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Beebotte vs Lightstreamer

This Beebotte vs Lightstreamer comparison was created based on reviews from developers and our best attempts to perform analysis by looking at documentation and other publicly available resources.

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Beebotte

Lightstreamer

Getting started and developer experience

Time to "hello world"

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Ratings were given based on the average amount of time it takes to sign up to a new account and publish the first message.

4 / 5

5 = <30 min
4 = 30 min - 1 h
3 = 1-2 h
2 = 2-4 h
1 = 4+ h

View code example
2 / 5

5 = <30 min
4 = 30 min - 1 h
3 = 1-2 h
2 = 2-4 h
1 = 4+ h

View code example

Demos / Tutorials

A selection of online demos and tutorials so you can test and see the code in action.

Explore Ably's tutorials for our pub/sub messaging platform

Documentation

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Explore Ably's documentation for our pub/sub messaging platform
4.50 / 5

Getting started guides / 5

Information architecture and developer journey / 5

API reference documentation / 5

Readability, design and navigation / 5

Quality of code / 5

Breadth and quality of tutorials / 5

Beebotte documentation provides a comprehensive set of tutorials and demos for different use cases. There's a quick start guide, an API playground, tutorials, demos, and libraries showing a detailed API reference for each SDK cross-linked to GitHub’s page for quick installation.

The information architecture and navigation experience are quite impressive, and most things are explained clearly in the documentation. The quality of the code is pretty great. The readability, design, and navigation are mostly good as well.

2.50 / 5

Getting started guides / 5

Information architecture and developer journey / 5

API reference documentation / 5

Readability, design and navigation / 5

Quality of code / 5

Breadth and quality of tutorials / 5

“Lightstreamer documentation is overall disappointing. First of all, it’s all over the place in terms of format: from GitHub READMEs to the most basic of HTML pages to PDFs. There’s even a slide deck. Resources are seldom cross-linked, which makes the docs hard to follow. The entire design of the website is from the last century. It’s aesthetically hideous, and the navigation experience is underwhelming. The only positive things are the API reference, which is quite comprehensive, and the GitHub tutorials, which are explained well.“

Dashboard or dev console

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Sign up for free and explore Ably's pub/sub messaging platform
5 / 5

Ease of use / 5

Stats and reports / 5

Functionality / 5

Beebotte provides a console (an integrated development interface with a collection of tools) that is intuitive to use. It allows you to write, read, publish, and manage data. It’s very easy to use once you get the hang of it, but you need to successfully register with Beebotte and obtain your API and secret keys in your account setting page to get started. There’s a nice section on the dashboard called Beerules that allows you to create a rule to evaluate messages published into Beebotte. There’s a monthly usage section that displays your daily and monthly (in vs. out) message stats.

The console covers the core tools you need to configure, manage, and test your real-time data pipeline, allowing you to subscribe to a channel resource, and publish data. The account usage section provides stats and reports on message usages.

4 / 5

Ease of use / 5

Stats and reports / 5

Functionality / 5

“Lightstreamer provides a monitoring dashboard that shows various realtime metrics and stats related to the server-side, such as connections, sessions, or throughput. The event log is pretty useful, showing successful operations/events, warnings, and errors. It’s intuitive and straightforward to use, although the UI is dull and ugly. Unfortunately, there’s no dev console or portal with more extensive functionality to allow you to create and manage resources.“

SDKs

Note: Only official SDKs were taken into account.

Explore Ably's 25+ SDKs for our pub/sub messaging platform

6 SDKs

Including:

  • JavaScript

  • Node.js

  • Python

10 production-ready client SDKs

Including:

  • Android

  • iOS

  • Node.js

API structure

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

5 / 5

API consistency across SDKs / 5

Well structured / 5

Intuitive / 5

Simple / 5

The Beebotte APIs are consistent and intuitive to use. The Beebotte REST APIs are available in many programming languages to help you get started, while a JavaScript client library (using WebSocket) allows you to integrate Beebotte with web application with ease. The APIs are well-structured and pretty easy to use once you take your time to go through the API reference.

3.25 / 5

API consistency across SDKs / 5

Well structured / 5

Intuitive / 5

Simple / 5

“Lightstreamer provides APIs covering many languages, operating systems, and development platforms, such as Java, .NET, JavaScript, or iOS. There’s a separate API reference page for each SDK - a highlight in otherwise mediocre documentation. The references are pretty detailed, and the APIs are fairly well structured and consistent across SDKs. But they aren’t simple, and it takes some time to wrap your head around them. They perhaps don’t have the most intuitive naming conventions, and the code samples included are not as clear as they could be“.

