deepstream.io vs SocketCluster: What are the differences?

What is deepstream.io? A scalable server for realtime webapps. Scalable Server for Realtime Web Apps with JSON structures that can be read, manipulated and listened to, messages that can be sent to one or more subscribers, and request response workflows, between two clients or servers.

What is SocketCluster? An open, scalable realtime engine for Node.js. SocketCluster is a fast, highly scalable HTTP + realtime server engine which lets you build multi-process realtime servers that make use of all CPU cores on a machine/instance. It removes the limitations of having to run your Node.js server as a single thread and makes your backend resilient by automatically recovering from worker crashes and aggregating errors into a central log.

deepstream.io and SocketCluster can be primarily classified as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.

Some of the features offered by deepstream.io are:

• Stores and syncs data in realtime
• Built in node.js
• Works for browsers, backend & mobile

On the other hand, SocketCluster provides the following key features:

• Resilient on both the client and backend - Process crashes, lost connections and other failures are handled seamlessly.
• Scales linearly as you add more CPU cores and workers (assuming a decent OS) - Tested with up to 16 cores.
• Also designed to scale horizontally across multiple machines. See sc-redis sample.

"RethinkDB" is the top reason why over 7 developers like deepstream.io, while over 8 developers mention "Cluster mode is awesome" as the leading cause for choosing SocketCluster.

deepstream.io and SocketCluster are both open source tools. deepstream.io with 6.14K GitHub stars and 315 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than SocketCluster with 5.35K GitHub stars and 283 GitHub forks.