Simperium vs SocketCluster: What are the differences?

What is Simperium? Move data everywhere it's needed, instantly and automatically. Simperium is a new kind of data layer. As your app reads and writes data, Simperium circulates that data everywhere it's needed. You add a Simperium library to your app and initialize it. This library keeps a persistent connection to the Simperium hosted service. The Simperium libraries and service work together to efficiently move data around for your users.

What is SocketCluster? 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.

Simperium and SocketCluster can be categorized as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Simperium are:

• Data transparently moves across mobile, web, and desktop versions of your app
• Your users can read and write data even when they're offline
• Multiple users can collaborate with the same data at the same time

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.

"Simple and useful data model" is the primary reason why developers consider Simperium over the competitors, whereas "Cluster mode is awesome" was stated as the key factor in picking 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.