Beebotte

Lightstreamer

"Hello world" code example
// Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Beebotte <[email protected]>
// This program is published under the MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
 
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code uses the Beebotte API, you must have an account.
// You can register here: http://beebotte.com/register
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

var mqtt = require('mqtt')

client =  mqtt.connect('mqtt://mqtt.beebotte.com',
  //Authenticate with your channel token, 
  {username: 'token:YOUR_CHANNEL_TOKEN', password: ''} 

  //alternatively, you can authenticate with your SECRET KEY 
  //{username: 'YOUR_SECRET_KEY', password: ''} 
);

client.on('message', function (topic, message) {
  console.log(topic + '   ' + message);
});

client.subscribe('mychannel/myresource');

setInterval(function() {
  client.publish('mychannel/myresource', 'Hello World');
}, 1000 /* 1 second */);
// Lightstreamer server 

// Data adapter xml file

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<adapters_conf id="HELLOWORLD">
    <metadata_provider>
        <adapter_class>com.lightstreamer.adapters.metadata.LiteralBasedProvider</adapter_class>
    </metadata_provider>
    <data_provider>
        <adapter_class>HelloWorldDataAdapter</adapter_class>
    </data_provider>
</adapters_conf>

// Package.json file for server requirements configuration

{
  "requires": true,
  "lockfileVersion": 1,
  "dependencies": {
    "lightstreamer-client-web": {
      "version": "8.0.2",
      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/lightstreamer-client-web/-/lightstreamer-client-web-8.0.2.tgz",
      "integrity": "sha512-UFEtoW+K2H+9PZNqdVGD6TqCBZNbsjC3TuZn5M1ee6D/aXlR8yzruKBXfQNdD0pgcpgpcKoMd/dyfeZxOf6EIg=="
    }
  }
}

// Lightstreamer client 

// HTML file with importing lightstreamer.min.js and require.js

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello World with Lightstreamer</title>
    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/require.js/2.3.6/require.js"></script>
    <script src="lightstreamer.min.js" data-lightstreamer-ns="Ls"></script>
  </head>

  <body>
    <div data-source="lightstreamer" data-grid="hellogrid" data-item="greetings" data-field="message">loading...</div>
    <div data-source="lightstreamer" data-grid="hellogrid" data-item="greetings" data-field="timestamp">loading...</div>

Beebotte

Lightstreamer

Realtime features

Pub/Sub messaging

Pub/Sub is a design pattern that lets any number of publishers (producers) push messages to channels (also known as topics). Multiple subscribers (consumers) can subscribe to a channel to consume published messages.

Explore Ably's pub/sub messaging implementation

Message queues

A message queue is a form of asynchronous service-to-service communication. Messages are stored on a queue until they are processed. Note that each message is only consumed by one subscriber (consumer).

Explore Ably's message queues implementation

Limited

Beebotte only stores data of a persistent message into its resources database for future read requests. Beebotte will not store data related to transient messages.

Limited

Queues are supported only via the Lightstreamer JMS Extender, which connects to any third-party JMS server and makes JMS (Java Message Service) available on the Web. Any HTML page running inside a web browser and any Node.js application instantly become JMS clients, able to publish and subscribe on JMS topics and queues.

Presence

Presence enables you to track the online and offline status of devices and end-users in real time and to store their state. Essential for chat apps and multiplayer games.

Explore Ably's presence implementation

Message history

Message history provides a means to retrieve previously published messages. For this to be possible, message data must be stored (persisted) somewhere.

Explore Ably's message history implementation

Limited 

Message retention duration is limited to the Beebotte’s plan you choose.

The maximum message retention duration for the Beebotte’s XS (free) plan is 3 months, it’s 12 months for the Small plan, while the Medium and Large plans offer unlimited message history.

Connection state recovery (stream resume)

In the case of unreliable network conditions, clients may suddenly disconnect.Connection state recovery ensures that when they reconnect, the data stream resumes exactly where it left off.

Explore Ably' s connection state recovery implementation

Guaranteed message ordering

Ordering ensures that messages are delivered to consumers in the same order that producers publish them.

Explore Ably' s guaranteed message ordering implementation

Exactly-once semantics

Exactly-once is a system-wide data integrity guarantee that ensures each message is delivered to consumers exactly-once.

Explore Ably' s idempotent publishing implementation

Message delta compression

Message delta compression enables you to only send the changes from the previous message to subscribers each time there’s an update, instead of the entire message. Useful for use cases where there is a significant degree of similarity between successive messages.

Explore Ably' s message delta compression implementation

Native push notifications

Native push notifications can be used to deliver messages even when clients are offline. Useful for geolocation updates or news alerts.

Explore Ably's push notifications implementation

Limited

Beebotte only supports native push notifications via its BeeRule FCM Action

Webhooks

Webhooks provide a mechanism to get messages and other types of events (such as clients entering or leaving channels) pushed to your servers over HTTP.

