now a days, there are a variety of options for our application authentication like OAuth, firebase, identity platform, etc… here we are going to discuss the main difference between the google identity platform and firebase auth. In the firebase, we have lots of options, but here we are going to focus only on the firebase authentication. these two services are offered by google only. before jumping on to the differences, first, let’s know about identity platform and firebase auth.

Google Identity platform:

Identity Platform is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform that helps organizations can add identity and access management functionality to their applications, can protect user accounts, and scale with confidence on Google Cloud.

Features of google Identity platform:

Multi-tenancy:

Identity Platform supports creating unique silos of users and configurations within a single instance. These silos might represent different customers, business units, subsidiaries, or some other division.

Authentication as a service:

Identity Platform provides a drop-in UI, customizable authentication service for user sign-up and sign-in. Development and admin activities are made easier with a range of app SDKs (iOS, Android, and web) as well as admin SDKs (Node.JS, Java, Python, and more).

Broad protocol support:

Identity Platform supports multiple authentication protocol methods (SAML, OIDC, email/password, social, phone, and custom auth) to provide flexible integration options for any identity solution.

Intelligent account protection:

Identity Platform is integrated with the Google intelligence and threat signals to help detect compromised user accounts. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods, such as SMS, can also be used to help protect user accounts from phishing attacks.

High-scale infrastructure:

Built on Google’s Cloud security, performance, network, and scale, Identity Platform is designed to satisfy the needs of even the most demanding apps.

Enterprise support and SLA:

Google Identity Platform offers technical support and 99.95% SLA to give you peace of mind for a foundational component of your application or service.

Firebase Authentication:

Firebase Authentication provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to your app. This supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Twitter, Google, Facebook and, and Apple.

Features of firebase:

Easy sign-in with any platform:

Firebase Auth aims to make building a secure authentication system easy while improving the sign-in and onboarding experience for end-users. This provides an end-to-end identity solution, supporting email and password accounts, phone auth, Google, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub login, and more.

Flexible and Customizable:

FirebaseUI provides a flexible, customizable, open-source, and drop-in auth solution that handles the UI flows for signing in users. FirebaseUI Auth component ensures to implementation of best practices for authentication on mobile devices and websites, which can maximize sign-in and sign-up conversion for your app.

Comprehensive security:

Firebase auth is built by the same team that developed Google Sign-in, Smart Lock, and Chrome Password Manager, Firebase security applies Google’s internal expertise in managing one of the largest account databases in the world.

Fast implementation:

Before firebase auth, This can take months to set up your own auth system, and it requires an engineering team to maintain that system in the future. Setting up the entire authentication system of your app in under 10 lines of code also handles complex cases like account merging.

Main differences between google Identity platform (GIP) and firebase authentication:

Identity Platform and Firebase Authentication offer similar functionality. Both will allow you to easily sign users into our applications by providing backend services, SDKs, and UI libraries. However, Identity Platform gives the additional capabilities designed for enterprise customers, such as

• Multi-factor authentication

• Blocking functions

• OIDC and SAML authentication.

• Multi-tenancy support.

• Identity-Aware Proxy integration.

• BAA coverage.

• A 99.95% uptime SLA.

Feature comparison between Identity platform and firebase:

Authentication Features:

Compliance and uptime Features:

When to choose Google Identity Platform?

So, undoubtedly both the identity platform and firebase authentication provide better authentication and security to our application if you need large-scale and enterprise-level features you can go for the identity platform, otherwise you can use the firebase auth.