Liveblocks Broadcast vs OneSignal
Discover how Liveblocks Broadcast compares to OneSignal, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
What is Liveblocks Broadcast?
Liveblocks Broadcast is a real-time communication solution that helps developers embed collaborative experiences into their products.
What is OneSignal?
OneSignal is a platform that delivers push notifications, in-app messages, and emails. It offers tools for targeting, automation, and analytics to help businesses manage and optimize their communication with users.
Compare Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal
Let’s compare Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal, 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 Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal. The content was last updated on 29 Jul 2024 for Liveblocks Broadcast and on 30 Oct 2024 for OneSignal. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No Liveblocks Broadcast only offers basic broadcast capabilities. | OneSignal No OneSignal is not a pub/sub service. It is a multi-channel customer engagement platform providing push notifications, emails, SMS, and in-app messages. |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Liveblocks Broadcast No Liveblocks does not support comprehensive chat capabilities such as 1-on-1 messaging, group chats, message history, read receipts, typing indicators, file sharing, and emojis. You will need to build this out by integrating with other chat solutions or by using the Liveblocks Realtime API. | OneSignal No OneSignal provides in-app messaging for users to send messages but does not offer a full-featured chat capability, such as 1-1 messaging with features like typing indicators, file sharing, and emojis. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Liveblocks Broadcast Partial Liveblocks supports collaboration features like comments, notifications, and text editor out-of-the-box. For other features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks and component locking, you would need to use Liveblocks Realtime APIs to build them. Read more | OneSignal No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks supports state sync capabilities through its Live Storage feature. It is a realtime sync engine thats reflects changes to the frontend instantly. Read more | OneSignal No |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Liveblocks Broadcast | OneSignal No |
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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks supports occupancy with its Rooms feature. | OneSignal No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Liveblocks Broadcast | OneSignal No OneSignal does not offer an archive of messages for retrieval. However, it provides notification history, which is different from message history. The notification history focuses on the records of notifications sent. |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers push notifications for both mobile and web platforms. |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Liveblocks uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly active users:
| OneSignal OneSignal offers a free plan and a tiered pricing model:
|
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| OneSignal
|
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| OneSignal None. |
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. | Liveblocks Broadcast None. | OneSignal None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No OneSignal provides queuing for messages and notifications but lacks proper streaming and queuing support. OneSignal's Live Activities and Event Webhooks simulate stream-like behavior, though real streaming requires integration with other services. |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks includes observability services through its monitoring dashboard, enabling you to track and manage collaborative experiences within your application. The dashboard provides various metrics, such as active users, active rooms, comments, notifications, and data stored. | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers observability features, such as tracking notifications, user engagement metrics, and delivery reports. |
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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Liveblocks Broadcast Unknown. | OneSignal OneSignal can deliver a throughput of over 850,000 notifications per second, which relatively equates to 4 billion push notifications daily. It has also been able to scale its database to 75 terabytes (TB) of stored data across nearly 40 servers. Read more |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No OneSignal does not guarantee message delivery. It only offers confirmed deliveries. That means it does not handle retries in the event of failures, and the message may not be delivered. |
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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| OneSignal Not publicly mentioned. |
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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks manages a WebSocket edge network which makes use of uses the Cloudflare Workers global network. Read more | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | OneSignal No OneSignal locates its datacenters in the EU, and it's unclear if they support multi-region data replication. 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks uses their data hosting provider's backup services to reduce risk of data loss under hardware failure. They also monitor services to alert the team of failures affecting users. | OneSignal 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Unknown. | OneSignal Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Supported with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). Two options are available: Access Tokens and ID Tokens. Read more | OneSignal Yes OneSignal has token-based authentication for email, SMS, and notifications. |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal Yes Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal Yes |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | OneSignal No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| OneSignal
|
Alternatives to Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal
While both Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal 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 Liveblocks Broadcast
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
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.
Alternatives to OneSignal
Braze is a cross-channel marketing service that offers email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging with realtime automation and analytics.
CleverTap is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, SMS, email, calls, in-app, and mobile and web messaging.
PushEngage is a push notification service for web and mobile.
Discover how Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Liveblocks Broadcast and OneSignal 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
