Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs SignalR
Discover how Google Cloud Pub/Sub compares to SignalR, 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 SignalR?
SignalR is an open-source library that simplifies adding real-time web functionality to apps. It is integrated into the ASP.NET Core web development stack and provides a mechanism for two-way remote procedure calls between client and server.
Suitable for:
- Apps that require high frequency updates from the server, like gaming, social networks, voting, auction, maps, and GPS apps.
- Dashboards and monitoring apps
- Collaborative apps
- Apps that require notifications
Not suitable for:
-Stateless applications -Apps with high scalability requirements -Apps with high throughput requirements
Pros:
- Open source
- Free to use
Cons:
- Self-hosted
- Complex to manage
Compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR
Let’s compare Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR, 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 SignalR. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Google Cloud Pub/Sub and on 29 Jul 2024 for SignalR. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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 | SignalR Partial The SignalR SDKs do not provide a topic abstraction out of the box, but they provide a "groups" abstraction which lets you implement something similar. Read more |
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. | SignalR |
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 | SignalR 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. | SignalR No |
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 | SignalR Yes Read more |
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 | SignalR No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No | SignalR 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 | SignalR No |
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 | SignalR No Microsoft Azure Web PubSub has no native push notification functionality. Microsoft has a separate service for this - Azure Notification Hubs. Read more |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub No | SignalR 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 | SignalR 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 | SignalR Yes Self-hosted and free. |
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 | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub
| SignalR Client SDKs:
Server 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. | SignalR
|
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
| SignalR None. |
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 | SignalR 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 | SignalR Partial SignalR is integrated with ASP.net Core metrics, and these can be reported to a monitoring system at regular intervals. Read more |
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:
| SignalR No Self-hosted, so you will have to implement your own. |
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. | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes | SignalR 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 | SignalR 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 | SignalR 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 | SignalR N/A |
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 | SignalR 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. | SignalR No |
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 | SignalR 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. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub 100ms round trip | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
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 | SignalR No |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub Yes | SignalR |
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 | SignalR |
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 | SignalR Yes You can restrict access to hubs and hub methods to users matching specific authorization policies. Read more |
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 | SignalR No You would need to implement this yourself. |
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 | SignalR No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Google Cloud Pub/Sub
| SignalR N/A |
Alternatives to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR
Whilst both Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR 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 real-time data streaming platform.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed message service with message queues and Pub/Sub topics.
Alternatives to SignalR
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.
Microsoft Azure Web PubSub is a fully managed PubSub offering. It is available as part of Microsoft's Azure Cloud Computing platform.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
Discover how Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Google Cloud Pub/Sub and SignalR 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
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- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections