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I don't mean this one to be a self-promotional comment - I wrote something similar last weekend: Building real time web apps with AngularJS, NodeJS and MongoDB - http://www.anupshinde.com/posts/livebase-realtime-webapps-an...

What does firebase offer (other than convenience) that say, a rabbitMQ or zeroMQ setup doesn't?

Seems like it's a simple JS API to a server component that manages subscriptions to fanout exchanges.

Data persistence and synchronization are just a few advantages of Firebase over the ones you mentioned.