Microsoft Azure vs SignalR: What are the differences?

Developers describe Microsoft Azure as "Integrated cloud services and infrastructure to support computing, database, analytics, mobile, and web scenarios". Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment. On the other hand, SignalR is detailed as "A new library for ASP.NET developers that makes developing real-time web functionality easy". SignalR allows bi-directional communication between server and client. Servers can now push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR supports Web Sockets, and falls back to other compatible techniques for older browsers. SignalR includes APIs for connection management (for instance, connect and disconnect events), grouping connections, and authorization.

Microsoft Azure belongs to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack, while SignalR can be primarily classified under "Realtime Backend / API".

"Scales well and quite easy" is the primary reason why developers consider Microsoft Azure over the competitors, whereas "Supports .NET server" was stated as the key factor in picking SignalR.

SignalR is an open source tool with 7.75K GitHub stars and 2.19K GitHub forks. Here's a link to SignalR's open source repository on GitHub.

Microsoft, Starbucks, and Accenture are some of the popular companies that use Microsoft Azure, whereas SignalR is used by simplement-e, Jet.com, and NRGSoft. Microsoft Azure has a broader approval, being mentioned in 497 company stacks & 474 developers stacks; compared to SignalR, which is listed in 22 company stacks and 18 developer stacks.