If you're exploring alternatives to Pusher, you're likely facing a common challenge: building out extensive features from scratch due to Pusher's limitations. Whether it's the feature constraints or finding Pusher unsuitable for certain real-time use cases like chat, these frustrations are all too familiar.
Regardless of the specific reason you're seeking a change, this blog aims to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the available alternatives. We'll delve into various options, helping you make an informed decision for your real-time application needs.
We'll explore a range of options, highlighting their strengths and suitability for different scenarios. Whether you crave more built-in functionality or a solution tailored to unique needs, this comprehensive guide will empower you to find the perfect pusher for your project.
Pusher: A quick overview
Pusher is a popular real-time communication platform widely used across various applications, from live updates in dashboards to collaborative tools and notifications. Pusher offers two main products: Channels and Beams.
01.
Channels
This product enables developers to add real-time WebSocket-based features to their applications, such as live data updates, notifications, and collaborative features.
02.
Beams
This product focuses on delivering push notifications to mobile and web applications, ensuring users receive timely updates even when they're not actively using the app.
Despite its versatility in supporting a broad range of real-time use cases, Pusher falls short when it comes to building realtime in-app chat applications. The limitations that make Pusher a less ideal choice for this specific use case include:
Scalability issues: As chat applications grow, the need for scalable infrastructure becomes critical. Pusher's architecture may struggle to efficiently handle a large number of concurrent connections and messages.
Feature limitations: Essential chat features like message history, presence indicators, and typing notifications require significant custom development effort with Pusher.
Low latency: Real-time chat demands low-latency communication. Pusher's latency might not be optimal for delivering the snappy, instant messaging experience users expect.
Limitations of Pusher
Pusher.io has several limitations that can impact its suitability for building real-time applications like chat:
Limited feature set: Pusher offers a limited feature set compared to some alternative real-time solutions. It lacks message persistence/history and message delta compression, which can be crucial for maintaining chat history and efficient data transmission
Single datacenter requirement: Pusher requires all real-time traffic to be routed through a single datacenter, which can lead to increased latency, reliability, and availability issues due to single points of congestion and failure.
Pricing and scalability: Pusher's pricing model is based on the number of messages, connections, and other attributes, which can lead to higher costs if usage exceeds certain thresholds. This can be challenging to predict and manage for applications with fluctuating traffic.
Soft and hard limits: Pusher has both soft and hard limits on usage, which can be enforced automatically. Exceeding these limits can result in application disablement, which is critical for chat applications that require continuous uptime.
Pusher alternatives for building real-time applications
1. CometChat - Dedicated communication infrastructure for chat and calling
Unlike Pusher, CometChat is purpose-built to help developers seamlessly integrate chat functionality into their applications. With SDKs, UI kits, and sample apps tailored for all popular front-end frameworks, we make it easier for developers to rapidly build chat features in a relatively short time compared to other options listed above.
Here are some of the key capabilities that set CometChat apart
Out-of-the-box features
CometChat offers a wide range of pre-built features, including file sharing, read receipts, typing indicators, voice and video calls, media sharing, real-time translation, and push notifications. These features are ready to use out-of-the-box, significantly reducing the time and effort required for implementation.
Best-in-class UI kits
Our UI kits come with embedded business logic, allowing developers to focus on customization rather than core functionality. Highly adaptable and customizable, enabling developers to tailor the chat interface to match their application’s design and branding seamlessly.
Scalability and reliability
Our infrastructure is supported by global servers, ensuring fast and reliable connectivity for users around the world. We guarantee 99.999% uptime, providing a highly reliable service that ensures users have continuous access to chat functionalities.
Security and compliance
All communications happening in our systems are secure with end-to-end encryption, protecting user data from unauthorized access. We comply with industry standards and regulations such as Hipaa, GDPR and CCPA, providing peace of mind for all your data privacy and security worries.
Exceptional developer support
Extensive documentation, sample codes, and tutorials, making it easier for developers to integrate and customize chat features.
2. Firebase
Firebase Realtime Database and Firestore are NoSQL document databases that provide real-time data synchronization capabilities. They can be used to build basic chat applications with low traffic volume that are not very sophisticated.
However, Firebase's offerings have limited features compared to dedicated chat APIs. They may not scale as well for high-traffic, complex chat applications. Building advanced features on top of Firebase's real-time capabilities requires significant custom development effort.
3. Pubnub
Pub/Sub messaging systems like Pubnub also allow for real-time data synchronization between clients by decoupling the publisher and subscriber. In pub-sub systems, messages are sent (published) to a central broker and then delivered to subscribers.
While they can be used as the underlying infrastructure for building chat applications, they require more development time and resources compared to dedicated chat APIs.
Pub/Sub systems are more complex to build and integrate into your application. They often lack the expansive out-of-the-box features and rapid development experience provided by dedicated chat SDKs.
4. Socket.io
Socket.IO is a popular library that enables real-time communication between a web server and a web client. Socket.IO allows you to efficiently broadcast messages to all connected clients or specific groups of clients. This is useful for features like live chat or group conversations that need to be delivered to multiple users simultaneously.
5. Ably
Ably is a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that provides a powerful infrastructure for building real-time applications like live chat, collaborative editing, and real-time dashboards. It provides a pub/sub messaging system, where publishers send messages to channels, and subscribers receive messages from those channels. This allows for low-latency, bidirectional communication between devices.
Aarathy Sundaresan
Content Marketer , CometChat