Azure SignalR Service vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Discover how Azure SignalR Service compares to Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Azure SignalR Service?
Azure-hosted, fully managed realtime framework built on top of an open-source software library for Microsoft ASP.NET. It allows server code to send asynchronous notifications to client-side web applications. The library includes server-side and client-side JavaScript components.
What is Google Cloud Pub/Sub?
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service. Pub/Sub is used for asynchronous messaging between different systems, and services, within your applications. It enables developers to build robust and scalable real-time applications.
Compare Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Let’s compare Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub, 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 Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Azure SignalR Service and on 1 Aug 2024 for Google Cloud Pub/Sub. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Azure SignalR Service Partial Azure SignalR does not provide pub/sub capabilities by itself but you can use it in combination with backplanes such as Redis or Event Grid, which support the pub/sub model. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Azure SignalR Service No Documentation references chat, but it is not clear how you would deliver it. There's no native chat capability. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Chat features such as group chat, emojis, and file sharing are not supported by Google Pub/Sub out of the box, which is intended to be used for service-to-service communication. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Azure SignalR Service No An article on-site showcases a solution idea for collaboration, but not using SignalR. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub recommends using other Google services like Firebase Realtime database to build applications that require functionalities like collaboration. Read more |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub does not support a state sync feature out of the box, but this can be achieved in combination with a realtime database. |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
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. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub provides monitoring dashboards that can be used to monitor subscriptions. Subscriptions can also be monitored through the Cloud Monitoring API. Read more |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Pub/Sub can't retrieve acknowledged messages. You can use the Seek feature to mark them as unacknowledged and redeliver them or delete unacknowledged messages. Read more |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes You can create a push subscription workflow for push notifications using Google Pub/Sub. Read more |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Azure SignalR Service | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No |
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. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub has usage-based pricing, based the number of published, delivered, and stored bytes. Read more |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub None. Google Pub/Sub does not natively support any real-time protocols. However, you can implement WebSockets using other Google services like Google's Compute Engine. |
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. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes The Google Monitoring, Alerting and Logging integration provides observability services. 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. | Azure SignalR Service While Azure SignalR itself doesn't have specific integration points in CI/CD tools, the broader Azure ecosystem and the Azure CLI or PowerShell can be leveraged in your CI/CD scripts to manage Azure SignalR resources. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Supports:
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Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Azure SignalR Service No metrics available | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub is built to be scalable and reliable. Google uses the service for their products to send billions of messages per day. You can read more about their architecture and limitations in their documentation. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
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. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub supports message ordering, but cannot always guarantee it even when this is enabled - for example, when dead-letter topics are enabled on subscriptions. Read more |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports exactly-once delivery based on a Pub/Sub-defined unique message ID. Read more |
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. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports synchronous data replication across three zones. |
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. | Azure SignalR Service No | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Azure SignalR Service Unknown | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 100ms round trip |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub only supports gcloud CLI credential and Application Default Credentials (ADC). Read more |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes SSO authentication in Pub/Sub is supported through Google Cloud IAM, OAuth 2.0, and Workforce Identity Federation, allowing integration with external identity providers like Azure AD or Okta. Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Rules for permissions and operation can be configured using Identity and Access Management (IAM). Read more |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Azure SignalR Service
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub
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Alternatives to Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
While both Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Azure SignalR Service
SignalR is an open-source library that simplifies adding real-time web functionality to ASP.NET Core web apps.
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.
Microsoft Azure Web PubSub is a fully managed PubSub offering. It is available as part of Microsoft's Azure Cloud Computing platform.
Alternatives to Google Cloud Pub/Sub
AWS SQS is a message queuing solution for decoupling apps, services & architectures.
Apache Kafka is an open-source realtime data streaming platform.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message service with message queues and Pub/Sub topics.
Discover how Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Azure SignalR Service and Google Cloud Pub/Sub on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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