PubNub vs Pulsar: What are the differences?
Developers describe PubNub 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. On the other hand, Pulsar is detailed as "Distributed solution providing messaging and queuing for streaming data". Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging solution developed and released to open source at Yahoo. Pulsar supports both pub-sub messaging and queuing in a platform designed for performance, scalability, and ease of development and operation.
PubNub and Pulsar can be primarily classified as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.
Some of the features offered by PubNub are:
- 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
On the other hand, Pulsar provides the following key features:
- Unified model supporting pub-sub messaging and queuing
- Easy scalability to millions of topics
- Native multi-datacenter replication
Pulsar is an open source tool with 3.77K GitHub stars and 862 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Pulsar's open source repository on GitHub.