I am building an app related to online bookings of Barbers in my city.I am planning to use Firebase to store my data and showing realtime updates. What will be the right option i.e. Realtime Database or Firestore. As much as I read, Firestore is great but it costs the developers according to number of queries and in my case query numbers will be much higher as I am planning to show realtime update to clients for their booking status. And I am a naive in this area so suggest which one will be easy to learn.
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It's up to you in the end, so I'll just name some main points:
- Realtime Database is basically one giant JSON file, while Cloud Firestore is based on collections of documents.
- Both offer realtime updating.
- Cloud Firestore has better ways to filter and sort data.
- Cloud Firestore has more advanced ways of writing and updating information.
- Realtime Database is based on a single region, while Cloud Firestore can scale to multiple regions automatically.
- They have different security options.
- Realtime Database charges based on bandwidth and storage, but at a higher rate. As you mentioned in your question, Cloud Firestore charges based on operations on your database (read, write, etc.)
In the end, it all depends on how you want to work in your code. For example, do you want to work with one large JSON tree, or do you want to work with separate documents? Cloud Firestore is the newer of the two, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better in your scenario.

Ben Soyka
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