Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs PubNub
Discover how Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Google Cloud Pub/Sub?
Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a real-time messaging service. Pub/Sub is used for asynchronous messaging between different systems, and services, within your applications. It enables developers to build robust and scalable real-time applications.
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 Pub/Sub and PubNub
Let’s compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub and PubNub. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 Pub/Sub Yes | PubNub Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Chat features such as group chat, emojis, and file sharing are not supported by Google Pub/Sub out of the box, which is intended to be used for service-to-service communication. | PubNub |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub recommends using other Google services like Firebase Realtime database to build applications that require functionalities like collaboration. Read more | 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 Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub does not support a state sync feature out of the box, but this can be achieved in combination with a realtime database. | 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 Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub provides monitoring dashboards that can be used to monitor subscriptions. Subscriptions can also be monitored through the Cloud Monitoring API. Read more | PubNub |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub No Pub/Sub can't retrieve acknowledged messages. You can use the Seek feature to mark them as unacknowledged and redeliver them or delete unacknowledged 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 Pub/Sub Yes You can create a push subscription workflow for push notifications using Google Pub/Sub. Read more | PubNub Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub No | 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 Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub has usage-based pricing, based the number of published, delivered, and stored bytes. 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 Pub/Sub
| PubNub
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 Pub/Sub None. Google Pub/Sub does not natively support any real-time protocols. However, you can implement WebSockets using other Google services like Google's Compute Engine. | 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub
| PubNub
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 Pub/Sub Yes | 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes The Google Monitoring, Alerting and Logging integration provides observability services. 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 Pub/Sub Yes Supports:
| 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 Pub/Sub Google Pub/Sub is built to be scalable and reliable. Google uses the service for their products to send billions of messages per day. You can read more about their architecture and limitations in their documentation. | PubNub
Source: Edge messaging solutions page |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes | 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 Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub supports message ordering, but cannot always guarantee it even when this is enabled - for example, when dead-letter topics are enabled on subscriptions. Read more | 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 Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports exactly-once delivery based on a Pub/Sub-defined unique message ID. Read more | 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 Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes Google Pub/Sub supports synchronous data replication across three zones. | 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 Pub/Sub Yes | 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 Pub/Sub 100ms round trip | 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 Pub/Sub No Google Pub/Sub only supports gcloud CLI credential and Application Default Credentials (ADC). Read more | 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 Pub/Sub 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes SSO authentication in Pub/Sub is supported through Google Cloud IAM, OAuth 2.0, and Workforce Identity Federation, allowing integration with external identity providers like Azure AD or Okta. 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 Pub/Sub Yes Rules for permissions and operation can be configured using Identity and Access Management (IAM). Read more | PubNub |
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 Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub Yes | PubNub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub
| PubNub
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Alternatives to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and PubNub
While both Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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 Pub/Sub
AWS SQS is a message queuing solution for decoupling apps, services & architectures.
Apache Kafka is an open-source realtime data streaming platform.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message service with message queues and Pub/Sub topics.
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 Google Cloud Pub/Sub and PubNub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Google Cloud Pub/Sub 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