Cloud Firestore is the successor to the Firebase real-time database from Google. Cloud Firestore partially supercedes Firebase by removing some of the limitations, scalability issues, and having a newer data model.
In short you have several SQL database options such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and No-SQL database options such as MongoDB. Why would you use Cloud Firestore, and why are we posting it here?
It boils down to 3 reasons, the first 2 being more important:
Cloud Firestore has a fantastic GUI for adding / removing data.
Cloud Firestore is easy to set up and no hosting is required, and it is very scalable.
NoSQL databases are easy to start with, albeit they may get complicated with their limitations and corner cases.
Cloud Firestore seems like a viable option for us to add as a main backend database for our easy SaaS / Web app builder solution called SaaSBox.
Imagine starting out with MongoDB. We need to set up a MongoDB host. We need to maintain that the database is up and running. We don’t have an easy GUI to modify it. It requires constant scaling upgrades, It doesn’t have real-time push API. For these reasons Cloud Firestore seems like a better alternative. SQL would have been a more robust solution, however, it is harder to program SQL (though usually this is not an issue if you want ultimate robustness), and lacks a strong cloud-based GUI like Firebase.
Disclaimer: I know I have done some very coarse generalizations here - but if I had only 1 day to decide what database to pick for a quick prototype, this would be my way of thinking.