Centrifugo vs OneSignal
Discover how Centrifugo compares to OneSignal, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
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.
What is OneSignal?
OneSignal is a platform that delivers push notifications, in-app messages, and emails. It offers tools for targeting, automation, and analytics to help businesses manage and optimize their communication with users.
Compare Centrifugo and OneSignal
Let’s compare Centrifugo and OneSignal, 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 Centrifugo and OneSignal. The content was last updated on 10 Oct 2024 for Centrifugo and on 30 Oct 2024 for OneSignal. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal No OneSignal is not a pub/sub service. It is a multi-channel customer engagement platform providing push notifications, emails, SMS, and in-app messages. |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal No OneSignal provides in-app messaging for users to send messages but does not offer a full-featured chat capability, such as 1-1 messaging with features like typing indicators, file sharing, and emojis. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal No |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Centrifugo Yes Read more | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Centrifugo | OneSignal No OneSignal does not offer an archive of messages for retrieval. However, it provides notification history, which is different from message history. The notification history focuses on the records of notifications sent. |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Centrifugo | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers push notifications for both mobile and web platforms. |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo supports delta compression only in channels with recovery and positioning on. Read more | OneSignal No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo is open-source and free to use. | OneSignal 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. | 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 | OneSignal OneSignal offers a free plan and a tiered pricing model:
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| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Centrifugo
| OneSignal
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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. | Centrifugo
| OneSignal None. |
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. | Centrifugo None. | OneSignal None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal No OneSignal provides queuing for messages and notifications but lacks proper streaming and queuing support. OneSignal's Live Activities and Event Webhooks simulate stream-like behavior, though real streaming requires integration with other services. |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Centrifugo Partial Centrifugo has no native observability tools, but offers integrations with monitoring tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. Read more | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers observability features, such as tracking notifications, user engagement metrics, and delivery reports. |
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. | Centrifugo No Self-hosted, so you will have to implement your own. | OneSignal No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | 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. | OneSignal OneSignal can deliver a throughput of over 850,000 notifications per second, which relatively equates to 4 billion push notifications daily. It has also been able to scale its database to 75 terabytes (TB) of stored data across nearly 40 servers. Read more |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No OneSignal does not guarantee message delivery. It only offers confirmed deliveries. That means it does not handle retries in the event of failures, and the message may not be delivered. |
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. | Centrifugo Partial Centrifugo supports ordering in channels but not across channels. | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo N/A | OneSignal Not publicly mentioned. |
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. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No OneSignal locates its datacenters in the EU, and it's unclear if they support multi-region data replication. 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. | Centrifugo No Centrifugo relies on external systems like Redis or NATS for data storage, which may have their own failure points. | OneSignal 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. | Centrifugo N/A (self-hosted) | OneSignal Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Centrifugo Yes | OneSignal |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Centrifugo | OneSignal Yes OneSignal has token-based authentication for email, SMS, and notifications. |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Centrifugo | OneSignal Yes Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Centrifugo Yes Centrifugo supports permission rules for operations through its configuration. | OneSignal Yes |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Centrifugo No | OneSignal No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Centrifugo None | OneSignal
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Alternatives to Centrifugo and OneSignal
While both Centrifugo and OneSignal 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 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.
Alternatives to OneSignal
Braze is a cross-channel marketing service that offers email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging with realtime automation and analytics.
CleverTap is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, SMS, email, calls, in-app, and mobile and web messaging.
PushEngage is a push notification service for web and mobile.
Discover how Centrifugo and OneSignal stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Centrifugo and OneSignal on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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