Firebase Vs MirrorFly: A Detailed Comparison Guide for the Chat Platform

Alexander S Published On September 26th, 2023 Product News & Updates

Choosing the right platform for the realtime chat application is essential to enhance the quality of any business. Hence, the right choice of technology is a must which helps to leverage excellent quality with low latency rates. Firebase chat and MirrorFly both provide realtime chat app though Firebase has certain limitations. In this article, let us briefly look into various key points which makes MirrorFly a better alternative to the Firebase and its various advantages as well.

Why we need to have a dedicated chat app right from larger Enterprise businesses to small business structure

• Facilitates real-time communication in an easy way
• Supports cross platforms
• Updates the product features consistently
• Safe and highly secured connection
• Simple to use and uncluttered
• Provides uninterrupted service irrespective of network bandwidth

MirrorFly Architecture

Build a real time chat app with MirrorFly for B2B mobile apps to get a highly scalable, quick and easy way to deploy a real-time messaging solution. MirrorFly’s underlying architecture is based on XMPP protocol.

Let us briefly see MirrorFly’s architecture design which effectively uses the top-notch technology in both the front-end and back-end.

Whenever the client sends a request through any of the devices through Web or Mobile the data is passed through secured encrypted traffic through the load balancer.

• Load Balancer – The Load Balancer function will go through all the Nodes from 1 to N and assign to the available Node.
• Clustering – To have effective communications between the servers these Ejaberd servers are clustered together. Similarly, the database is clustered when one database is down it checks the next up and running the server.

MirrorFly’s Front End Technology

XMPP Protocol – The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is an effective protocol type in which the MirrorFly product is built to facilitate a simple and quick deployment of a real-time chat app. Through an API interface all the client’s registration data, call initiation process and all types of file uploads take place and stores the data in the database. This reduces the load in the Ejabberd chat server and helps in the overall performance of the chat application.

There are several key features which make the XMPP, the most preferred protocol for the chat applications.

• The core XML streaming protocol is recognized as the standard protocol model for instant messaging.
• The XMPP architecture follows a decentralized model where anyone can run their own server. This provides the organizations or individual to take complete control of their communication experience.
• MUC – Multi-User-Chat which is based on these XMPP protocols effectively used to exchange not only plain-text messages but also can be used for several XML payloads. Like they have the ability to restrict or ban users, to join a group they are required to enter a password or acquire membership.
• Security – XMPP servers utilize a robust, secure system which is achieved through the SSL framework and encrypted TLS protocol.

MirrorFly’s Backend Technology

Scalability and the overall performance of the chat application depend upon the optimal choice of backend technology. MirrorFly is backed with powerful backend technologies that give greater performance.

Programming Language – Erlang

Erlang is the best option which provides a highly concurrent, scalable real-time applications. Erlang is loaded with laudable features like pattern matching, live debugging, which simplifies the troubleshooting activities with the help of built-in error reporting tools.

Erlang supports horizontal scalability with the help of a built-in database called ‘Mnesia’. It also manages multiple connections easily like a server to a server process, client connection process or chat room process.

Application Framework – Ejabberd

MirrorFly uses Ejabberd, a massively scalable server for real-time applications. Ejabberd architecture has a rock-solid structure which has a massive concurrency of 2,00,000 users in a single node. Ejabberd has some of the vital features such as,

• Ejabberd messaging architecture is flexible where it provides a full API that can create a custom plugin and modify the server to fit the user requirement with minimal coding.
• Ejabberd supports multi-platform where it runs on MS Windows, Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X.
• If there are tens of thousands of concurrent users then add a new node to your cluster where these Ejabberd servers run successfully with a cluster of machines all sharing the same
• Jabber domain. In this way, it is not required to buy an expensive high-end machine to support a large volume of users.
• These are fault-tolerant, that is when one node is crashed then the other node will automatically continue to work without any interruptions. Also, any nodes can be added or an existing node can be replaced based on the fly.
• The ejabberd architecture is built in such a way that there is no external web server or external database is required to keep it up and running. This is because Ejabberd is built on top of the open source Erlang.
• Ejabberd is embedded with multiple components such as Multi-User Chat, Publish-Subscribe, Jabber User Directory, HTTP file server.

MirrorFly Data Security

Firebase Architecture

Comparison of Firebase Vs MirrorFly

Firebase	MirrorFly
Firebase chat is developed by Google.	MirrorFly which uses the XMPP protocol is created by Jabber Open-source community and highly scalable Ejabberd architecture.
It provides limited Google Hosting.	Mirrofly provides unlimited cloud storage with the flexible deployment of chat on cloud or on-premises.
Firebase contains an inbuilt database.	MirrorFly has an open-source database.
It does not support any customization.	Fully customizable.
Firebase follows pay as you go method.	MirrorFly facilitates a one-time payment method.

Which Businesses Needs Firebase?

Firebase is a fully developed BaaS Platform that provides scalable solutions offered by Google. Seamless synchronization of the data is vital for any real-time chat applications and in this case, Firebase uses WebSocket which is faster than the HTTP. Whenever an app is connected to the Firebase it synchronizes all the data automatically to the WebSocket so that whenever a client makes any changes the data gets updated quickly in real-time.

Below are the few business models in which Firebase may be a better choice.

• If you need to build an app for a lighter version where it does not involve heavy data processing, then Firebase is the optimal choice.
• Similarly, Firebase can be used where complex user authentication is not required.
• Also, if your application does not require to integrate into any third-party systems like a payment gateway or a login through a Social media then Firebase is sufficient for building these kinds of simple applications.

Which Businesses Needs MirrorFly?

MirrorFly offers a diverse set of chat possibilities that cater to the needs of various organizations starting from small companies to big tech giants.

• This ready made chat solution is fully customizable, which suits any business requirements and thus it is suitable for any organization from startup to enterprise level.
• MirrorFly can be used in any organization to provide effective communication between teams where the real-time chat application has the ability to run tens of thousands of concurrent users without any disruption. This is possible by Ejabberd messaging architecture where it is embedded with MUC and other powerful components as discussed in the above architecture section.
• Any businesses take extra effort to back up the data for future reference or for any kind of data loss. MirrorFly proving an effective backup data option through Amazon S3 bucket or Google Cloud storage, which attracts any business where they can store unlimited data.

Conclusion

MirrorFly with inbuilt XMPP chat API framework provides the ability to integrate into an existing application or build a new one from scratch. Full customization is possible with a one-time payment model. But Firebase, on the other hand, does not support customization or one-time payments. Also, MirrorFly architecture which is based on the XMPP protocol and other niche technologies makes it more reliable and scalable for building any real-time chat application.

If you already have an idea about creating your chat, contact us and we’ll help you implement it!