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Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs Pusher

Discover how Google Cloud Pub/Sub compares to Pusher, 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.

Suitable for:

  • Chat applications
  • Realtime analytics
  • IoT data ingestion
  • Log aggregations
  • Online collaboration applications

Not suitable for:

  • Stateful applications

Pros:

  • Highly scalable
  • Easy to use
  • Integrates with Google Cloud's ecosystem
  • Reliable

Cons:

  • Cost can escalate quickly
  • Vendor lock-in
  • Debugging can be challenging
  • Limited retention time
  • Lack of configuration control
  • Isolated service

What is Pusher?

Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications. Pusher offers two products: - Channels - Build scalable realtime features - Beams - Programmatic push notifications

Suitable for:

  • Realtime charts
  • Location tracking
  • Notifications
  • In-app chat

Not suitable for:

  • Audio and video

Pros:

  • Great developer experience

Cons:

  • Not reliable at scale or spikes
  • Must choose one data center to locate apps
  • Bigger message latencies for clients further away from data center
  • No message delivery guarantees

Compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher

Let’s compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher, 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 Pusher. The content was last updated on 22 Jul 2024 for Google Cloud Pub/Sub and on 22 Jul 2024 for Pusher. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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

Pusher

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.

Pusher

No

Pusher has channels which enable read receipts, but no SDK, reactions, or read-receipts built in.

Read more
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
Pusher

No

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.

Pusher

No

Pusher has 'cache channels', but this is just persist-last.

Read more
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

Pusher

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
Pusher

No

Message interactions

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

No

Pusher

No

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
Pusher

No

Pusher does not offer any message history functionality. But Cache Channels stores the last event sent to the channel - it is stored for a max of 30 min or until a new event arrives. This can be useful in some use cases.

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
Pusher

Yes

Pusher's product Beams is a cross-platform push notifications API.

Message delta compression

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

No

Pusher

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

Pusher

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

Pusher

Partial

Only in 'sandbox', which is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day.

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
Pusher

Free, Flexible pricing plans and Enterprise

See more information
Integrations & interoperability
SDKs

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub
  • C++
  • C#
  • Go
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
Pusher
  • Android (uses Java library)
  • AngularJS (uses JavaScript library)
  • iOS: Swift and Objective-C
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • .NET
  • Unity
  • Flutter
  • React Native
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.

Pusher
  • WebSockets
  • Fallback to Comet (XHR) and Long Polling for older browsers
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
  • Google Cloud Functions
Pusher
  • Own serverless functions
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

Pusher

No

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
Pusher

Yes

Pusher provides Datadog and Librato integrations.

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:

  • Jenkins
  • Google Cloud Build
Pusher

No

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.

Pusher

No scalability metrics published.

Guaranteed message delivery

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Yes

Pusher

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
Pusher

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
Pusher

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
Pusher

Channels SLA: API will be made available with an Annual API Uptime Percentage of 99.95%.

Pusher will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Pusher Beams available with an Annual Uptime Percentage of > 99.95%.

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.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Yes

Pusher

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.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Yes

Google Pub/Sub supports synchronous data replication across three zones.

Pusher

No

Pusher apps are located in a single data center rather than distributed across multiple data centers. Any latency issues that occur in that data center will affect all apps hosted there.

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

Pusher

No

Pusher apps are located in a single data center rather than distributed across multiple data centers. If that data center goes offline then all apps hosted there are affected.

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

Pusher

Not shared. Because apps exist in only one region, message latencies increase for clients the further they are from your chosen data center.

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
Pusher

Yes

Token-based authentication

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Yes

Pusher

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
Pusher

Partial

For GitHub and Google.

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
Pusher

Partial

Requires you to implement an endpoint they will call to check if operation is allowed.

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

Pusher

Yes

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

Pusher

No

Compliance

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

Google Cloud Pub/Sub
  • HIPAA
Pusher

EU GDPR compliant

Alternatives to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher

Whilst both Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher 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.

Amazon SNS is an AWS service for designed to distribute notifications from applications to subscribers via SMS, email, etc.

Apache Kafka is an open-source real-time data streaming platform.

Alternatives to Pusher

Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.

PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.

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.

Discover how Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher stack up against Ably

Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Pusher 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