Amazon EventBridge vs PubNub
Discover how Amazon EventBridge compares to PubNub, 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 PubNub?
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the real-time infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect. It can serve as the foundation for online chat, live events, geolocation, remote IoT control, and realtime updates.
Suitable for:
- Chat
- Live audience engagement
- Multi-user collaboration
- Device control
- Data streaming
- Geolocation /dispatch
Not suitable for:
- Audio and video
Pros:
- Highly scalable
- Global edge network
Cons:
- No message delivery guarantees
- No message ordering guarantees
- No exactly-once delivery guarantees
- No WebSockets support
- Reduced message continuity when clients are disconnected
Compare Amazon EventBridge and PubNub
Let’s compare Amazon EventBridge and PubNub, 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 PubNub. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Amazon EventBridge and on 1 Aug 2024 for PubNub. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 | PubNub Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Amazon EventBridge No | PubNub |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Amazon EventBridge No | PubNub Partial Via Presence, no dedicated SDK to make it easier. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | PubNub 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 | PubNub 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. | Amazon EventBridge No | PubNub |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Amazon EventBridge No | PubNub Yes |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | PubNub Yes |
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. | PubNub Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Amazon EventBridge No | PubNub No |
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 | PubNub No |
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. | PubNub Yes |
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. | PubNub PubNub offers Free, Starter, and Pro packages. Their support packages, separate from their standard plans, also include an Enterprise option. See the pricing page |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Amazon EventBridge
| PubNub
Source: SDKs |
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Amazon EventBridge
| PubNub
PubNub uses HTTP as the transport for their client libraries. A WebSocket compliant interface is provided in some libraries, however this is just a wrapper around an underlying HTTP transport. |
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
| PubNub
PubNub allows you to run code on its own platform using proprietary PubNub Functions in the form of “Blocks”. The code you can run in Blocks is limited to the Javascript API available in PubNub’s system. |
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. | PubNub Egress:
Ingress:
|
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. | PubNub Yes PubNub provides integrations with Datadog and NewRelic |
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:
| PubNub PubNub provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) specifically for managing and deploying PubNub Functions. |
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. | PubNub
Source: Edge messaging solutions page |
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. | PubNub 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 | PubNub 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. | 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. | PubNub 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 | PubNub 99.999% |
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 | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub <100 milliseconds delivery |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | PubNub No PubNub does not provide configurable private key permissions. It uses a different model where each client’s access is configured with the PubNub Access Manager (PAM). |
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. | PubNub 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. | Amazon EventBridge Yes Amazon EventBridge supports Single Sign-On (SSO) through AWS SSO. | PubNub Yes Google and SSO |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Amazon EventBridge Yes | PubNub |
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 | PubNub Yes All customer data stored within PubNub is encrypted in transit over public networks using TLS 1.2+. Customer data stored in PubNub cloud products and services is AES-256 encrypted at rest. |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Amazon EventBridge
| PubNub
|
Alternatives to Amazon EventBridge and PubNub
Whilst both Amazon EventBridge and PubNub 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 PubNub
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
Socket.IO is a library that provides realtime, bi-directional communication between clients and servers. It allows the management of connections, sending and receiving messages, and more.
SignalR is an open-source library that simplifies adding real-time web functionality to ASP.NET Core web apps.
Discover how Amazon EventBridge and PubNub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Amazon EventBridge and PubNub 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