Firehose.io vs SocketCluster: 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; 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.

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

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, 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.

SocketCluster is an open source tool with 5.35K GitHub stars and 283 GitHub forks. Here's a link to SocketCluster's open source repository on GitHub.