Amazon EventBridge vs Centrifugo
Discover how Amazon EventBridge compares to Centrifugo, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Amazon EventBridge?
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that enables real-time response to state changes in your applications. Using an event bus, it collects data from multiple sources, processes and routes them between other AWS services or external SaaS providers. This simplifies the building of scalable and loosely coupled systems in event-driven architectures.
Suitable for:
- Multiple systems syncing
- Event-driven automation
- Data processing
- Tasks scheduling
- Monitoring and auditing
Not suitable for:
- Two-way communication
- On-premises applications
- Legacy systems
- Complex event processing
Pros:
- Event archive & replay
- Serverless architecture
- Event replay & filtering
- Custom event buses
Cons:
- Vendor lock-in
- Complex access control
- Low throughput
What is Centrifugo?
Centrifugo is an open source, language-agnostic, self-hosted pub/sub server capable of scalable realtime messaging. It uses transports like WebSockets to deliver messages to active users.
Suitable for:
- Collaboration tools
- Chat applications
- Multiplayer games
Not suitable for:
- Small-scale projects
- Non-realtime use cases
Pros:
- High performance
- Has message history and message recovery
- Scalable architecture
- Has user presence status
- Customizable
Cons:
- Requires server management
- Steep learning curve
- Complex setup
Compare Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo
Let’s compare Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Disclaimer:This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon EventBridge and on 23 Jul 2024 for Centrifugo. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.
Core features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo Yes |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo Yes |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo Yes Read more |
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. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo Yes |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Amazon EventBridge does not support native push notifications. Notifications can be sent to communication channels by integrating with AWS Chatbot. | Centrifugo |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo supports delta compression only in channels with recovery and positioning on. Read more |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo Yes |
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. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Free access to AWS default service events for event buses. Custom events, third-party SaaS, and cross-account events are paid. | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo is open-source and free to use. |
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. | Amazon EventBridge Amazon EventBridge has a limited free tier and a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the number of events published to EventBridge, the number of invocations, events replayed, and schema discovery. The cost varies based on the event type. You can read more about the pricing plan on Amazon's website. | Centrifugo Centrifugo's base product is free and open-source, but there is also a paid version called Centrifugo PRO. More specific pricing information is not available online; for pricing, you need to contact Centrifugo's sales team. Read more |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon EventBridge
| Centrifugo
|
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon EventBridge
| Centrifugo
|
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. | Amazon EventBridge
| Centrifugo None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Available through Amazon SQS. | Centrifugo Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Amazon EventBridge Partial Amazon EventBridge provides an integration with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring usage and metrics. | Centrifugo Partial Centrifugo has no native observability tools, but offers integrations with monitoring tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. Read more |
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. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Supports:
| Centrifugo No Self-hosted, so you will have to implement your own. |
Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Amazon EventBridge No published metrics are available. | Centrifugo Centrifugo is designed for high scalability; its Redis engine allows for scaling Centrifugo nodes to different machines. For specific stats on scale, you can read more in Centrifugo's scale test tutorial. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge promises at-least-once event delivery. It will try to deliver an event to a target for up to 24 hours. | Centrifugo 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. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo Partial Centrifugo supports ordering in channels but not across channels. |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Amazon EventBridge No Amazon EventBridge does not support exactly-once delivery semantics out of the box. It ensures at least-once delivery, but does not guarantee exactly-once delivery. | Centrifugo 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. | Amazon EventBridge 99.99%. Read more | Centrifugo N/A |
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. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo 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. | Amazon EventBridge No | Centrifugo No |
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. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo No Centrifugo relies on external systems like Redis or NATS for data storage, which may have their own failure points. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Amazon EventBridge 500ms global average latency Read more | Centrifugo N/A (self-hosted) |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge uses the AWS STS (Security Token Service) for token-based authentication. | Centrifugo |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge supports Single Sign-On (SSO) through AWS SSO. | Centrifugo |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo supports permission rules for operations through its configuration. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | Centrifugo No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon EventBridge
| Centrifugo None |
Alternatives to Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo
Whilst both Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo 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 Amazon EventBridge
![tech provider image](https://images.ctfassets.net/ee3ypdtck0rk/1YIsoyCVk6rAla5Qj5cAjq/c37c5649a2de7b9853400490dbd4e04e/triggermesh.png?w=48&h=48&q=80&fm=png)
TriggerMesh is a free and open-source AWS EventBridge alternative.
Azure Event Grid is a Pub/Sub message routing service for creating event-driven architectures using MQTT and HTTP protocols.
![tech provider image](https://images.ctfassets.net/ee3ypdtck0rk/2ngDi0rhFEC8EX3fkrgoft/145ef783f5fa7581fc42e61190753da6/kafka-icon-blue.jpg?w=48&h=48&fl=progressive&q=80&fm=jpg)
Confluent Kafka is a scalable and distributed streaming platform that enables real-time data communications.
Alternatives to Centrifugo
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a scalable messaging service that can be used to send and receive messages from applications or services.
Discover how Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon EventBridge and Centrifugo on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections