DBMS > Google Cloud Firestore vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. Realm vs. SQLite

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Firestore vs. H2 vs. ObjectBox vs. Realm vs. SQLite

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Primary database model

Document store

Relational DBMS

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	6.63
Rank	#54	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	7.57
Rank	#47	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	1.08
Rank	#179	Overall
	#6	Object oriented DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Score	7.18
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.h2database.com

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

realm.io

www.sqlite.org

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.objectbox.io

realm.io/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

Developer

Google

Thomas Mueller

ObjectBox Limited

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Initial release

2017

2005

2017

2014

2000

Current release

2.2.220, July 2023

4.0 (May 2024)

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

Public Domain

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

server-less

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, plus "flex" map-like types

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

APIs and other access methods

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary native API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

Java

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

Triggers

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

via file-system locks

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

News

MongoDB Realm & Device Sync alternatives – ObjectBox
17 September 2024

Local AI – what it is and why we need it
11 September 2024

First on-device Vector Database (aka Semantic Index) for iOS
24 July 2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with vector databases: Expanding AI Capabilities
18 June 2024

The on-device Vector Database for Android and Java
29 May 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.