Azure SignalR Service vs PubNub
Discover how Azure SignalR Service 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 Azure SignalR Service?
Azure SignalR is an 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 PubNub?
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime 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.
Compare Azure SignalR Service and PubNub
Let’s compare Azure SignalR Service and PubNub, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations & interoperability, quality of service, performance & availability and security & compliance.
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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub |
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. | PubNub Partial PubNub's collaboration capabilities are largely powered by its Presence feature. There is no dedicated collaboration SDK. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Azure SignalR Service No | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub 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. | Azure SignalR Service No | PubNub Yes PubNub's Presence API allows developers to access and integrate occupancy information into their applications. Read more |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Azure SignalR Service No | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Azure SignalR Service 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | PubNub 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 | 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. | PubNub PubNub offers Free, Starter, and Pro packages. Their support packages, separate from their standard plans, also include an Enterprise option. Their pricing model is based on monthly active users (MAUs). See the pricing page | |
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Azure SignalR Service Free: 20k messages and 20 connections per day. Standard: 1 million messages and 1k connections per day per unit, with extra messages available at $1/day. $1.61 a day service charge. That means 1 unit allows up to 30 million messages over 30 days with a ~$48 service charge. Premium: 1 million messages and 1k connections per day per unit, with extra messages available at $1/day. $2 a day service charge. That means 1 unit allows up to 30 million messages over 30 days with a $60 service charge. | PubNub Starter: $98/month/MAU: Up to 1000 MAUs, and up to 3000 transactions per MAU. Pro packages: Custom pricing Their support packages, separate from their standard plans, also include an Enterprise option. Overages apply:
|
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Azure SignalR Service
| PubNub
Source: SDKs |
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Azure SignalR Service
| 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. | Azure SignalR Service
| PubNub PubNub operates its own serverless architecture through its feature called PubNub Functions. |
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 | PubNub Egress:
Ingress:
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Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | 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. | 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. | 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. | Azure SignalR Service No metrics available | PubNub
Source: Edge messaging solutions page |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Azure SignalR Service No | 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. | Azure SignalR Service 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. | Azure SignalR Service No | 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. | Azure SignalR Service
| PubNub PubNub offers a 99.999% uptime SLA for its users. |
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 | 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | PubNub Yes PubNub supports multi-region data replication across different points of presence except for file sharing. Read more |
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 | PubNub No |
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 | PubNub <100 milliseconds delivery. |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | PubNub Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | 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. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | PubNub Yes PubNub implements SAML SSO authentication. |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Azure SignalR Service Yes | PubNub Yes PubNub supports rules for permissions and operations through its Access Manager. See Access Manager docs |
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 | PubNub |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Azure SignalR Service
| PubNub PubNub is compliant with five policies for the security and privacy of its services:
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Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Azure SignalR Service and PubNub. The content was last updated on 24 Apr 2025 for Azure SignalR Service and on 30 Apr 2025 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 let us know.
Alternatives to Azure SignalR Service and PubNub
While both Azure SignalR Service 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 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 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 Azure SignalR Service and PubNub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Azure SignalR Service 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
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- 200 concurrent connections