Why our customers choose Ably over Socket.IO

Ably is an enterprise-grade serverless WebSockets platform for pub/sub messaging at the edge. Our customers trust in Ably to power scalable and realtime online user experiences that will work anywhere in the world, without fail. We provide an elastic, hyper-reliable global infrastructure that also comes with the flexible building blocks needed for creating rich user experiences. Everything is offered via consistent and intuitive APIs.

Focus on building realtime apps that delight customers. We’ll handle the rest.

Ably is a serverless edge messaging platform designed to stream realtime messages at extreme scale to web, mobile, and IoT devices, over a fault-tolerant, autoscaling global edge network. We deliver 750+ billion messages to more than 300 million end-users each month.

As a managed solution, Ably enables you to:

  • Easily build high-performance realtime functionality that delights your users.

  • Reduce engineering and DevOps efforts - there's no complex realtime infrastructure for you to provision and maintain.

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Key Ably advantages vs Socket.IO

Features

Ably

Socket.IO

SDKs

Note: Only official SDKs were taken into account.

25+ SDKs targeting every major language and development platform
Including:
JavaScript
Cocoa
.NET
Android

Explore Ably's SDKs for our pub/sub messaging platform

4 official client library (JavaScript) for browsers:
JavaScript
Java
Swift
C++

Note that there are also several community-made client implementations in other languages, such as Python, or .NET.

Pub/Sub messaging

Yes, Ably provides Pub/Sub messaging.

Explore Ably's pub/sub messaging implementation

Socket.IO provides Pub/Nub messaging, but with limitation

You can use the rooms feature to broadcast events to a subset of clients. However, the rooms feature is a server-only concept (the client doesn't have access to the list of rooms it has joined).

Message queues

Yes, Ably provides message queues

Explore Ably's message queues implementation

No, Socket.IO doesn't provide message queues

Guaranteed message ordering

Yes, Ably provides guaranteed message ordering

Explore Ably' s guaranteed message ordering implementation

No, Socket.IO doesn't provide guaranteed message ordering

Guaranteed message delivery

Yes, Ably provides guaranteed message delivery

No, Socket.IO doesn't provide guaranteed message delivery

Native push notifications

Yes, Ably provides native push notifications

Explore Ably's push notifications implementation

No, Socket.IO doesn't provide native push notifications

Serverless functions

Ably is integrated with most serverless functions providers. We support AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, IFTTT, Cloudflare Workers, and Zapier.

Explore Ably's serverless functions implementation

No, Socket.IO doesn't provide serverless functions

Built-in integrations
Webhooks
Custom -yes
IFTTT
Zapier

Serverless functions
AWS Lambda
Cloudflare Workers
Google Cloud Functions
Microsoft Azure Functions

Streaming
Apache Pulsar
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon SQS
RabbitMQ
AMQP
Apache Kafka


Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes


Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes



Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Get in touch

Explore Ably's integrations


No
No
No
No


No
No
No
No



No
No
No
No
No
No

Robust features set to power delightful realtime experiences

PUB/SUB MESSAGING

Publish messages to millions of subscribers over Ably channels - named units of distribution that offer a way to implement Pub/Sub messaging and realtime data delivery.

MULTIPROTOCOL

Ably supports WebSockets, SSE, and MQTT, so you can choose the right protocol for your use case. We also support the Pusher and PubNub protocols, making the migration to Ably quick and simple.

DATA INTEGRITY GUARANTEES

No message is ever lost, delivered multiple times, or out of order, even if unreliable networks and brief disconnections are involved.

DEVICE AND USER PRESENCE

Subscribe to events when devices or users enter, leave, or update their state on channels. Essential for use cases like chat, multiplayer games, or collaboration tools.

MESSAGE DELTA COMPRESSION

Reduce the bandwidth needed to distribute messages to consumers by sending only the changes from the previous message instead of the entire payload.

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

Send push notifications over Ably channels, or deliver them directly to Android and iOS users with FCM and APNs.

Simple and powerful client library SDKs

All official Ably client library SDKs offer a consistent yet idiomatic API across every language. Regardless of your development environment or preferred language, Ably keeps things simple for you by providing consistency and predictability. You can quickly integrate our SDKs into your tech stack with a few lines of code, and start building realtime features in minutes. 

Migrate to Ably from Socket.IO

It's very easy to migrate from Socket.IO to Ably. Explore our documentation to find out why.

Migrate to Ably

Not sure Ably is right for you?

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