Firebase gets mobile and web apps off the ground fast. pylo gives the whole team one system on relational data: data model, permissions, flows, admin UI, forms and analytics, hosted in Europe.

TL;DR

Firebase is Google's app platform, its core is Firestore, a NoSQL document database with realtime sync and strong offline support. Aside Firebase offers auth, storage, cloud functions, hosting and a long list of mobile tools. pylo is a backend platform on relational data; the data model, permissions, workflows, admin UI, forms and analytics features are one system. If you build an offline-first consumer app, Firebase is hard to beat. If you need a very flexible, relational data model and you want everyone in your team to be able to make the most out of it, pylo saves you a lot of glue code.

What is pylo?

pylo is a Backend-as-a-Service platform from Germany, you can use to build the operating system for your company. You model entities, fields and relations visually or through the API and pylo generates a typed GraphQL APIs with a great DX. The same permission model governs the API, the admin UI, forms, flows and the MCP server. pylo flows run automations on top of your own data model and connect to most tools you already use. You build apps, automations and products on one base across your whole team or company.

What is Firebase?

Firebase is Google's platform for mobile and web apps. Its core is Cloud Firestore, a NoSQL document database with realtime listeners and offline persistence in the client SDKs. Firebase also offers Authentication, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Hosting and App Hosting, plus app tools like Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging, Remote Config and Google Analytics. For relational data there is SQL Connect, which adds a relational API layer on top of your NoSQL database. Firebase runs on the Google Cloud.

At a glance

Relational data instead of documents

Firestore stores documents in collections, which works well when one user reads one tree of data, like a chat or a profile or for large amounts of other unstructured data. Business data mostly looks different: orders belong to customers, customers to regions, invoices to orders, etc.. In Firestore you either copy data into several documents and keep the copies in sync or you run several queries and join the results on the application layer. Both cost reads and the copies tend to drift apart over time.

In pylo you add an entity, a field or a relation in the admin panel and the typed GraphQL API updates at once, without any migration file or redeploy. Field types include relations, enums, JSON, public or private files, rich text, dates, booleans and number/text formatters, with validation built in. You can filter across deeply nested relations and group aggregations by any field.

Firebase's answer to relational data is SQL Connect: it is a separate product with its own schema files, its own deploy step and its own bill and it runs in addition to the Firestore NoSQL database instead of replacing it.

Permissions that follow the data everywhere

Firebase secures client access with Security Rules, a separate rules language you write per collection and path. Server code that uses the Admin SDK skips those rules and relies on IAM instead, so you maintain and test two security models. Rules also only work per document, so if you want private fields inside of a public document have to move these fields into separate documents.

pylo separates tenants at the row level. Inside a tenant, any entity can act as the requester (ARO) and any entity as the requested object (ACO), with hierarchies and field-level rules. Every path into the data is GraphQL, so the same rules apply to the API, the admin panel, flows and MCP.

pylo flows instead of Cloud Functions

On Firebase, custom logic and automation lives in Cloud Functions, which you can write in JavaScript, TypeScript or Python, deploy them with the CLI and run them on the paid Blaze plan. Firestore triggers, schedules and HTTP calls can be used to start them.

In pylo you can build the same logic in a visual workflow engine called pylo flows. Any event on any entity in pylo can start a flow, so can cron schedules and incoming webhooks. Flows include retries, custom rate limiting, error handling and full event logs, while everything is statically typed. pylo ships integrations for email sending and a range of third-party systems, for anything custom you can create your own TypeScript flow actions.

An admin dashboard your operations team will actually use

The Firebase console is a developer tool, where you and fellow devs can browse and edit documents, but there are no list views, workflows or role-specific screens for the people who run the business, so most teams end up building their own back office. pylo's admin UI is built for those people, you compose list and detail views from predefined components, decide who sees what and show or hide fields depending on a entity instance's state. Forms can be built on top of it, they can be public or authenticated, with hidden fields, conditional rendering, direct mapping to your entities and submission limits per form or per user.

Events and dashboards built in with pylo analytics

Google Analytics for Firebase measures how people use your app: screens, sessions, conversion, it does not record what changed in your data. For that you export your app's data to BigQuery and write SQL, or log changes yourself in Cloud Functions. Every create, update and delete in pylo emits an event with the full before and after state. You can also send in external events through the API. On top of your internal and external event data you cab build dashboards and charts and define who may see them through the same unified permission system.

AI and MCP with guardrails

Firebase ships an official MCP server inside the Firebase CLI for developers, which runs locally with the credentials of whoever ran firebase login and it can read and write Firestore, manage users and deployments. pylo's MCP server is live for customers, you can connect it as a specific user and the AI gets exactly that user's read permissions, nothing else. pylo never applies an AI's writes directly, instead arrive as proposals that a human accepts or declines, which makes it safe to let an assistant work on production business data.

File handling

pylo stores files in EU-hosted object storage with public or private links, no file size limit and any file type. Firebase uses Cloud Storage, which needs the Blaze plan and its free quota only applies to buckets in three US regions. Firebase is ahead on delivery, with Google's CDN, resumable uploads in every SDK and an extension for image resizing. In pylo you can build your own file or image transformations as custom flow actions.

