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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Realtime Backend API
  5. PubNub vs Pulsar

PubNub vs Pulsar

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PubNub
PubNub
Stacks249
Followers458
Votes238
Apache Pulsar
Apache Pulsar
Stacks118
Followers199
Votes24

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.

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Advice on PubNub, Apache Pulsar

tauschjl
tauschjl

Apr 22, 2021

Needs advice

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?

38.1k views38.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PubNub
PubNub
Apache Pulsar
Apache Pulsar

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.

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 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;Storage and Playback- Store your real-time data streams for future access, “playback” or re-publish;Mobile - Easily manage the complexity of real-time apps on mobile devices;Analytics - Simulate an audience of millions. See a live view of audience size, engagement and geography;Security - Protect your real-time data with easy to use enterprise-grade security
Unified model supporting pub-sub messaging and queuing; Easy scalability to millions of topics; Native multi-datacenter replication; Multi-language client API; Guaranteed data durability; Scalable distributed storage leveraging Apache BookKeeper
Statistics
Stacks
249
Stacks
118
Followers
458
Followers
199
Votes
238
Votes
24
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 36
    Massively scalable & easy to use
  • 25
    Easy setup
  • 20
    Reliable
  • 19
    Great support
  • 14
    Flexible to integrate to custom applications
Cons
  • 1
    Costly
Pros
  • 7
    Simple
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 3
    High-throughput
  • 2
    Geo-replication
  • 2
    Multi-tenancy
Cons
  • 1
    LImited Language support(6)
  • 1
    Very few commercial vendors for support
  • 1
    Only Supports Topics
  • 1
    Not jms compliant
  • 1
    No guaranteed dliefvery

What are some alternatives to PubNub, Apache Pulsar?

Firebase

Firebase

Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO

It enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed.

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Pusher

Pusher

Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

SignalR

SignalR

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.

Ably

Ably

Ably offers WebSockets, stream resume, history, presence, and managed third-party integrations to make it simple to build, extend, and deliver digital realtime experiences at scale.

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