PubNub vs Radar: What are the differences?
PubNub: 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; Radar: High level API and backend for writing web apps that use push messaging. Radar is built on top of engine.io, the next-generation backend for socket.io. It uses Redis for backend storage, though the assumption is that this is only for storing currently active data.
PubNub and Radar belong to "Realtime Backend / API" category of the tech stack.
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, Radar provides the following key features:
- More than just pub/sub: a resource-based API for presence, messaging and push notifications via a Javascript client library
- Written in Javascript/Node.js, and uses engine.io (the new, low-level complement to socket.io)
- Backend to multiple front-facing servers
Radar is an open source tool with 209 GitHub stars and 35 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Radar's open source repository on GitHub.