PubNub vs SignalR
Discover how PubNub 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 PubNub?
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the real-time 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.
Suitable for:
- Chat
- Live audience engagement
- Multi-user collaboration
- Device control
- Data streaming
- Geolocation /dispatch
Not suitable for:
- Audio and video
Pros:
- Highly scalable
- Global edge network
Cons:
- No message delivery guarantees
- No message ordering guarantees
- No exactly-once delivery guarantees
- No WebSockets support
- Reduced message continuity when clients are disconnected
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 PubNub and SignalR
Let’s compare PubNub 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 PubNub and SignalR. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for PubNub 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub | SignalR |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | PubNub Partial Via Presence, no dedicated SDK to make it easier. | SignalR No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | PubNub Yes | SignalR No |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | PubNub Yes | 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. | PubNub | SignalR No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | PubNub Yes | SignalR No |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | PubNub Yes | SignalR No |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | PubNub Yes | 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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub No | 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. | PubNub Yes | 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. | PubNub PubNub offers Free, Starter, and Pro packages. Their support packages, separate from their standard plans, also include an Enterprise option. See the pricing page | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | PubNub
Source: SDKs | 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. | 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. | 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. | PubNub
PubNub allows you to run code on its own platform using proprietary PubNub Functions in the form of “Blocks”. The code you can run in Blocks is limited to the Javascript API available in PubNub’s system. | SignalR None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | PubNub Egress:
Ingress:
| SignalR No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | PubNub Yes PubNub provides integrations with Datadog and NewRelic | 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. | PubNub PubNub provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) specifically for managing and deploying PubNub Functions. | 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. | PubNub
Source: Edge messaging solutions page | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | PubNub No | 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. | PubNub No | 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. | PubNub No | 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. | PubNub 99.999% | 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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub Yes | 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. | PubNub 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. | PubNub <100 milliseconds delivery | SignalR N/A (self-hosted) |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | PubNub No PubNub does not provide configurable private key permissions. It uses a different model where each client’s access is configured with the PubNub Access Manager (PAM). | SignalR No |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | PubNub 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. | PubNub Yes Google and SSO | SignalR |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | PubNub | 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. | PubNub Yes All customer data stored within PubNub is encrypted in transit over public networks using TLS 1.2+. Customer data stored in PubNub cloud products and services is AES-256 encrypted at rest. | 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. | PubNub Yes | SignalR No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | PubNub
| SignalR N/A |
Alternatives to PubNub and SignalR
Whilst both PubNub 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 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.
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 PubNub and SignalR stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to PubNub and SignalR on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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- 6M monthly messages
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