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Pusher

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Pusher vs SocketCluster: What are the differences?

Developers describe Pusher as "Hosted APIs to build realtime apps with less code". Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features. On the other hand, SocketCluster is detailed as "An open, scalable realtime engine for Node.js". 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.

Pusher and SocketCluster can be primarily classified as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Pusher are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, SocketCluster provides the following key features:

  • Resilient on both the client and backend - Process crashes, lost connections and other failures are handled seamlessly.
  • Scales linearly as you add more CPU cores and workers (assuming a decent OS) - Tested with up to 16 cores.
  • Also designed to scale horizontally across multiple machines. See sc-redis sample.

"An easy way to give customers realtime features" is the top reason why over 44 developers like Pusher, while over 8 developers mention "Cluster mode is awesome" as the leading cause for choosing SocketCluster.

SocketCluster is an open source tool with 5.35K GitHub stars and 283 GitHub forks. Here's a link to SocketCluster's open source repository on GitHub.

Product Hunt, Groupon, and Mailchimp are some of the popular companies that use Pusher, whereas SocketCluster is used by notthatbad technologies UG, Livevents, and StaffConnect. Pusher has a broader approval, being mentioned in 125 company stacks & 42 developers stacks; compared to SocketCluster, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.

Advice on Pusher and SocketCluster
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AblyAblyPubNubPubNub
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PusherPusher

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?

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Replies (2)
Ben Gamble
Recommends
on
AblyAbly

For IoT, we support MQTT along with websockets and SSE. The pattern you're suggesting that involves harvesting data from devices and soaking into a database is easy to achieve with one of the Ably integrations (Serverless functions/webhook) . Here are some tutorials to do things like this: https://ably.com/tutorials/reactor-event-zapier#step2-mqtt-ably

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Philip Rossen
Recommends
on
PusherPusher
at

We use Pusher at www.justlearn.com. It works fine. When you reach more users, Pusher gets expensive. We use Pusher for live chat between users. Their software is easy to use. We have had issues with auth on Pusher.

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Pros of Pusher
Pros of SocketCluster
  • 55
    An easy way to give customers realtime features
  • 40
    Websockets
  • 34
    Simple
  • 27
    Easy to get started with
  • 25
    Free plan
  • 12
    Heroku Add-on
  • 11
    Easy and fast to configure and to understand
  • 9
    JSON
  • 6
    Happy
  • 6
    Azure Add-on
  • 5
    Support
  • 4
    Push notification
  • 12
    Cluster mode is awesome
  • 8
    WebSockets
  • 7
    Scalability
  • 4
    Security
  • 4
    Real-time
  • 4
    JWT based Authentication
  • 3
    Pub-Sub API
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Client Libraries

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Cons of Pusher
Cons of SocketCluster
  • 11
    Costly
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is Pusher?

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

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Pusher?
    What companies use SocketCluster?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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    What tools integrate with Pusher?
    What tools integrate with SocketCluster?

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    What are some alternatives to Pusher and SocketCluster?
    PubNub
    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.
    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.
    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.
    Chat by Stream
    Chat API and SDK. With a beautiful UI Kit, easy to use React Components and powerful API. Add Chat to any application in a matter of hours. The tech uses Go, RocksDB and Raft. By the creators of Stream, the API that powers activity feeds for more than 300 million users.
    Twilio
    Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs.
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