Ably vs Fanout

As we 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.

Fanout has 3 point-of-presence locations in addition to a single central location.

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.

Fanout does not support binary encoded messages, but does support Base64 encoding.

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.

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.

It’s unknown whether Fanout has autonomous datacenters, however their service operates around a central location.

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.

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.

With Fanout, if a message is published whilst a client is briefly disconnected (such as going through a tunnel or changing networks), then the message may never arrive to that client.

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

Fanout does not offer this.

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

Fanout does not support the use of traditional message queues.

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

Both Ably and Fanout support Webhooks

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

Fanout supports Amazon Lambda, but not other cloud platforms.

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.

Fanout does not support presence.

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

Fanout does not offer any type of message history.

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

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

Fanout does not provide these guarantees.

Ably offers push notifications.

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

Fanout also support custom domains for their Business customers allowing them to connect to Fanout using a CNAME such as “realtime.yourcompany.com”.

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

Fanout only support a limited number of client libraries. Additionally, Fanout assumes developers will implement the protocol themselves using a client library.

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

Fanout does not support MQTT.

The Ably platform is designed to be protocol-agnostic and ensure protocol interoperability. That's why we support SSE. Fanout also supports SSE.

Using our protocol adapters, our customers can use a large selection of compatible embedded client libraries for low energy and other embedded devices. Additionally, Ably supports MQTT enabling a wide range of embedded client library SDKs to be used.

Fanout does not support 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.

With Fanout, if a message is published whilst a client is not connected, then the message is effectively lost and will never be delivered to that client. Fanout expects the developer to handle data loss due to loss of connectivity.

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.

Ably and Fanout 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.

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

Fanout does not support configurable private key permissions.

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.

Fanout does not provide channel configuration rules.

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.

Fanout does not provide payload encryption in their client libraries.