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Firehose.io vs PubNub: What are the differences?
Firehose.io: Build realtime Ruby web applications. Firehose is both a Rack application and JavaScript library that makes building real-time web applications possible; PubNub: 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.
Firehose.io and PubNub belong to "Realtime Backend / API" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Firehose.io are:
- Firehose embraces RESTful design prinicpals and consequently works great with any library that speaks HTTP
- Integrates with Backbone.js and Ember.js
- Hook it into an ORM, like ActiveRecord
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 Firehose.io
- RESTful2
- Rails gem2
- Works with ActiveRecord2
- Clean way to build real-time web applications1
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 Firehose.io
Cons of PubNub
- Costly1