Firebase Analytics is where almost every mobile team starts, for the obvious reason that it is free and it is already in the project. The trouble arrives later: the reporting is sampled, event types are capped, and the moment you want a genuine funnel or a retention cohort you are told to export to BigQuery and write SQL.
Nohmo is built for the question that follows a crash — which step of which flow did this user abandon, and did the release cause it. Analytics, crash monitoring and rage-tap detection share one SDK, one session model and one identity.
Nohmo vs Firebase Analytics, feature by feature
| Capability | nohmo | Firebase Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Free at any volume | Not included | Included |
| Unsampled reporting | Included | Not included |
| Funnels without writing SQL | Included | Not included |
| Unlimited custom event types | Included | Not included |
| Crash monitoring in the same SDK | Included | Partial |
| Rage-tap / silent failure detection | Included | Not included |
| BigQuery export | Not included | Included |
| Real-time event feed | Included | Partial |
Which one should you pick?
Choose Firebase Analytics if…
- •Your budget for analytics is genuinely zero and it needs to stay there at any scale.
- •You are deep in the Google stack and rely on Remote Config, A/B testing or Google Ads audience sync.
- •You already have a BigQuery warehouse and a team comfortable writing SQL against raw events.
Choose Nohmo if…
- •You want funnels, retention and crash context without building a data pipeline first.
- •You need to know which release started a crash and which flow it broke.
- •You want silent failures — the taps that fail without throwing — surfaced automatically.
Where Nohmo falls short today
- •Firebase is free. Nohmo is not, and at very high event volumes that difference is real.
- •Firebase has first-party BigQuery export, Remote Config and A/B testing. Nohmo has none of those.
- •Firebase Crashlytics has deeper native crash symbolication, including NDK support, than our crash capture.
Why teams choose Nohmo
One SDK, not three
Firebase Analytics plus Crashlytics plus something for session context is three integrations that never share a session. Nohmo ships them as one npm install.
Funnels you can actually build
Define a funnel in the dashboard and read it immediately, rather than exporting to BigQuery and writing SQL against a raw event table.
Nothing is sampled
Every event you send is counted. Firebase samples high-volume reporting, which is exactly when you most need the numbers to be right.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run Nohmo alongside Firebase?+
Yes, and most teams do at first. The SDKs do not conflict — run both for a fortnight and compare the numbers before you decide.
Does Nohmo replace Crashlytics?+
For React Native it covers the same ground: native crashes on both platforms, grouped and tied to the session that caused them. For deep NDK-level native debugging, Crashlytics is still stronger.
What about the 500 event type limit?+
That is a Firebase constraint, not a universal one. Nohmo does not cap the number of distinct event names.
The verdict
Stay on Firebase if free matters more than answers. Move to Nohmo when you are tired of exporting to BigQuery to ask a question a product analytics tool should answer directly.
Comparison reflects our understanding of Firebase Analytics as of 2026; third-party products change — check their site for current details.