PubNub vs Pusher vs Socket.IO

Overview

Pusher

Stacks618

Followers1.4K

Votes234

PubNub

Stacks249

Followers458

Votes238

Socket.IO

Stacks13.6K

Followers11.0K

Votes776

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Pusher, PubNub, Socket.IO

Kenzie

Sep 30, 2021

Needs adviceon

.NET

AngularJS

MSSQL

I'm working on a project where I need to both send real-time updates for specific data sets, along with providing notifications to the users after long-running processes have been completed (SSE).

The project is using .NET Framework, AngularJS, & MSSQL. I understand that SignalR is nice as a polyfill for .NET and you can scale with a backplane, but I was wondering if there was a more efficient/effective technology for this?

36.1k views36.1k

Comments

Noam

Jul 16, 2020

Needs adviceon

Node.js

ExpressJS

React

We are starting to work on a web-based platform aiming to connect artists (clients) and professional freelancers (service providers). In-app, timeline-based, real-time communication between users (& storing it), file transfers, and push notifications are essential core features. We are considering using Node.js, ExpressJS, React, MongoDB stack with Socket.IO & Apollo, or maybe using Real-Time Database and functionalities of Firebase.

1.15M views1.15M

Comments

Amit

Software Developer at Superpro.ai

Aug 20, 2021

Needs advice

We need to do lots of real-time communication like sending messages when someone request t to join an ongoing call then in real-time show the request to admin and if the admin accepted, then let the user join the call, change the user role from the audience to speaker so that they can also speak. We are planning to use WebSocket for it, but I think using some tools that already work on WebSocket is better so that we can focus on other things rather than implementing and managing WebSocket.

3.4k views3.4k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Pusher	PubNub	Socket.IO
Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.	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.	It enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed.
Easily build scalable in-app notifications, chat, realtime graphs, geotracking and more in your web & mobile apps with our hosted pub/sub messaging API.;Send programmable push notifications to iOS and Android devices with delivery and open rate tracking built in.;Easily add 1-1 and group Chat to your web & mobile apps. Presence, message storage, rich media, notifications, typing indicators and more.;Embed a realtime collaborative editor in your app in seconds to empower your users to do more, together.	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	Real-time analytics - Push data to clients that gets represented as real-time counters, charts or logs.;Binary streaming - Starting in 1.0, it's possible to send any blob back and forth: image, audio, video.;Instant messaging and chat - Socket.IO's "Hello world" is a chat app in just a few lines of code.;Document collaboration - Allow users to concurrently edit a document and see each other's changes.
Statistics
Stacks 618	Stacks 249	Stacks 13.6K
Followers 1.4K	Followers 458	Followers 11.0K
Votes 234	Votes 238	Votes 776
Pros & Cons
Pros 55 An easy way to give customers realtime features 40 Websockets 34 Simple 27 Easy to get started with 25 Free plan Cons 11 Costly	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 219 Real-time 143 Node.js 141 Event-based communication 102 WebSockets 102 Open source Cons 12 Bad documentation 4 Githubs that complement it are mostly deprecated 3 Doesn't work on React Native 2 Small community 2 Websocket Errors
Integrations
Slack Datadog Librato	No integrations available	Auth0 Gatsby Flutter React Backbone.js Cloud Firestore Outbrain

What are some alternatives to Pusher, PubNub, Socket.IO?

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.

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 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.

Syncano

Syncano is a backend platform to build powerful real-time apps more efficiently. Integrate with any API, minimize boilerplate code and control your data - all from one place.

NATS

Unlike traditional enterprise messaging systems, NATS has an always-on dial tone that does whatever it takes to remain available. This forms a great base for building modern, reliable, and scalable cloud and distributed systems.

SocketCluster

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.

deepstream.io

Scalable Server for Realtime Web Apps with JSON structures that can be read, manipulated and listened to, messages that can be sent to one or more subscribers, and request response workflows, between two clients or servers.

8base

A cloud service designed to power enterprise-grade web and mobile applications that require support for large numbers of users, complex data and transactional requirements, comprehensive role-based security and a modern look-and-feel.

Supabase

Supabase is currently in early-Alpha .It is an open-source Firebase alternative. It adds realtime and RESTful APIs to your PostgreSQL database without a single line of code.

Faye

Faye is a set of tools for simple publish-subscribe messaging between web clients. It ships with easy-to-use message routing servers for Node.js and Rack applications, and clients that can be used on the server and in the browser.