Ably vs Cloudflare Durable Objects

Discover how Cloudflare Durable Objects 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 infrastructure platform that provides APIs and SDKs to power live experiences at global scale, with no infrastructure to build or maintain. Ably’s products include:

Pub/Sub: Managed WebSocket messaging at scale, with guaranteed ordering, exactly-once delivery, and connection recovery out of the box
Chat, Spaces, and LiveSync: Purpose-built SDKs for common realtime use cases
AI Transport: Resumable streaming and session continuity for AI applications

What is Cloudflare Durable Objects ?

Cloudflare Durable Objects provides an easy way to manage stateful objects with low-latency access and real-time updates. It enables developers to create collaborative, real-time applications using WebSocket connections, ensuring data persistence and consistent performance across distributed clients.

Compare Ably and Cloudflare Durable Objects

Let’s compare Ably and Cloudflare Durable Objects , looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations & interoperability, quality of service, performance & availability and security & compliance.

Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Ably and Cloudflare Durable Objects . The content was last updated on 10 Jul 2026 for Ably and on 25 Sept 2025 for Cloudflare Durable Objects . Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.

Hear from companies gaining their realtime advantage with Ably

“

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

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“

Ably copes easily with big loads. We don’t have to worry about stability, even when we get huge traffic spikes.”

Johan Bengtsson

CTO

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“

Ably delivers all the performance and reliability we need as well as taking our compliance and encryption requirements in its stride.”

Jeremy Hutchings

CTO

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“

We’re not just benefiting from Ably’s ability to elasticity scale, but also from the freedom their SDKs give us to innovate.”

Chad Larter

Senior Director, Technical Operations

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“

The 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

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“

Ably gives us the reliable, low-latency AI transport we need for Messenger and Fin. No polling, no dropped messages, just a platform we can finally build next-generation AI experiences on.”

Colin Kennedy

Principal Product Engineer, Fin

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“

Rock solid reliability — in terms of both uptime and customer connectivity.”

Brad Ward

Co-founder and CTO, TeamRetro

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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

