Liveblocks Broadcast vs PubNub
Discover how Liveblocks Broadcast 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 Liveblocks Broadcast?
Liveblocks Broadcast is a real-time communication solution that helps developers embed collaborative experiences into their products.
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 Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub
Let’s compare Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub, looking at key dimensions such as their core features, pricing, integrations & interoperability, quality of service, performance & availability and security & compliance.
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. | PubNub Yes |
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. | PubNub |
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 | PubNub Partial PubNub's collaboration capabilities are largely powered by its Presence feature. There is no dedicated collaboration SDK. |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Liveblocks Broadcast | PubNub 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes Liveblocks supports occupancy with its Rooms feature. | PubNub Yes PubNub's Presence API allows developers to access and integrate occupancy information into their applications. Read more |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | PubNub Yes |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Liveblocks Broadcast | PubNub Yes |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Liveblocks Broadcast 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | PubNub 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 | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Liveblocks uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly active users. 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 |
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| PubNub Starter: $98/month/MAU: Up to 1000 MAUs, and up to 3000 transactions per MAU. Pro packages: Custom pricing Their support packages, separate from their standard plans, also include an Enterprise option. Overages apply:
|
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| PubNub
Source: SDKs |
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast None. | PubNub PubNub operates its own serverless architecture through its feature called PubNub Functions. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | PubNub Egress:
Ingress:
|
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. | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Unknown. | PubNub
Source: Edge messaging solutions page |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| PubNub PubNub offers a 99.999% uptime SLA for its users. |
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 | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast No | PubNub Yes PubNub supports multi-region data replication across different points of presence except for file sharing. 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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub <100 milliseconds delivery. |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | PubNub Yes |
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 | 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. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | PubNub Yes PubNub implements SAML SSO authentication. |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Liveblocks Broadcast Yes | PubNub Yes PubNub supports rules for permissions and operations through its Access Manager. See Access Manager docs |
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 | PubNub |
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 | PubNub Yes |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Liveblocks Broadcast
| PubNub PubNub is compliant with five policies for the security and privacy of its services:
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Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub. The content was last updated on 24 Apr 2025 for Liveblocks Broadcast and on 30 Apr 2025 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 let us know.
Alternatives to Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub
While both Liveblocks Broadcast 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 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 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 Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Liveblocks Broadcast and PubNub on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
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