Ably vs deepstreamHub

Ably have 7 datacenters globally. We can ensure that your users always experience the lowest possible latency by connecting to the closest datacenter, and have complete availability by connecting to alternative healthy datacenters when necessary.

deepstreamHub clusters must exist in a single data centre region.

Our latency based routing ensures that users anywhere in the world connect through one of our 385 edge acceleration PoPs to one of our 7 Ably datacenters. deepstreamHub do not offer this as all traffic is directed to a single datacenter location.

Encoding messages in binary format is faster. It reduces bandwidth to send and receive messages, and streamlines the processing time for clients and servers when encoding and decoding messages.

Ably and deepstreamHub both support the use of binary data.

The Ably platform is designed with no single point of failure and to be self-healing. All our customers benefit from their apps running on all of our datacenters providing resilience, reliability and low latencies globally.

deepstreamHub stores data across a combination of storage and cache layers. This allows the individual servers to go down / fail over without causing any data-loss, as the data is distributed across multiple nodes. However, as the deepstreamHub platform relies on shared services such as a Redis for a message bus, that layer itself becomes a point of failure and congestion.

Ably's servers are located in 7 datacenters covering 4 continents with each datacenter designed to operate as part of the global cluster when available, but operate autonomously when necessary.

deepstreamHub do not operate with multiple datacenters.

Ably stores every message in at least two datacenters and separate geographical regions. This ensures that an outage in any datacenter or region cannot result in data loss.

deepstreamHub do not operation with multiple datacenters and, as such, data is typically stored in the location the platform is running in. It is possible however for a data layer to be used that could be replicated such as Mongo with replication across regions or datacenters.

Ably provides guaranteed message delivery and continuity across disconnections. Publishers only receive an ACK when data is persisted in two locations, and subscribers never lose data during brief disconnections as we maintain connection state for each client on our servers.

We are not clear on what QoS promises the platform can offer given the different plugins for different protocols and backends could significantly change the quality of service available in the design.

Ably offers varying levels of uptime guarantees depending on your needs. For all of our enterprise customers we provide a 99.999% uptime SLA.

deepstreamHub does not offer a specific SLA thus if the service goes down or fails then you are entitled to no refunds.

Data published into Ably's realtime system can be moved into traditional message queues for realtime or batch processing.

deepstreamHub does not offer message queuing features or a means to distribute data using once-only pattern to your server workers.

Webhooks provide a means to get messages, channel lifecycle and present events pushed to your servers over HTTP.

deepstreamHub use Webhooks as a form of authentication but not as a means to get messages, channel lifecycle and present events such as Ably.

Ably can trigger serverless functions on any third platforms such as Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure or Google Function.

deepstreamHub currently do not offer the ability to use serverless functions.

Presence allows you to subscribe to events when users or devices enter or leave channels. This is a useful feature for collaborative apps, games and chat rooms.

Both Ably and deepstreamHub provide presence capabilities yet only Ably emits presence events when a present member has updated their member data.

Ably's message history feature provides a means for clients or servers to retrieve messages that were previously published on a channel.

deepstreamHub offers message history through its persistence layer.

Stream your realtime data published within the Ably platform directly to another streaming or queueing service such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Storm or Kafka.

The deepstreamHub community has built a number of plugins that offer similar capabilities. However, given each plugin is built by the community, it is not clear how these features are offered consistently across different target platforms.

Ably ensures that messages are delivered to persistently connected subscribers in the order they were published on each channel.

It is not clear how deepstreamHub provides guaranteed ordering of messages given the messaging backends they rely on, such as Redis, do not generically provide that functionality.

Ably offers push notifications, with smart notifications coming soon.

deepstreamHub’s push notifications are still in their feature backlog.

Ably supports custom domains for our Enterprise customers allowing them to connect to Ably using a CNAME such as "realtime.your-company.com".

deepstreamHub does not provide support for custom CNAME endpoints.

Ably offer a considerable range of client library SDKs for every popular platform.

Ably's realtime protocol provides an efficient means to reliably and efficiently publish and subscribe to realtime data.

deepstreamHub has its own realtime protocols.

The Ably platform is designed to be protocol-agnostic and ensure protocol interoperability. Ably supports the deepstreamHub's protocol.

deepstreamHub does not currently support competitor realtime platform protocols.

The Ably platform is designed to be protocol-agnostic and ensure protocol interoperability. Ably supports MQTT./p>

deepstreamHub only supports MQTT on their enterprise product.

The Ably platform is designed to be protocol-agnostic and ensure protocol interoperability. That's why we support SSE. deepstreamHub doesn't support SSE.

Using our protocol adapters, our customers can use the large selection of PubNub embedded client libraries for low energy and other embedded devices.

deepstreamHub has a very limited set of client libraries suitable for embedded devices.

Ably provides continuity for clients that become disconnected for reasons such as going through a tunnel or changing networks. Ably stores the connection state for each client on its servers so that clients that reconnect within two minutes can resume their connection and receive all messages published whilst they were disconnected.

It is not clear if deepstreamHub provides connection state recovery. Given connections can be resumed and data synchronization can be completed, it is quite possible an equivalent is available.

WebSockets are widely regarded as the most efficient HTTP compatible transport for full duplex realtime communication between devices.

Whilst most modern devices support WebSockets, there are situations where the device or the network environment requires use of HTTP transports.

deepstreamHub only support WebSockets such that the client will fail to start in browsers without WebSocket support.

Ably and deepstreamHub offer TLS connections ensuring that all data in transit is encrypted.

Token based authentication ensures your private key is never shared and instead a short-lived token is used to authenticate.

Ably allows configurable policies and an identity to be embedded in a token ensuring you have complete control over what actions your users can perform such as limiting which channels they can subscribe or publish to.

deepstreamHub also provide a Token based authentication service.

Using JWT allows for easy integration with your existing authentication systems, along with ensuring your private key is never shared.

Ably allows for not only Ably Tokens to be embedded within JWTs, but also for JWTs to be signed by Ably API keys and used themselves for authentication.

deepstreamHub also supports JWT.

Ably provides support for private API keys with configurable permissions including restrictions on channels or operations.

deepstreamHub does not support configurable permission for keys.

Ably provides channel rules providing you with the flexibility to maintain control of your channels, such as requiring SSL/TLS or only identified authenticated clients on a channel.

deepstreamHub does not support configurable channel permissions.

Ably's AES encryption allows messages to be encrypted using the provided private key before they are published to Ably. As a result, messages are practically impossible to intercept and view for anyone including Ably. For very sensitive data, this ensures you can safely use us knowing your payloads are always secure and opaque.

deepstreamHub does not provide payload encryption in their client libraries.