Ably vs AWS AppSync
Discover how AWS AppSync compares to Ably, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Ably?
Ably is a realtime experience platform that provides APIs and SDKs to power realtime functionality - with no realtime infrastructure to build and maintain. Our application building blocks and integrations enable developers to quickly create live experiences from live chat and data broadcast, to collaborative UXs and notifications.
What is AWS AppSync?
AWS AppSync is a fully managed service designed to streamline the process of building and deploying serverless GraphQL and pub/sub over WebSocket APIs. It enables developers to seamlessly handle and synchronize mobile app data in realtime across devices and users. Even when a mobile device is offline, AppSync permits data access and modification.
Compare Ably and AWS AppSync
Let’s compare Ably and AWS AppSync, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Disclaimer:This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Ably and AWS AppSync. The content was last updated on 10 Jun 2024 for Ably and on 10 Jun 2024 for AWS AppSync. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.
| Core features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Ably Yes Ably provides robust pub/sub messaging capabilities over serverless WebSockets. | AWS AppSync Yes Read more |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Ably Partial It's possible to use Ably Pub/Sub to build chat applications today, as many customers do. A new product to make this seamless, idiomatic and help accelerate time-to-market is under active development. | AWS AppSync |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Ably Yes The Spaces SDK provides an opinionated set of abstractions for collaborative environments including live cursors, avatar stacks and component locking. Learn more | AWS AppSync |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Ably Yes Ably provides a self-hostable and managed database connector to stream updates over our serverless WebSocket platform. Ably also provides the Models SDK for seamless connector interactions. Learn more | AWS AppSync Partial Can be built on top of AppSync, but not available out of the box. |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Partial "AWS AppSync does not provide events related to client connections or disconnections" (see source) - but it can be built on top of it by composing multiple AWS products. |
Occupancy | High-level metrics about the clients currently connected to a channel make it simple to show things such as connected user count, or display which channels are the most popular. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Ably Partial Message interactions are natively supported in ably-js. There is not currently any API support for retrieving messages and their interactions efficiently from the Realtime service (under development). Learn more | AWS AppSync No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Partial Looks like you can get message history, but only in combination with other AWS services see source |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Ably Yes Support for Android and iOS push notifications. Improved web-push for browsers currently in progress. | AWS AppSync Yes Find out how |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Ably Yes Broadcast changes efficiently with our binary deltas, reducing bandwidth consumption by typically up to 95%. | AWS AppSync Yes See tutorial |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes You can perform programmatic management using the AWS SDKs (Software Development Kits), AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation or AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit). |
| Pricing | |||
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes 250,000 API requests free per month for 12 months with the AWS Free Tier. |
Pricing model | The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient. | Ably
| AWS AppSync You pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage. You are billed separately for query and data modification operations, and for performing realtime updates on your data. Read more |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Ably
| AWS AppSync
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Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Ably
| AWS AppSync
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Serverless functions | Enables integration with third-party cloud providers by facilitating the execution of custom code against messages to perform business logic like on-the-fly translation. | Ably
| AWS AppSync
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Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Ably Egress:
Ingress:
The Database Connector is designed for any database in the SQL-family, but at the moment only supports Postgres. Please contact us if you want support in other databases. | AWS AppSync AWS AppSync doesn't directly integrate with streaming and queuing services for data ingress and egress, but you can use the following AWS services alongside AppSync to build scalable and event-driven architectures for your applications: Ingress:
Egress:
|
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync |
CI/CD tools | Makes it possible to provision and configure service infrastructure as part of a CI or CD pipeline, enabling repeatable and reliable deployments. | Ably
| AWS AppSync No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Ably
| AWS AppSync No published metrics are available. However, this works on top of serverless technology which means theoretically it should scale to millions of concurrent connection with little to no tuning from the customer. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync No |
Guaranteed message ordering | Maintains the sequence of messages as they were sent. This is particularly important in apps where the chronological order of messages is essential for meaningful communication. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync No |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync No |
| Performance & availability | |||
Uptime Guarantee | An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime. | Ably 99.999% | AWS AppSync 99.95 uptime SLA |
Global edge network | By bringing servers (Points of Presence, or PoP) geographically closer to the devices of end users, and routing requests to the nearest PoP, global latency is reduced to a minimum. | Ably Yes All Ably customer data runs across all our 7 geographically-distributed core routing datacenters by default. Ably's network of 385 edge acceleration points-of-presence is growing day by day. | AWS AppSync No |
Multi-region data replication (message durability) | By replicating data across multiple regions, the risk of data loss or downtime is greatly mitigated since if data is lost or a server fails in one region, the information can be retrieved from another. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Partial Single region by default - multi region deployment of AWS AppSync would require integration of Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables. |
No single point of failure or congestion | Having no single point of failure means a system is resilient and can continue to operate even if one part fails. Avoiding a single point of congestion ensures messages flow efficiently across the system and avoids bottlenecks that could lead to performance issues under load. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Partial Not available by default - but could be built with the integration of Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Ably <50ms round trip latency for the 99th percentile; <35ms latency once traffic arrives within AWS | AWS AppSync Unknown, although reports in forums suggest it is 200-500 ms. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes Learn more |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes Can set up auth with AWS IAM, and AWS IAM can be configured with any identity source (e.g. Okta). Learn more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes Learn more |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Ably Yes Ably offers SSL/TLS encryption and 256-bit AES encryption using private keys. Message payloads can only be decrypted by other clients that share your secret key. Learn more about Ably's encryption | AWS AppSync |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Ably Yes | AWS AppSync Yes Done using AWS Key Management Service keys. This ensures that data in services like AppSync is securely encrypted. Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Ably
Ably also offers EU and US-only data storage. | AWS AppSync
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Hear from companies gaining their realtime advantage with AblyThe core infrastructure for delivering live sports data to our customers is Ably. We sleep easier at night knowing it can be relied on for consistent low latency and message integrity at scale.”
Gary Williams
IT Infrastructure Team Lead
Ably immediately solved our issues around the user experience and scale. It supports our customers’ stringent expectations as well as future product development.”
Max Freiert
Product Group Lead
Ably copes easily with big loads. We don’t have to worry about stability, even when we get huge traffic spikes.”
Johan Bengtsson
CTO
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M Monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
