OneSignal vs Pusher
Discover how OneSignal 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 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.
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
Compare OneSignal and Pusher
Let’s compare OneSignal 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 OneSignal and Pusher. The content was last updated on 30 Oct 2024 for OneSignal and on 1 Aug 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | 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. | Pusher Yes |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | 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. | 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. | OneSignal No | Pusher No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | OneSignal No | Pusher |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | OneSignal 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. | OneSignal No | Pusher No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | OneSignal No | Pusher No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | 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. | 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. | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers push notifications for both mobile and web platforms. | 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. | OneSignal 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. | OneSignal 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. | OneSignal Yes | 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. | OneSignal OneSignal offers a free plan and a tiered pricing model:
| Pusher Pusher has free, flexible, and Enterprise plans based on number of messages and concurrent connections. See more information |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | OneSignal
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Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | OneSignal None. | Pusher
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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. | OneSignal None. | Pusher
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Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | 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. | Pusher No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | OneSignal Yes OneSignal offers observability features, such as tracking notifications, user engagement metrics, and delivery reports. | 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. | OneSignal No | Pusher No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | 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 | Pusher No scalability metrics published. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | 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. | 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. | OneSignal No | 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. | OneSignal No | 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. | OneSignal Not publicly mentioned. | 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. | OneSignal No | 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. | OneSignal No OneSignal locates its datacenters in the EU, and it's unclear if they support multi-region data replication. Read more | 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. | OneSignal No | 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. | OneSignal Unknown. | 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. | OneSignal | Pusher Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | OneSignal Yes OneSignal has token-based authentication for email, SMS, and notifications. | 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. | OneSignal Yes 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. | OneSignal Yes | 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. | OneSignal No | Pusher Yes |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | OneSignal No | Pusher No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | OneSignal
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Alternatives to OneSignal and Pusher
While both OneSignal 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 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.
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.
OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, messages, and email sends for businesses to manage communication with their users.
Discover how OneSignal and Pusher stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to OneSignal 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
