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Google Cloud Run vs PubNub

Discover how Google Cloud Run compares to PubNub, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.

Google Cloud Run

What is Google Cloud Run?

Google Cloud Run is a serverless platform that allows developers to deploy containerized applications with real-time communication capabilities using Websockets. It uses Google's highly scalable infrastructure, providing automatic scaling, high availability, and easy integration with other GCP services and products.

PubNub logo

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 Google Cloud Run and PubNub

Let’s compare Google Cloud Run and PubNub, 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 Google Cloud Run and PubNub. The content was last updated on 10 Oct 2024 for Google Cloud Run and on 16 Oct 2024 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.

Core features
Pub/Sub messaging

Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

WebSockets services deployed on Cloud Run can integrate with Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis, which has Pub/Sub features.

Read more
PubNub

Yes

Chat capabilities

Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more.

Google Cloud Run
Collaboration capabilities

Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

Realtime collaboration features such as live cursor and profile stacks can be built using Cloud Run's Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis, and Google Firestore for storage.

PubNub

Partial

Via Presence, no dedicated SDK to make it easier.

State sync capabilities

Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

PubNub

Yes

Presence

Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime.

Google Cloud Run

No

PubNub

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.

Google Cloud Run

No

PubNub

Yes

Via presence.

See Presence docs
Message interactions

Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads.

Google Cloud Run

No

PubNub

Yes

Message history

Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages.

Google Cloud Run

Partial

To build a message history feature, you will have to integrate with a database like Cloud Firestore for the storage of messages.

Read more
PubNub

Yes

Push notifications

Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive.

Google Cloud Run

No

Cloud Run does not natively support push notifications.

PubNub

Yes

Message delta compression

Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent.

Google Cloud Run

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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

PubNub

No

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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

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.

Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run has a free tier and two paid tiers of usage-based pricing, based the number of CPUs, memory, and requests used.

Read more
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
Integrations & interoperability
SDKs

Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps.

Google Cloud Run
  • Python
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • Go
  • .NET
  • Ruby
  • PHP
PubNub
  • REST API
  • Asyncio
  • C-Core
  • C-Sharp
  • Cocoa Objective-C
  • Cocoa Swift
  • Dart
  • FreeRTOS
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Kotlin
  • Lua
  • Mbed
  • MQTT
  • Objective-C
  • PHP
  • POSIX C
  • POSIX C++
  • Python
  • React
  • Redux
  • Ruby
  • Rust
  • Swift
  • Unity
  • Windows C
  • Windows C++

Source: SDKs

Supported realtime protocols

Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements.

Google Cloud Run
  • WebSockets
PubNub
  • HTTP
  • MQTT
  • Fallback to Comet (XHR) and Long Polling for older browsers

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.

Google Cloud Run
  • Google Cloud Functions
PubNub
  • PubNubFunctions - proprietary functions

PubNub allows you to run code on its own platform using proprietary PubNub Functions in the form of “Blocks”. The code you can run in Blocks is limited to the Javascript API available in PubNub’s system.

Streaming & queueing

Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

PubNub

Egress:

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

Ingress:

  • Kafka
Observability services

Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

Google Cloud Monitoring provides tools for observing services deployed on Cloud Run. You can use the service to build charts and dashboards.

Read more
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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

Supports:

  • Google Cloud Build
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.

Google Cloud Run

In Cloud Run, each revision automatically scales to the necessary number of instances to handle incoming requests, events, or CPU utilization, and scales down to zero instances when there is no traffic.

PubNub
  • 2 trillion monthly transactions
  • 800 million device connections monthly
  • Under 100 milliseconds delivery
  • 99.999% reliability

Source: Edge messaging solutions page

Guaranteed message delivery

Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions.

Google Cloud Run

No

Cloud Run doesn't guarantee message deliverability as it can scale to zero instances when traffic drops, interrupting WebSocket connections.

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.

Google Cloud Run

No

Cloud Run doesn't guarantee message ordering for WebSockets, as multiple instances may handle connections independently.

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.

Google Cloud Run

No

Cloud Run doesn't provide exactly-once message delivery semantics for WebSockets, as it lacks built-in deduplication and can't guarantee single processing of messages across scaling events or instance changes.

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.

Google Cloud Run

99.95%

Read more
PubNub

99.999%

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.

Google Cloud Run

No

Cloud Run is typically deployed in specific regions, and WebSocket connections are established directly to those regional endpoints.

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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

Cloud Run services are automatically distributed across multiple zones within their deployed region, enhancing availability and fault tolerance without requiring manual configuration.

PubNub

Yes

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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

Cloud Run eliminates single points of failure through multi-zone deployment, automatic load balancing, and auto-scaling.

PubNub

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.

Google Cloud Run

Unknown.

PubNub

<100 milliseconds delivery

Security & compliance
API key authentication

Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens.

Google Cloud Run
PubNub

No

PubNub does not provide configurable private key permissions. It uses a different model where each client’s access is configured with the PubNub Access Manager (PAM).

Token-based authentication

Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system.

Google Cloud Run

No

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.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

SSO authentication is supported through Google Cloud Identity Platform.

Read more
PubNub

Yes

Google and SSO

Rules for permissions and operations

Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

End-to-end encryption

Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

PubNub

Yes

All customer data stored within PubNub is encrypted in transit over public networks using TLS 1.2+. Customer data stored in PubNub cloud products and services is AES-256 encrypted at rest.

Encryption at rest

Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach.

Google Cloud Run

Yes

PubNub

Yes

Compliance

Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry.

Google Cloud Run
  • ISO/IEC 27001
  • ISO/IEC 27017
  • ISO/IEC 27018
  • SOC 1
  • SOC 2
  • SOC 3
  • PCI DSS
  • HIPAA
  • FedRAMP
PubNub
  • HIPAA compliant
  • GDPR compliant
  • SOC2 type 2 compliant
  • CCPA compliant

Alternatives to Google Cloud Run and PubNub

While both Google Cloud Run 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 Google Cloud Run

Aws-appsync logo

AWS AppSync enables developers to seamlessly handle and synchronize mobile app data in real-time across multiple devices and users.

Socketio logo

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.

Pusher logo

Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.

See more alternatives to Google Cloud Run

Alternatives to PubNub

Pusher logo

Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.

Socketio logo

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.

tech provider image

SignalR is an open-source library that simplifies adding real-time web functionality to ASP.NET Core web apps.

See more alternatives to PubNub

Discover how Google Cloud Run and PubNub stack up against Ably

Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Google Cloud Run 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
  • 200 concurrent channels
  • 200 concurrent connections