Explore Ably's webhooks implementation

Limited

You have to set a rule to perform this action (webhook) using Beebotte BeeRules

Serverless functions

A serverless function is essentially an isolated, single-purpose piece of code that is only executed when it’ triggered by an event. For example, you can use serverless functions to send a welcome message to clients when they become present on chat channels.

Note that serverless functions are usually fully managed by cloud vendors.

Explore Ably's serverless functions implementation

Limited

Can only trigger serverless functions on IFTTT. Does not support other platforms, such as Google Cloud Functions, AWS Lambda, or Microsoft Azure Functions.

Built-in integrations

Which popular services & systems are Beebotte and Lightstreamer integrated with?

Explore Ably's library of integrations

Webhooks

  • Custom
  • IFTTT
  • Zapier

Serverless functions

  • AWS Lambda
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Google Cloud Functions
  • Microsoft Azure Functions

Streaming

  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Pulsar
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • Amazon SQS
  • RabbitMQ
  • AMQP

Webhooks

  • Custom
  • IFTTT
  • Zapier

Serverless functions

  • AWS Lambda
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Google Cloud Functions
  • Microsoft Azure Functions

Streaming

  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Pulsar
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • Amazon SQS
  • RabbitMQ
  • AMQP

Known limits and constraints

Find out practical limits, such as the maximum message size, or the maximum number of concurrent connections.

Explore the practical limits of the Ably pub/sub messaging platform

Publisher throughput  

Unknown

Maximum message size

16 KB for Inbound Messages 

Maximum number of channels

Unlimited

Maximum number of topics

Unknown

Maximum number of connections

Unknown

Throughput 

Depends on server capacity (Enterprise and Enterprise Ultimate packages). 

1 message/second for each subscription done by each client (community/free package).

Maximum message size 

Unknown

Maximum number of channels

Unknown

Maximum number of concurrent connections

Depends on server capacity

Supported development platforms, languages, open protocols and cloud models

Development platforms & operating systems

Which popular development platforms and operating systems do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support via official SDKs?

Explore the development platforms supported by Ably
  • Android
  • Java / JVM
  • iOS
  • macOS
  • iPadOS
  • tvOS
  • watchOS
  • Mono
  • .NET
  • Android
  • Java / JVM
  • iOS
  • macOS
  • iPadOS
  • tvOS
  • watchOS
  • Mono
  • .NET

Languages

Which popular programming languages do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support via offical SDKs?

Explore the programming languages supported by Ably
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Go
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Flutter
  • Clojure
  • Scala
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Go
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Flutter
  • Clojure
  • Scala

Open protocols

Which popular open protocols do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support?

Explore the open protocols supported by Ably
  • WebSocket
  • HTTP
  • AMQP
  • MQTT
  • STOMP
  • SSE
  • Webhooks
  • WebSocket
  • HTTP
  • AMQP
  • MQTT
  • STOMP
  • SSE
  • Webhooks

Cloud models

Which popular cloud models do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support?

  • Self-hosted
  • Cloud-managed
  • Serverless
  • Globally-distributed
  • Self-hosted
  • Cloud-managed
  • Serverless
  • Globally-distributed
Global and reliable edge service

Edge messaging network with latency-based routing

Latency-based routing ensures that clients are always routed to the nearest datacenter and point of presence.

Explore Ably's routing mechanism that mitigates network and DNS issues

Multi-region data replication (message durability)

Multi-region data replication (storage) protects against single points of failure and ensures message data durability.

Learn how Ably ensures message durability

Unknown

Uptime SLAs

Here’s what the most common SLAs amount to in terms of downtime over a calendar year:

99.999% SLA = 5m 15s downtime per year

99.99% SLA = 52m 35s downtime per year

99.95% SLA = 4h 22m 58s downtime per year

99.9% SLA = 8h 45m 56s downtime per year

99% SLA = 3d 15h 39m 29s downtime per year

Source: https://uptime.is/

99.9% uptime

Unknown

Quality of Service

What QoS guarantees do Beebotte and Lightstreamer provide natively?

Explore Ably's availability and uptime guarantees for our pub/sub messaging platform
  • Multi-region data replication (storage)
  • Exactly-once semantics
  • Guaranteed message ordering
  • Connection state recovery (stream resume)
  • Multi-region data replication (storage)
  • Exactly-once semantics
  • Guaranteed message ordering
  • Connection state recovery (stream resume)
Security

API key authentication

The simplest way to authenticate. Involves using private API keys that you can usually create and edit via a dashboard. Recommended to be used server-side, as private API keys shouldn’t be shared with untrusted parties.

Explore Ably's implementation of API key authentication

Limited

Lightstreamer authentication involves the usage of user & password credentials.

Token-based authentication

Which popular token-based authentication mechanisms do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support?

Note that token-based authentication is usually the recommended strategy on the client-side as it provides more fine-grained access control and limits the risk of credentials being compromised.

