Encore vs
Firebase connects your app to Google-managed backend services. Encore lets you build your own backend, with infrastructure provisioned automatically in your AWS or GCP account. Ship quickly, with control over how your backend works and where it runs.
“What used to take days or weeks of back-and-forth between developers and infra teams is now automated and completed in minutes.”
Josef Sima, Engineering Director at Groupon
Feature Comparison
See how Encore and Firebase differ across key capabilities.
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Your AWS or GCP account | Firebase services (Google only) |
| API Approach | Code-first, type-safe APIs | Client SDKs + Security Rules |
| Custom Logic | Full backend services | Cloud Functions |
| Databases | PostgreSQL (RDS / Cloud SQL) | Firestore (NoSQL document DB) |
| Pub/Sub & Queues | SNS/SQS or GCP Pub/Sub | Function triggers |
| Scheduling | Cron Jobs (in code) | Scheduled functions |
| Local Development | Automatic (DBs, queues included) | Local Emulator Suite |
| Observability | Built-in tracing & metrics | Cloud Logging & Monitoring |
Your options for running a backend
Hosted platforms get you started fast. Encore gets you there just as fast, in your own cloud account, without the migration later.
Do it yourself Terraform, IAM, VPCs | Hire DevOps One senior engineer | Hosted platform Firebase, Supabase, Convex | Encore Automated, in your cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first production deploy | Weeks | Months, after the hiring search | Minutes | Minutes |
| Ongoing cost | Your best engineer's evenings | $150k to $250k a year, fully loaded | Grows fast with usage | From $49 per member a month |
| Every new database or queue | Another day of config | A ticket in their queue | Limited to what they offer | One line of code |
| Runs in your AWS or GCP account | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Your cloud credits apply | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Answers "where is our data?" in security reviews | If set up right | Yes | Their answer, not yours | Your account, your VPC |
| When you grow | Rewrite what you hacked together | Hire a second one | Migrate off, usually at the worst time | Nothing changes |
| If the key person leaves | Nobody knows how it works | Same problem | Not your problem | Not your problem |
You don't need to become an infrastructure expert to run on AWS or GCP
Encore sets all of this up from your application code. It's real infrastructure in your own cloud account, so you can always open the console and look. You just never have to build it by hand.
- Terraform modules
- IAM policies
- VPC and subnets
- Security groups
- Kubernetes
- Helm charts
- CI/CD pipelines
- Load balancers
- Secrets per environment
- Staging environments
- Tracing setup
- Database networking
How They Work
Firebase
Firebase is Google's app development platform. Your frontend reads and writes Firestore, a NoSQL document database, directly through client SDKs, and Security Rules decide who can access what.
For logic that can't run in the client, you write Cloud Functions in Node.js or Python, triggered by HTTP requests or by events like database writes. Authentication, file storage, hosting, and realtime sync are built in.
Encore
Encore is a backend development platform where you write full backend services in your application code. You define APIs, databases, Pub/Sub, and other resources as code. When you deploy, Encore provisions the corresponding AWS or GCP resources in your account.
This gives you complete control over your API design and business logic, with infrastructure ownership, built-in observability, and support for microservices architectures.
Infrastructure Ownership
Every Firebase project is also a Google Cloud project, but its core services are Firebase's own. Firestore, Authentication, and Security Rules have no equivalent elsewhere, and there is no AWS option, so moving off Firebase usually means rewriting your data layer.
With Encore, resources are provisioned in your own AWS or GCP account. You can see your databases in the cloud console, set up VPC peering, configure IAM policies, and use any cloud service alongside Encore resources.
For compliance requirements or teams that need standard, portable cloud services, Encore provides full ownership. For client-heavy apps where you don't need backend control, Firebase's managed approach works well.
Learn more about infrastructure ownership →Local Development
Firebase provides the Local Emulator Suite, which emulates Firestore, Auth, Functions, Storage, and more on your machine. Some emulators need a Java runtime, and the emulators approximate production services rather than run them.
Encore runs encore run and automatically provisions local PostgreSQL, Pub/Sub emulation, and cron scheduling. A local dashboard shows distributed tracing and architecture diagrams.
Both provide local development, but Encore's is more lightweight and includes observability tools that work identically to production.
Learn more about local development →Automatic Infrastructure
Firebase provides a fixed set of services: Firestore, Authentication, Storage, Cloud Functions, and Hosting. You work within these boundaries. For message queues, relational data, or other infrastructure, you reach into Google Cloud and configure it yourself.
