[cortesoft]

I am not sure what makes you say it is a thin layer over Socket.IO... or even the comparison to Firebase. I would say Firebase solves a different problem, not really a harder one.

Firebase doesn't have an identity service, does it? Firebase doesn't seem to address the issue of security or privacy at all, which seems to me to be fairly important to a web application.

[dyoder]

Also, you can implement data synchronization over a messaging layer but not the other way around. So I'd say our approach is actually more flexible. And we do plan to introduce APIs to make data synchronization easier.

[equark]

Implementing the Firebase API is nontrivial. It's an entire datastore with fine-grained monitoring and optimistic, distributed, data synchronization. Messaging falls automatically out of their API -- all you do is push child messages. And it's better messaging protocol than pub/sub since you get windowed queries into the channel history for free.

[dyoder]

You get 'windowed queries into the channel history for free' on spire.io as well.