Cloudflare Durable Objects vs Supabase Realtime
Discover how Cloudflare Durable Objects compares to Supabase Realtime, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Cloudflare Durable Objects ?
Cloudflare Durable Objects provides an easy way to manage stateful objects with low-latency access and real-time updates. It enables developers to create collaborative, real-time applications using WebSocket connections, ensuring data persistence and consistent performance across distributed clients.
Suitable for:
- Collaboration tools
- Multiplayer games
- Chat applications
- Editing tools
- Realtime leaderboard applications
Not suitable for:
- Heavy computations tasks
- Large datasets
- Offline-first applications
- Legacy systems
- High-latency tolerance
Pros:
- Globally distributed
- Reliable performance
- Low latency
- Scalable
Cons:
- No free plan
- Cost at scale
- Limited customizability
- Learning curve
What is Supabase Realtime?
Supabase Realtime is a globally distributed network of real-time servers. Supabase Realtime is built on top of PostgreSQL database and enables developers to build applications with real-time data synchronization capabilities.
Suitable for:
- Live location applications
- Collaborative tools
- Interactive dashboards
- Chat applications
- Multiplayer games
Not suitable for:
- Non-collaborative applications
- Offline-first applications
- Low-data change dashboards
- High-latency tolerance
- Static websites
Pros:
- Extensive documentation
- Generous free plan
- In-built presence
- Open-source
Cons:
- Difficult to self-host
- Limited features in the self-host version
- Message delivery is not guaranteed
Compare Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime
Let’s compare Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime, 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 Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime. The content was last updated on 2 Aug 2024 for Cloudflare Durable Objects and on 16 Aug 2024 for Supabase Realtime. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects does not have built-in pub/sub. However, Cloudflare has an MQTT-powered pub/sub service in private beta which can be integrated with Durable Objects. Read more | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase's Broadcast feature supports Pub/Sub messaging, allowing clients to publish messages to specific channels and have those messages received by all subscribers. Read more |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can implement some chat features, but some require additional Cloudflare services or custom development. File sharing would require integration with Cloudflare R2 for file storage. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase supports chat capabilities through Broadcast for typing indicators, Presence, and Postgres Changes for messages history filesharing and emojis. Read more |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects can support collaboration capabilities, but require integration with storage services like Cloudflare Workers KV for features like avatar stacks and location data. | Supabase Realtime Yes You can build collaboration capabilities like live cursors and profile stacks using the Presence, Postgres Changes, and Broadcast features of Supabase. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase supports state sync with its Postgres Changes feature to listen to changes in the database. When the database updates, changes are pushed to the client in real time. Read more |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects does not natively support presence; it requires custom implementation. | Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase Realtime's Presence feature enables occupancy tracking by allowing you to monitor user joins/leaves in channels, retrieve online user lists, and receive real-time updates on occupancy changes. |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase enables message interactions using Presence for tracking, Postgres Changes for listening to changes, and Broadcast for custom events. These features can be used to build message interactions like reactions. |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime No |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects supports the Brotli and gzip compression algorithms for all responses, rather than delta compression. | Supabase Realtime No Supabase uses the Brotli compression algorithm for all responses, rather than delta compression. |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Programmatic management is possible through the Durable Objects REST API. | Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase offers a free plan with the a limit of 200 concurrent clients and 100 messages per second. Read more |
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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare Durable Objects is only available on a pay-as-you-go plan. The plan offers 1 million requests and then $0.15/million requests. Connections to Durable Objects are billed as one request. Read more | Supabase Realtime Supabase uses 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Supabase Realtime
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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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Supabase Realtime
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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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Supabase Realtime
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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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No Cloudflare Durable Objects itself doesn't directly support specific message brokers or streaming platforms. Instead, it provides a runtime environment where you can implement your own logic. | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial For observability, Cloudflare Durable Objects can be integrated with Baselime, or can be retrieved with Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API. Read more | Supabase Realtime Partial Supabase supports integration with observability tools like Sentry, New Relic, and Supabase-Grafana. |
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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Supports:
| Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Durable Objects scale horizontally across many objects as needed. Each single object can handle up to 1,000 requests per second. Read more | Supabase Realtime Supabase can handle up to 10,000 concurrent clients, 2,500 channel joins per second, and 2,500 messages per second. Read more |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message delivery. Read more | Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve guaranteed message ordering. Read more | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Partial Cloudflare Durable Objects requires integration with Cloudflare Queues to achieve exactly-once message delivery. Read more | Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Cloudflare offers Business customers a 100% uptime SLA with service credits for any failures, while Enterprise customers have separate agreements. Read more | Supabase Realtime 99.0%. 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Read more | Supabase Realtime Yes Multi-region data replication is natively supported in Supabase through their Publications feature. 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. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase provides a globally distributed cluster of realtime servers. The realtime servers are designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Unknown. | Supabase Realtime Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Cloudflare Durable Objects No | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase offers the Row Level Security (RLS) system, allowing fine-grained access control at the database level. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Data in transit is encrypted via TLS/SSL. | Supabase Realtime Yes Data in transit is encrypted via TLS. |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Cloudflare Durable Objects Yes Cloudflare encrypts all users' data at rest using the AES-256 standard. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase encrypts all users' data at rest using the AES-256 standard. |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Cloudflare Durable Objects
| Supabase Realtime
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Alternatives to Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime
Whilst both Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime 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 Cloudflare Durable Objects
Amazon API Gateway is a service for building, deploying, and managing APIs.
AWS AppSync enables developers to seamlessly handle and synchronize mobile app data in real-time across multiple devices and users.
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
Alternatives to Supabase Realtime
Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.
Prisma Pulse provides realtime data synchronization and monitoring across third-party databases. Only supports PostgresSQL databases.
Hasura is an open-source engine that provides instant GraphQL APIs that integrate with your backend.
Discover how Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Cloudflare Durable Objects and Supabase Realtime 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
