Agora vs Pusher
Discover how Agora compares to Pusher, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as scalability, pricing, security, and their chat features.
What is Agora?
Agora offers realtime communication services through APIs, enabling developers to integrate voice, video, and live-streaming features into mobile, desktop, and web applications.
What is Pusher?
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications. Pusher offers two products:
- Channels - Build scalable realtime features
- Beams - Programmatic push notifications
Compare Agora and Pusher
Let’s compare Agora and Pusher, looking at key elements of their offering such as their scalability, pricing, security and chat feature set.
| Scalability | |||
Concurrent connections | Number of users that can be supported in a single chat. | Agora 10,000 users supported per chat room. | Pusher Unknown. |
Connections | Number of connections that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | Pusher 30k per month Growth Plus plan - custom plans may support higher number of connections. Pusher pricing page |
Channels / rooms | Number of channels or rooms that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unlimited. | Pusher Unlimited. |
Messages | Number of messages that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | Pusher |
Message throughput | Number of messsages that can be published per second. | Agora Unknown. | Pusher 10 messages per second. Limited to 10 messages per second per client connection. |
| Data integrity | |||
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Agora No | Pusher 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. | Agora No | Pusher 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. | Agora No | Pusher 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. | Agora Agora guarantees an SLA uptime of 99.95%. | Pusher Channels SLA: API will be made available with an Annual API Uptime Percentage of 99.95%. Pusher will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Pusher Beams available with an Annual Uptime Percentage of > 99.95%. Read more |
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. | Agora Yes Agora operates a global network (SD-RTN) of over 200 data centers spread across multiple regions, including the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Asia Pacific. Read more | Pusher 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. | Agora Yes | Pusher No Pusher apps are located in a single data center rather than distributed across multiple data centers. Any latency issues that occur in that data center will affect all apps hosted there. |
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. | Agora Yes Agora global data centers have superior routing capabilities to ensure that the network services are not interrupted due to a single point of failure. Read more | Pusher No Pusher apps are located in a single data center rather than distributed across multiple data centers. If that data center goes offline then all apps hosted there are affected. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Agora The average end-to-end global latency for Agora is 300 milliseconds. Read more | Pusher Not shared. Because apps exist in only one region, message latencies increase for clients the further they are from your chosen data center. |
Server-side batching | Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios. | Agora No | Pusher Partial Pusher provides a Batch Events API for server-side batching, allowing developers to send multiple events in a single API call. |
Connection state recovery | Automatically re-establish failed connections and replay missed messages. | Agora Yes Agora supports reconnection and state recovery mechanisms through the Agora SDK, which automatically tries to re-establish connections if a user drops offline. | Pusher Partial Pusher provides some level of connection state recovery but doesn't offer built-in, automatic recovery. |
| Ecosystem support | |||
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Agora
| Pusher
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Supported languages | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Agora
| Pusher
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| Chat room types | |||
Multi-type chat support (group, DM, supergroups) | Enables chat experiences to be tailored to various user needs, from one-on-one to large, scalable group discussions. | Agora
| Pusher Pusher does not offer predefined features for chat rooms, but you can use Pusher Channels API to build:
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| Chat room management | |||
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Agora Yes | Pusher Yes |
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. | Agora No | Pusher |
Typing indicators | Show when others are typing in a chat room, enhancing realtime communication flow. | Agora Yes Agora’s Chat SDK allows you to build fully-featured messaging experiences for your users, including typing indicators. Read more | Pusher Partial Pusher does not provide built-in typing indicators natively, but you can implement typing indicators using Pusher Channels or Presence Channels by sending custom events to notify users when someone is typing. |
Room reactions | Customize the chat environment with reactions and other shared room states. | Agora Yes | Pusher Partial Pusher does not provide built-in support for room reactions or managing room states directly. However, you can implement these features using Pusher Channels by creating your custom logic. |
| Chat message attributes | |||
Message edits and deletes | Allow users to modify or remove messages. | Agora Yes | Pusher No |
Message reactions & emoticons | Boost engagement by enabling users to quickly express emotions or feedback on messages. | Agora Yes Agora allows you to react with up to 20 emoji reactions in a single message during one-to-one chats and group chats. Read more | Pusher No |
Rich text support | Enhance messages with rich text formatting in chat. | Agora No | Pusher No |
Media attachments | Support for sharing images, videos, and files in chat. | Agora | Pusher No |
| Chat application and user state | |||
In-app notifications | Notify users of important events from other chat rooms without them leaving the current chat, keeping them engaged and informed. | Agora No | Pusher Yes |
Role-based permissions | Control user roles and permissions to ensure proper access and moderation. | Agora | Pusher Partial Pusher itself does not directly provide built-in role-based permissions. However, you can implement it in Pusher Channels using Pusher's user authentication and authorizing mechanics. Read more |
