to Firebase is highly problematic so I use a client -> API server -> other DB -> Firebase architecture. My architecture also gets around the fact that Firebase is hard to query.