TellWang vs Firebase

The Firebase comparison is mostly a data-model question. Firestore is a document store, and it's genuinely good at what document stores are good at. But most apps people build for a business are relational — customers place orders, orders have line items, inventory belongs to locations — and on a document store that turns into denormalized copies you maintain by hand. A Wok is built on Postgres: real SQL, joins, constraints, and row-level security.

SQL instead of documents

Here's a question a business app asks on day one — revenue per customer this month:

select c.name, sum(o.total) as revenue
from customers c join orders o on o.customer_id = c.id
where o.created_at >= date_trunc('month', now())
group by c.name order by revenue desc;

In Firestore that's a precomputed aggregate you keep in sync yourself, or a client-side merge of multiple reads. Neither is wrong — but if your data has relationships, SQL stops being a preference and becomes the cheaper path. The database page covers the REST API and row-level security that come with it.

The parts Firebase made famous are here

Sign-in with JWTs, live postgres_changes subscriptions for dashboards and chat, file storage, serverless functions, scheduled jobs, hosting on your own domain. Those are the overlap — a Wok also carries the rest of a working stack: database, auth, storage, realtime, functions, scheduler, email, SMS, hosting and domains, a model gateway, and key management. The stack lays it out piece by piece.

Someone does the assembly — here it's an agent

Firebase leaves the assembly and the operating to you. On TellWang, tell Wang what you're making and it provisions the Wok, writes the schema and policies, deploys the functions and frontend, then opens the result in a real browser and checks the console and network requests before handing you the URL. Engineers can drive the same stack from Cursor or Claude Code through the MCP server, or over REST.

Leaving is allowed

Moving off Firestore means rewriting your data access, because the client APIs are proprietary to Firebase. A Wok's data layer is standard Postgres — pg_dump works on any plan — and on Pro and Scale the whole Wok definition exports to Terraform HCL in one API call, so you can redeploy it on another cloud or self-hosted.

Where Firebase is the better pick

Native mobile. Firebase's iOS, Android, and Flutter SDKs with offline-first sync are mature and deeply integrated, and if you're committed to Google's ecosystem — Analytics, Crashlytics, Cloud — staying inside it has real value. Firebase also runs globally; every Wok runs in one region today (ca-central-1). TellWang's case is web apps and internal tools with relational data, especially when you want the backend built and operated for you rather than assembled by hand.

Common questions