Encore provisions infrastructure from your code. Declare a database, Pub/Sub topic, cron job, or object storage in your application code, and Encore creates the corresponding cloud resources when you deploy using sensible defaults for each provider. When you need more control, those defaults are yours to configure.
import { SQLDatabase } from "encore.dev/storage/sqldb";
const db = new SQLDatabase("users", {
migrations: "./migrations",
});
// Encore provisions RDS/Cloud SQL automaticallyDatabases, Pub/Sub, Cron Jobs, Object Storage, and more. See all primitives →
Built-in Observability
Firebase relies on Google Cloud Logging and Monitoring for your functions, with Crashlytics and Performance Monitoring focused on client apps. Tracing a request across functions and database calls takes extra setup.
Encore includes distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging out of the box. Every request is traced across services automatically. No instrumentation code needed.
This matters more as your backend grows beyond simple CRUD operations into multi-service architectures.
See observability docs →AI-Assisted Development
With Firebase, your data access rules live in Security Rules, your data model is implicit in Firestore documents, and business logic lives in separate Cloud Functions. AI agents like Cursor and Claude Code lack full context about how these pieces connect, leading to inconsistencies.
Encore defines infrastructure in your application code. AI agents see everything in one context: your APIs, databases, queues, and how they connect. This makes AI-generated code accurate, reviewable, and safe to deploy.
Because the infrastructure comes from Encore's defaults rather than hand-written config, you can let an AI agent build features and trust the result is provisioned correctly. Built-in guardrails, auto-documentation, and observability keep what it produces maintainable, even when AI writes most of the code.
Learn about AI-assisted development →Migrating from Firebase
You don't have to move a Firebase project all at once. Encore can run alongside Firebase while you move data, functions, and storage one part at a time, keeping Firebase Authentication as an external service if you like.
The migration guide covers how each part maps to Encore, how to run both side by side, and what to check before cutover.
Read the Firebase migration guideLoved by teams
who refuse to slow down
"Encore is our foundation for all new development. Since adopting it, we've seen a 2-3x increase in development speed and 90% shorter project lead times."
Josef Sima · Engineering Director"Encore lets us go from idea to shipped product at least 3x faster and saves us hours of devops work every week."
Will · Co-founder"We've reduced time spent on DevOps by 95%, and we're now on track to save $60K annually in cloud costs."
Mason Stewart · CTO"Encore is an unfair advantage. At Pave we've moved 2x faster than we did at Monzo."
Simon Vans-Colina · CTO"We're saving $200k+ annually compared to additional hiring. The ROI is outstanding, easily 10x."
Daniel Stocks · CTO"You define infrastructure in your code and it's automatically spun up for you. You can go from zero to a deployed service on GCP in an hour. I don't know how else to do it."
Nilkanth Patel · CTO"Encore's inferred infrastructure has allowed us to move at unprecedented speed. Combined with database branching in Neon, we're able to spin ephemeral environments up and down with incredible ease. Stakeholders love preview app URLs."
Justin Foley · VP of Engineering
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about Encore vs Firebase.
Firebase is Google's app development platform: clients talk directly to managed services like Firestore, Authentication, and Cloud Storage, with Cloud Functions for server-side logic. Encore is a backend development platform where you write backend services in code and Encore provisions the infrastructure they need, such as PostgreSQL, Pub/Sub, cron jobs, and object storage, in your own AWS or GCP account.
Firebase works well for client-heavy apps where most logic lives in the frontend and Security Rules guard direct database access. Encore is built for backends with real business logic: type-safe APIs, multiple services, relational data, queues, and scheduled jobs, with distributed tracing across all of it.
Every Firebase project is also a Google Cloud project, so billing and some resources show up in your GCP console. But the core services, like Firestore, Realtime Database, and Firebase Authentication, are Firebase-specific, and there is no AWS option. Encore provisions standard cloud services like RDS or Cloud SQL, SQS or GCP Pub/Sub, and S3 or GCS in your own AWS or GCP account.
In Firebase, custom logic runs in Cloud Functions, triggered by HTTP requests or by events like Firestore writes, with cold starts and per-function deployment. Encore lets you write full backend services in your application code, with APIs, business logic, and infrastructure declared together in the same codebase.
No. Encore uses PostgreSQL, with migrations applied automatically locally, in preview environments, and in production. That gives you relational data, joins, transactions, and the whole Postgres ecosystem, without being tied to a proprietary document database.
Firebase relies on Google Cloud Logging and Monitoring for functions, plus Crashlytics and Performance Monitoring for client apps. Encore provides built-in distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging across all your services, with every request traced from API call to database query.
Start building with Encore
Deploy to your own AWS or GCP account, with infrastructure provisioned automatically.