Explore Ably's implementation of token-based authentication
  • Ephemeral tokens
  • JWTs
  • Ephemeral tokens
  • JWTs

Configurable rules and permissions

Which types of configurable rules and permissions do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support?

Explore Ably's configurable rules and permissions
  • API keys rules and permissions
  • Operation rules and permissions
  • Admin rights
  • API keys rules and permissions
  • Operation rules and permissions
  • Admin rights

Message encryption

Which types of message encryption do Beebotte and Lightstreamer support?

Explore Ably's message encryption mechanisms
  • Encrypted at rest
  • Encrypted in transit
  • Message payload encryption
  • Encrypted at rest
  • Encrypted in transit
  • Message payload encryption

Formal certifications

Which formal certifications are Beebotte and Lightstreamer compliant with?

Explore Ably's security and compliance for our pub/sub messaging platform
  • SOC 2 TYPE I
  • SOC 2 Type II
  • HIPAA
  • EU GDPR
  • SOC 2 TYPE I
  • SOC 2 Type II
  • HIPAA
  • EU GDPR
Pricing & Support

Free package

What do the free packages offered by Beebotte and Lightstreamer consist of?

Explore Ably's free package for our pub/sub messaging platform

Not bad 

The free plan includes 50,000 daily messages, 5,000 persistent messages per day, unlimited channels, 3 months message history, access to all major features and basic supports, and SSL encryption. 

Lightstreamer’s free package (the community edition) provides a license for one server and unlimited clients. However, the message rate is throttled at one message per second, and some features are unavailable (such as clustering or TLS support).

Pricing model

How are the Beebotte and Lightstreamer pricing models calculated?

Explore Ably's pricing model for our pub/sub messaging platform

Beebotte pricing model is plan-based and calculated per month. There are three different paid plans:

- $10/month for the Small plan: this covers unlimited channels, 200,000 messages per day, 15,000 persistent messages per day, 12 months history, and SSL encryption.

- $30/month for the Medium plan: this covers unlimited channels, 1,000,000 messages per day, 50,000 persistent messages per day, unlimited history, and SSL encryption.

- $120/month for the Large plan: this covers unlimited channels, 5,000,000 messages per day, 200,000 persistent messages per day, unlimited history, and SSL encryption.

Find out more about Beebotte pricing

Lightstreamer has a complex and confusing pricing model. First, you must choose between the community edition (free) and the enterprise edition (paid). When you select enterprise, you must then opt between the Enterprise or the Enterprise Ultimate package (the latter includes all client APIs, superior message rates, and all features). On top of this, you must choose a licensing scheme, of which there are six options in total. Some examples: Perpetual Upfront per Server License, Monthly Pay-as-you-go Per Core-Hour License, Annual Upfront per Client Licence.

Once you choose a licensing scheme, you must also choose a license type, such as Demo, Evaluation, Production, or Hot-Standby.

There’s no transparency regarding cost estimation or concrete numbers (at least not on their website).

Enterprise package

What benefits do the Beebotte and Lightstreamer enterprise packages offer?

Explore Ably's enterprise package for our pub/sub messaging platform

There is no specific Beebotte enterprise package.

Lightstreamer has an Enterprise Ultimate package that includes all client APIs (different programming languages), provides unlimited messages without throttling, and grants access to all features.

Community

Reviewed by 3+ independent developers

Explore Ably's community support channel for our pub/sub messaging platform
1 / 5

Presence on multiple channels / 5

Size and activity / 5

Beebotte community is essentially non-existent. There’s a very small number of posts and only one follower on GitHub. The number of repos is very small as is the number of forks and stars. No presence on Slack, Discource, StackOverflow, or Gitter, either.

2 / 5

Presence on multiple channels / 5

Size and activity / 5

“The Lightstreamer community is small. There is some activity going on on the Lightstreamer forums - usually people raising issues and asking for clarifications that arguably should have been clear from the documentation. Beyond forums, the Lightstreamer community is basically non-existent. There are only about 30 threads in total on Stack Overflow, and, although there are over 140 Lightstreamer repos on GitHub, they barely have a few stars or open issues and almost no pull requests.“

Support

What types of support options and response times do Beebotte and Lightstreamer offer?

Explore Ably's support options for our pub/sub messaging platform

General Support Options

Email, technical documentation, Community support (LinkedIn or Twitter) 

Response time

< 24 hours for general queries

General support options

Email, support forums, phone, technical documentation.

Enterprise support

Lightstreamer provides 8x5 and 24x7 technical support for enterprise and enterprise ultimate packages.

Response time

Unknown

Disclaimer: The information presented for Beebotte was last updated on 28 February 2021 and on 7 December 2020 for Lightstreamer. It is possible that some details may now be out of date. If you think that’s the case, please let us know so we can update them. In any case, you should not rely solely on the information presented here and must check with each provider before deciding to integrate or buy any of these two solutions.


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