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Fanout vs PubNub: What are the differences?
Developers describe Fanout as "Realtime APIs made simple". Fanout makes it easy to build realtime APIs and apps. The product is a cross between a reverse proxy and a message broker. Receivers subscribe to channels, and published data is delivered in realtime. On the other hand, PubNub is detailed as "Build real-time apps quickly and scale them globally". PubNub makes it easy for you to add real-time capabilities to your apps, without worrying about the infrastructure. Build apps that allow your users to engage in real-time across mobile, browser, desktop and server.
Fanout and PubNub can be categorized as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.
Some of the features offered by Fanout are:
- Reverse proxy -- integrate realtime with any level of your technology stack, not just your front end.
- Interoperable -- Add realtime to any API, no matter your backend or database, without changing any of your existing API contracts.
- Open -- cloud or self hosted, it’s up to you. We don’t believe in vendor lock-in.
On the other hand, PubNub provides the following key features:
- PubNub SDKs support over 50 of the most popular environments, including: iOS, Android, JavaScript, .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and many more.
- Data Push - Establish and maintain persistent socket connections to any device (mobile, browser, desktop and server) and push data to global audiences in less than ¼ of a second
- Presence - Automatically detect when users enter or leave your app and whether machines are online
I am building an IoT application that will utilize connected air quality sensors to provide real-time indoor air quality in offices. I want to be able to share this data with a few different databases, etc.
Wondering if anyone has any advice on which real-time streaming API would be best for this sort of application, or even how I should think about it?
For IoT, we support MQTT along with websockets and SSE. The pattern you're suggesting that involves harvesting data from devices and soaking into a database is easy to achieve with one of the Ably integrations (Serverless functions/webhook) . Here are some tutorials to do things like this: https://ably.com/tutorials/reactor-event-zapier#step2-mqtt-ably
We use Pusher at www.justlearn.com. It works fine. When you reach more users, Pusher gets expensive. We use Pusher for live chat between users. Their software is easy to use. We have had issues with auth on Pusher.
Pros of Fanout
Pros of PubNub
- Massively scalable & easy to use36
- Easy setup25
- Reliable20
- Great support19
- Flexible to integrate to custom applications14
- Sockets at Scale13
- 99.999% availability guarantees13
- High-Performance13
- High-Reliability12
- Multiplexing12
- Scalability7
- High-Availability5
- 70+ SDKs5
- Security4
- Azure Add-on4
- Heroku Add-on3
- Presence3
- Flexible3
- Easy to setup3
- Data Streams2
- Free Plan2
- Server-Side Cache2
- PhoneGap Plugin2
- AngularJS Adapter2
- Data Sync2
- Analytics2
- Support2
- Easy setup and very reliable1
- High cost, going up more in Summer '151
- Cool1
- Angular 2+ integration1
- Documentation, easy to use, great people/service1
- CTO stephen also is A++++++1
- Real time and easy to use.1
- Easy integration with iOS apps1
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Cons of Fanout
Cons of PubNub
- Costly1