Firebase hands you a database, auth, storage, and functions — you still build CRM, products, forms, and rewards yourself, on Google's infrastructure. 23blocks ships those as complete, open-source backend blocks with standard REST APIs, and you can run them anywhere.
Prices and quotas change constantly on both sides. What doesn't change is the structure — that's what actually determines how much you build and who owns it.
| Approach | Firebase | 23blocks |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of adoption | Infrastructure primitives — db, auth, storage, functions | Complete business blocks — CRM, products, forms, rewards |
| Who builds the feature | You do, on top of the primitives | Already built, ready to call |
| Source code | Proprietary, Google-operated | Open source, yours to fork |
| API surface | Proprietary SDKs per platform | Standard REST, any language or client |
| Where it runs | Google Cloud, no alternative | Our shared platform, your own cloud, or self-hosted |
| Moving off later | Rewrite against a new backend | Graduate to your own infra, same code, no rewrite |
| Adoption model | All-in on the Firebase ecosystem | Per-block — add one, ignore the rest |
Skip the months of building CRUD, permissions, and workflows around raw primitives. Call a block and move on.
Auth, CRM, products, forms, files, search, rewards, content, and more — each a complete backend with its own data model, permissions, and REST API. No assembly required.
As of July 31, 2026, every block's code is open source. Read it, audit it, fork it. You're never trusting a black box the way you do with Firebase's closed runtime.
Start free on our shared platform. Outgrow it, and move the same blocks to your own cloud account — reversibly, with no code rewrite. Firebase has no equivalent exit.
Call blocks over plain REST from any language or client. No proprietary SDK to learn, no vendor-specific client library tying your codebase to one provider.
Add auth this week and products next month, without touching the rest of your stack. There's no all-in commitment the way Firebase pulls in its whole ecosystem.
The open-core model means the software is free forever. What you pay for — if anything — is the platform running it, whether that's ours, yours, or a hybrid.
Firebase is a well-built product and it fits real situations. We'd rather tell you when than pretend it doesn't.
You're already deep in the Google ecosystem — Analytics, Cloud Messaging, ML Kit, and mobile SDKs that already assume Firebase underneath.
Your app is genuinely primitive-shaped — real-time sync for a chat or multiplayer app, with no CRM, commerce, or forms logic to speak of.
You want to build the business logic yourself — some teams prefer owning every line of feature code on top of managed primitives, by design.
You need Firebase's specific mobile tooling — Crashlytics, Remote Config, and A/B testing baked into one console, tightly coupled to your app.
None of that is wrong — it's just a different bet. 23blocks is built for teams who want the business logic already solved, want the code they can read and own, and want the option to run it anywhere without a rewrite. If that's not your situation, Firebase is a solid choice.
Yes. As of July 31, 2026, every block's code is open source. You can read it, fork it, and self-host it. What you pay for, if anything, is running the platform — not the software itself.
Firebase gives you infrastructure primitives — a database, auth, storage, functions — that you assemble into features yourself. 23blocks gives you the features already built as complete backend blocks, with standard REST APIs instead of a proprietary SDK.
No. You adopt blocks one at a time. Start with auth or forms, add CRM or products later, and leave the rest of your stack untouched. There is no all-in commitment.
You graduate to your own cloud account with a reversible migration and no code rewrite — the same open-source blocks, the same REST APIs, just running on infrastructure you control. A real reference case moved 11 blocks across 4 surfaces with zero traffic left on the shared platform.
Start free on the shared platform, open source underneath, and never rewrite your code to move.
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