UI kit | Customizable UI elements for a seamless chat integration. | Agora Yes Agora provides open-source chat UI kits on GitHub for iOS, Android, and Web, which you can clone and run. Read more | Pusher No |
| Storage and history | |||
Synchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, before the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes Moderation is done through Microsoft Azure, and is not enabled by default. To get access, you need either a Pro or Enterprise plan. | Pusher No |
Asynchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, after the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes | Pusher No |
Manual moderation via dashboards | Tools for moderators to detect harmful messages and manage them effectively. | Agora Yes Agora's console allows moderators to manually view the report items and address the messages and message senders according to their content policy. Read more | Pusher No |
Ban users | Remove problematic users from the chat to maintain a healthy environment. | Agora Yes | Pusher Partial Pusher supports banning users through its server SDKs but only terminates the user’s active connections. |
| Dev tools | |||
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Agora Yes | Pusher Yes Pusher supports programmatic management of its services via APIs, Webhooks, SDKs, and serverless functions for Pusher Channels. Read more |
| Pricing | |||
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. | Agora Agora provides pay-as-you-go pricing based on the number of participant minutes, messages per month, and MAUs for chat. Read more | Pusher Pusher has free, flexible, and Enterprise plans based on number of messages and concurrent connections. See more information |
Pricing illustration | An example price based on 5 live streaming chat events and 50K attendees. | Agora $2349,
| Pusher $1199 minimum. Could not calculate exactly. Would need a custom enterprise plan as Growth Plan Plus only supports 90M messages a day. |
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Agora Yes Agora's free plan offers 10k minutes/month. | Pusher Partial Only in 'sandbox', which is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day. |
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Agora
| Pusher Pricing is based around the number of messages per day and concurrent connections.
Source: Pusher pricing page |
| Support for additional realtime features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Agora Yes Agora's message channels use the pub/sub model, allowing you to publish messages to a channel or subscribe to receive them without pre-creating the channel. Read more | Pusher Yes |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Agora No | Pusher No |
Database sync capabilities | Database sync capabilities enable realtime updates between your database and UI, ensuring the UI reflects changes in the database instantly, with data consistency, and without the need for polling. | Agora No | Pusher No |
Notifications | Send notifications directly to users screens, from chat responses to news alerts, or game updates, whether or not an application is open and running. | Agora Yes | Pusher Yes Pusher supports push notifications through its Pusher Beams API. |
Asset tracking | State-of-the-art asset tracking across last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. | Agora Yes Agora provides rich media messages that support GPS locations, allowing you to track assets. | Pusher Yes Pusher supports asset tracking. Pusher Channels can be used to display the current location of assets on a map in realtime. |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
AI models | Allows you to integrate AI models, like GPT, into your app. | Agora Yes Agora provides integration with OpenAI models AI for its conversational AI SDK developed in partnership with OpenAI. Read more | Pusher No |
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. | Agora No | Pusher Yes |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Agora No | Pusher No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Agora Yes Agora analytics integrates with Datadog to provide monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services. Read more | Pusher Yes Pusher provides Datadog and Librato integrations. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Agora No Agora uses token-based authentication for user authentication, rather than API keys. Users authenticate through Access Tokens, which are generated using the app's credentials. Read more | Pusher Yes |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Agora Yes | Pusher Yes Pusher supports authentication with Github SSO. |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Agora Yes | Pusher Partial Pusher provides a mechanism for implementing rules and permissions primarily through its Channels service. It requires you to implement an endpoint which they will call to check if an operation is allowed. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Agora Yes Agora implements E2EE for its messages through its signaling SDK, which has a built-in AES 256 GCM encryption algorithm. Read more | Pusher Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Agora
| Pusher
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Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Agora and Pusher. The content was last updated on 16 May 2025 for Agora and on 8 May 2025 for Pusher. 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.
Alternatives to Agora and Pusher
While both Agora and Pusher are worth considering as options for realtime experiences, they aren’t without their limitations. We suggest evaluating them against the following alternatives to make sure you find the right solution for your needs.
Alternatives to Agora
Sendbird offers APIs and SDKs for live chat, realtime messaging, push notifications, and calls with WebSocket connections, UI kits, and backend integrations.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Twilio is a platform that provides developers with a suite of communication tools for building messaging infrastructure in their applications.
Alternatives to Pusher
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Discover how Agora and Pusher stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Agora and Pusher on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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
