Flutter with Firestore: StreamBuilder vs StreamProvider

Question

I’m developing an app with Flutter, and I’m using Cloud Firestore. Is there any reason to prefer one between StreamBuilder and StreamProvider?

Answer 1

Is there any reason to prefer one?

StreamBuilder is nice and easy to use for a stream that you are sure you will only need at that same widget. If your app is growing, passing this stream data through your app widgets will get messy, in that case, use StreamProvider.

Why?

StreamProvider is a more complete solution than StreamBuilder:

• StreamBuilder is a widget that comes with Flutter, and rebuilds itself every time the stream gets updated, that's it's only job.
• StreamProvider is a widget that comes with the Provider package, it's built using StreamBuilder, but combines this with InheritedWidget, allowing you to pass information through the tree of widgets efficiently.

Some useful info and code

David King explains in this video an evolution from using StreamBuilder to StreamProvider, explaining their benefits (and MultiProvider, which allows to have multiple streams). His code is in this GitHub repo.

In this Fireship article, there's a video and code explaining how to use Firebase with Provider. There's a very useful example on using it with Firebase user authentication.