Ably vs Push Technology

As we have 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.

Push Technology partner with IBM’s cloud infrastructure and allow you as the client to determine the number of servers you require. This is more risky for smaller businesses who can only afford 1 server and thus an outage or malfunction would halt operations and increase latency.

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.

Push Technology does not offer latency based routing.

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.

Push Technology offer binary topics as an option when transferring 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.

Push Technology do not offer multiple servers as the default option instead customers must choose to operate on more than 1 server.

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.

Push Technology is not a multi-region cloud solution.

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.

It’s unknown if Push Technology provides any QoS or delivery guarantees.

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

Push Technology do not offer any uptime-related SLAs.

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

Push Technology does not offer message queues.

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

Push Technology does not support the use of Webhooks.

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

Push Technology do not support the use of server-less 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.

Push Technology does not have presence capabilities.

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

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.

Both Ably and Push Technology support 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".

It’s unknown if Push Technology supports CNAME.

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

Push Technology do not offer an extensive range of client libraries in comparison to Ably.

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

Push Technology does not support MQTT.

The Ably platform is designed to be protocol-agnostic and ensure protocol interoperability. That's why we support SSE. Push Technology does not 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.

Push Technology can allow for embedded usage through their C library.

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.

Push Technology operates a recovery buffer of sent messages but if a message has been lost or is no longer in the recovery buffer the server will abort the reconnection.

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

Both Ably and Push Technology offer WebSockets support.

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

Both Ably and Push Technology support HTTP transports.

Ably and Push Technology 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.

Push Technology also offers token based authentication.

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

Push Technology 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.

Push Technology supports 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.

Push Technology does not support encrypted message payloads.