Fóir as an alternative to Firebase
Firebase is a strong application backend and it has no content layer. There is nowhere for the person who writes the copy to work, and no publishing model to work within.
Side by side
| Capability | Fóir | Firebase |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £0.99, £29 or £99 a month | Pay as you go per read, write and gigabyte |
| Hosted auth | Included, on your domain | Included |
| API | Typed GraphQL from your models | SDKs, and GraphQL over Cloud SQL |
| Access rules | Generated from your model | Security rules you write |
| Content modelling | Models, fields, relations | Documents, or SQL tables |
| Editor experience | Built for non-developers | A developer console |
| Publishing | Drafts, versions, scheduling | Build it yourself |
| Localisation | Per-field translations | Build it yourself |
| Personalisation | Built in, resolved per request | Build it yourself |
| Media | Library, transformations, renditions | Object storage |
Price
- Fóir
- £0.99, £29 or £99 a month
- Firebase
- Pay as you go per read, write and gigabyte
Hosted auth
- Fóir
- Included, on your domain
- Firebase
- Included
API
- Fóir
- Typed GraphQL from your models
- Firebase
- SDKs, and GraphQL over Cloud SQL
Access rules
- Fóir
- Generated from your model
- Firebase
- Security rules you write
Content modelling
- Fóir
- Models, fields, relations
- Firebase
- Documents, or SQL tables
Editor experience
- Fóir
- Built for non-developers
- Firebase
- A developer console
Publishing
- Fóir
- Drafts, versions, scheduling
- Firebase
- Build it yourself
Localisation
- Fóir
- Per-field translations
- Firebase
- Build it yourself
Personalisation
- Fóir
- Built in, resolved per request
- Firebase
- Build it yourself
Media
- Fóir
- Library, transformations, renditions
- Firebase
- Object storage
Firebase's behaviour is taken from its published documentation, current at August 2026. Where we say a thing is absent we mean absent from the product and its official plugins, not impossible to build. Corrections are welcome and we will make them.
Somewhere for the content team to work
The Firebase console is built for the people who wrote the app. Handing it to whoever owns the homepage is how copy changes end up in a developer's queue.
Fóir's admin is built for them, from the same models your code reads.
The publishing model already exists
Drafts, version history, revert, scheduled publishing and bulk rollouts are the shape content work actually takes, and on Firebase each is something you design and then maintain.
They are switches per model here.
Rules you generate rather than write
Security rules are their own language, and they are correct until someone adds a collection in a hurry.
In Fóir the rules come from the model, so somewhere new to store data cannot ship without rules covering it.
Content resolved per request
A locale or an audience is not a field every client fetches and branches on.
Fóir resolves it server-side, so a website, a native app and an agent all get the same answer.
What you would otherwise assemble
A content API is the smallest part of what an application needs. These come with it.
Publishing
Drafts, full version history, revert, publish at a future time, and bulk rollouts when a batch has to go live together.
Model behaviour
Per model: versioning, publishing, variants, or none of them. Records can be plain data, owned by a customer, or public.
Permissions
Roles for your team and roles for your customers, plus per-record visibility and grants to a named person.
Hosted sign-in
Password, one-time code, and social or OIDC providers, on your own domain, with tokens and refresh handled for you.
Media and assets
An asset library with upload, transformations and responsive renditions, and the same access rules over files as records.
API keys
Each key reaches exactly the models and operations you allow, against a schema generated for that project.
Automation
Cron schedules, lifecycle hooks on publish and change, outbound operations, and a vault for the keys they need.
Notifications
Transactional email and push to web, iOS and Android, from the same events your content already emits.
Notes and tasks
Comments anchored to the record they concern rather than to a page, assignable to whoever has to act on them.
Ask Fóir
An assistant that works your content through the same tools and permissions your team has, staging its edits for review.
Work that carries on without you
Assign a task to Fóir and it works while you are away, coming back on the note when it needs an answer or is done.
Extensions
Install apps that add your own tools to the admin, beside the content they operate on.
Search and vectors
Full-text search, and embeddings generated for your records so you can retrieve by meaning rather than by keyword.
Geo
Store coordinates on any model and query by proximity: what is near this point, ordered by distance.
See it against your own models
Create a project, define a model, and read it back over the API.