Agencies and multi-tenant work

pylo is built for agencies that run many client workspaces from one user account. Each workspace has its own tenant and permissions and one login switches between them, while the tenants are seperated with row-level security. On Firebase, each client usually means a separate Google Cloud project with its own billing setup.

Pricing

For a small app with light traffic, Firebase's free tier goes a long way, but the catch is how costs grow. Firebase bills every document read, write and delete, plus egress, functions and storage, so list screen that reads 500 documents per visit looks harmless in development and shows up on the bill at scale and you can't forecast it well before you have real traffic. pylo bills records, flow actions and file storage/traffic, not reads; its price already includes the admin UI, forms, pylo analytics, forms and personal onboarding, which on Firebase you would build or buy separately. Every pylo plan has every feature and unlimited users, the plans differ only in terms of the included usage.

Hosting, compliance and reliability

All pylo content data, data models and databases live in data centres in Europe, our subprocessor list is public and names every non-EU parent company openly. A GDPR data processing agreement is part of the terms, and we never use customer data to train AI models. Paid plans come with a 99.5% availability SLA, hourly encrypted backups kept for 30 days at a separate German location and support from the team that builds the product.

Firebase runs on Google Cloud, and you can place Firestore and Cloud Storage in EU regions such as Frankfurt, but not every Firebase service lets you pick a region, so you have to check each product you use. Google is a US company. Many Firebase services fall under its ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications and uptime commitments come per product from the Google Cloud SLAs.

Where Firebase is the better choice

We would rather tell you than have you find out later:

• Offline sync is excellent, apps keep working without a connection and sync when they reconnect. pylo does not offer offline sync out of the box.

• Realtime listeners push changes to every connected client out of the box.

• Firebase has SDKs for iOS, Android, Web, Flutter, Unity and C++, where pylo currently ships a Next.js SDK plus MCP.

• It offers more auth options, including phone, anonymous sign-in, Apple, GitHub and other OAuth providers, plus SAML, OIDC and MFA through Identity Platform.

• It comes with a full mobile toolkit that pylo does not try to replace: Crashlytics, push notifications through Cloud Messaging, Remote Config, A/B testing and Test Lab.

• Security Rules, indexes and functions live in your repo and deploy from the CLI and the local emulator suite lets you test everything offline. pylo has no schema versioning or rollback yet.

• It has a CDN and resumable uploads for files.

• It runs on Google's infrastructure with formal certifications, a huge community and open signup.

If you build a consumer mobile app that has to work offline, Firebase is a great choice. pylo is for teams whose app runs on business data and who would rather not build the back office around Firestore from scratch.

Where pylo is a great Firebase alternative

We think these are the main reasons for when to pick pylo over Firebase:

• Relational data from day one. Model entities and relations, filter across them and aggregate by any field, there are no copied documents to keep in sync and no joins in app code.

• One system instead of a stack. The data model, API, permissions, flows, admin UI, forms, events and MCP are all one product. There's no glue code between services and no second place to keep in sync.

• Schema changes without a deploy. Add an entity or field and the typed GraphQL API is live immediately, you skip the migration file and the redeploy and focus on your features instead.

• Permissions you can't bypass. API, admin panel, forms, flows and MCP all go through the same permission layer, down to single fields. You don't maintain Security Rules next to IAM.

• Business logic without deployments. The flow builder covers event, cron and webhook triggers, with retries, rate limiting, typed actions and full logs, your own custom flow actions are plain TypeScript.

• Non-developers can work without you. Configurable admin views, state-dependent fields and a full form builder let operations teams handle their own changes, not every change has to become a developer ticket and you do not need to build your own admin UI.

• Analytics you don't have to instrument. pylo records every change as an event with before and after state and dashboards sit right next to the data.

• AI access that's safe for production. MCP runs with the connected user's exact read permissions and every write goes through human approval as a proposal.

• Predictable pricing. pylo doesn't bill per read, per write or per MAU. You get unlimited users and API requests and all features on every plan. Only three meters are billed: flow actions, records and file storage/traffic.

• European hosting from a German company. pylo hosts user data in Germany and the DPA is part of the terms, you get a 99.5% SLA from the first paid plan, hourly backups with 30-day retention and personal support from the team who built the product.

FAQs - Questions and answers about pylo

• Is pylo open source? No, but you can export all data at any time as CSV or JSON or through the API. The data models, flow definitions and generated SDK code are yours to keep, even after you leave.

• Can I self-host pylo? No, but if you need specific hosting options, we can discuss them as part of the Enterprise plan.

• Does pylo support offline sync like Firestore? No, pylo is built for apps that work online against a central, relational data model, you can of course use pylo to create your own apps with your own offline sync implementation.

• Can I keep using Crashlytics or Cloud Messaging? Yes, those and some other Firebase products work independently of Firestore, so you can move your data to pylo and keep them.

• Does pylo scale? Yes, some of our customers already run with millions of records and ten thousands of flow actions today.

• Where exactly is my data? Content data is in data centres in Germany and backups are kept at a different German location.

• Can I get access now? pylo is currently in private beta, so just request access and we will set up your first entities with you on a call and onboard you personally for your first project.