Get started for free Read our docs

	Ably	Cloudflare Durable Objects	Why this matters
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 large scale pub/sub messaging capabilities over serverless WebSockets. Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects does not have built-in pub/sub. However, Cloudflare has an MQTT-powered pub/sub service in private beta which can be integrated with Durable Objects. Read more	Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps.
Chat capabilities	Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more.	Ably Yes Ably Chat supports 1:1, group messaging and live streaming chat, with APIs for edit & delete, message and room reactions, moderation, typing indicators, moderation and more. Learn more about Ably Chat	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can implement some chat features, but some require additional Cloudflare services or custom development. File sharing would require integration with Cloudflare R2 for file storage.	Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more.
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	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can support collaboration capabilities, but require integration with storage services like Cloudflare Workers KV for features like avatar stacks and location data.	Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking.
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. LiveSync provides seamless connector interactions for Postgres and MongoDB. Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes	Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience.
Presence	Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime.	Ably Yes Ably’s presence API automatically syncs the full membership state on channel attach, ensuring clients always have an up-to-date and consistent view of who’s online. Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects does not natively support presence; it requires custom implementation.	Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime.
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 Ably’s Occupancy API delivers detailed, real-time metrics (connections, publishers, subscribers, presenceMembers, etc.) for every channel as part of its built-in monitoring capabilities. Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	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.
Message interactions	Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads.	Ably Yes Ably’s annotations API lets you attach, update and aggregate metadata (reactions, flags, tags) to previously-sent messages and query the roll-up summary efficiently. Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads.
Message history	Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages.	Ably Yes	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages.
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.	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive.
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%.	Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects supports the Brotli and gzip compression algorithms for all responses, rather than delta compression.	Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent.
Programmatic management	Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI.	Ably Yes	Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Programmatic management is possible through the Durable Objects REST API.	Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI.
Server-side batching	Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios.	Ably Yes		Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios.
Maximum message size	A message size limit below your payload size means custom chunking on both publisher and subscriber, plus manual ordering logic — significant engineering overhead for LLM responses, document content, or structured data.	Ably 64KB by default, with higher limits available on Enterprise.		A message size limit below your payload size means custom chunking on both publisher and subscriber, plus manual ordering logic — significant engineering overhead for LLM responses, document content, or structured data.
AI streaming support	Without purpose-built AI streaming infrastructure, ordering, chunking, and session recovery have to be built and maintained across the stack - and they tend to fail at the moments users notice most.	Ably Yes Ably AI Transport provides resumable token streaming, multi-device session continuity, guaranteed ordered delivery, and two-minute session recovery for AI applications.		Without purpose-built AI streaming infrastructure, ordering, chunking, and session recovery have to be built and maintained across the stack - and they tend to fail at the moments users notice most.
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 6 million monthly messages, 200 concurrent connections, 200 concurrent channels, 500 messages per second. No credit card required.	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan.
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 Ably offers usage-based pricing (messages, connection minutes, and channel minutes) or MAU-based pricing, letting you choose the model that best fits your traffic pattern.	Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare Durable Objects is only available on a pay-as-you-go plan. Connections to Durable Objects are billed as one request. Read more	The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient.
Pricing plans	The pricing plans offered by cost.	Ably The free and paid plans are for per-minute and MAU models: Free plan: Up to 6 million monthly messages and 200 concurrent connections Standard plan ($29/month): Up to 10k concurrent connections and 2.5k messages/second Pro plan ($399/month): Up to 50k concurrent connections and 10k messages/second Enterprise plan: For committed use, with custom pricing Learn more	Cloudflare Durable Objects Pay as you go: The plan offers 1 million requests and then $0.15/million requests. Read more	The pricing plans offered by cost.
Integrations & interoperability
SDKs	Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps.	Ably Java Javascript (browsers) React Native React Hooks Android Clojure Cordova / Phonegap Flutter Go iOS Objective-C iOS Swift Kotlin Laravel (PHP) MacOS Mono NativeScript .NET Node.js PHP (REST only) Scala Python Ruby (REST only) tvOS Unity Xamarin + Xamarin.forms	Cloudflare Durable Objects JavaScript TypeScript	Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps.
Supported realtime protocols	Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements.	Ably WebSockets MQTT Server-Sent Events (SSE) Fallback to Comet (XHR) and Long Polling for older browsers	Cloudflare Durable Objects WebSockets	Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements.
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 Lambda Microsoft Azure Functions Cloudflare Workers Google Cloud Functions	Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare Workers	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.
Streaming & queueing	Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing.	Ably Egress: Kafka Kinesis AMQP SQS Pulsar Ably-hosted queues Ingress: Kafka Connector Postgress (via Database Connector) 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.	Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects itself doesn't directly support specific message brokers or streaming platforms. Instead, it provides a runtime environment where you can implement your own logic.	Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing.
Observability services	Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice.	Ably Yes	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial For observability, Cloudflare Durable Objects can be integrated with Baselime, or can be retrieved with Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API. Read more	Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice.
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 Terraform Control API + SDKs	Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Supports: GitHub Actions GitLab Pipelines	Makes it possible to provision and configure service infrastructure as part of a CI or CD pipeline, enabling repeatable and reliable deployments.
Quality of Service
Proven scalability	Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance.	Ably Yes 2T+ API operations per month 30B+ connections opened monthly 2B+ connected devices	Cloudflare Durable Objects Durable Objects scale horizontally across many objects as needed. Each single object can handle up to 1,000 requests per second. Read more	Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance.
Guaranteed message delivery	Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions.	Ably Guarantees message delivery with continuity across disconnections.	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message delivery. Read more	Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions.
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	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message ordering. Read more	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.
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	Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve exactly-once message delivery. Read more	Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages.
Connection state recovery	Without connection state recovery, filling a disconnection gap requires a custom message store, fetch-on-reconnect logic, and deduplication - engineering the platform should handle natively.	Ably Yes If a client reconnects within two minutes, all missed messages are replayed in order with exactly-once semantics. No custom catch-up logic required. Beyond two minutes, message history is available for up to 72 hours.		Without connection state recovery, filling a disconnection gap requires a custom message store, fetch-on-reconnect logic, and deduplication - engineering the platform should handle natively.
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 Yes Ably backs its operations with a 99.999% SLA and has delivered over seven consecutive years of 100% uptime, supported by transparent incident reporting.	Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare offers Business customers a 100% uptime SLA with service credits for any failures, while Enterprise customers have separate agreements. Read more	An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime.
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 11 geographically-distributed core routing datacenters by default. Ably's network of 700+ edge acceleration points-of-presence is growing day by day.	Cloudflare Durable Objects No	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.
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	Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Read more	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.
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	Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes	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.
Low 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 Yes 6.5ms API latency	Cloudflare Durable Objects Unknown.	Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience.
Security & compliance