Pusher vs Rails ActionCable
Discover how Pusher compares to Rails ActionCable, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
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
Suitable for:
- Realtime charts
- Location tracking
- Notifications
- In-app chat
Not suitable for:
- Audio and video
Pros:
- Great developer experience
Cons:
- Not reliable at scale or spikes
- Must choose one data center to locate apps
- Bigger message latencies for clients further away from data center
- No message delivery guarantees
What is Rails ActionCable?
Rails Action Cable is a framework built into Ruby on Rails that integrates WebSockets for real-time communication, allowing developers to create interactive applications.
Suitable for:
- Small apps
- Rails apps
- Simple real-time use cases
- Interactive features
Not suitable for:
- Large-scale apps
- Multi-protocol needs
- High scalability requirements
- Non-Rails apps
Pros:
- Easy to integrate
- Uses Rails conventions
- Quick setup
- Good for small apps
Cons:
- Limited scalability
- Lacks advanced features
- Only supports WebSockets
- Not for large apps
- Limited protocols
Compare Pusher and Rails ActionCable
Let’s compare Pusher and Rails ActionCable, 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 Pusher and Rails ActionCable. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Pusher and on 1 Aug 2024 for Rails ActionCable. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Pusher Yes | Rails ActionCable Partial Supports basic pub/sub via channels. |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and more. | Pusher No Pusher has channels which enable read receipts, but no SDK, reactions, or read-receipts built in. Read more | Rails ActionCable Partial Rails ActionCable does not have an out-of-the box chat solution, but provides the building blocks for a basic chat implementation, and several resources for self-building specific chat use cases. Read more |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable Partial Rails ActionCable provides basic support, but lacks advanced features like live cursors or component locking. |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | Pusher | Rails ActionCable Partial Rails ActionCable offers basic state sync capabilities, but it does not offer advanced tools to ensure continued synchronization between clients and devices. |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Pusher Yes | Rails ActionCable Partial Rails ActionCable doesn't offer presence out of the box, but can support presence when custom built on a user appearance channel. 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. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable Partial Rails ActionCable supports basic message interactions like broadcasting but advanced features like reactions require custom code. |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | 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. | Rails ActionCable No |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Pusher Yes Pusher's product Beams is a cross-platform push notifications API. | Rails ActionCable No |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable Yes Rails ActionCable can be managed through Rails. |
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. | Pusher Partial Only in 'sandbox', which is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day. | Rails ActionCable Yes The Rails framework, including Rails ActionCable, is completely free and open-source. |
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. | Pusher Pusher has free, flexible, and Enterprise plans. See more information | Rails ActionCable Completely free, no paid plans. |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Pusher
| Rails ActionCable
|
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Pusher
| Rails ActionCable
|
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. | Pusher
| Rails ActionCable None. |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Pusher Yes Pusher provides Datadog and Librato integrations. | Rails ActionCable No |
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. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable No |
Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Pusher No scalability metrics published. | Rails ActionCable No metrics available. |
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable 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. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable 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. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable 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. | 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 | Rails ActionCable No uptime SLA. |
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. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable 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. | 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. | Rails ActionCable 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. | 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. | Rails ActionCable 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. | Pusher Not shared. Because apps exist in only one region, message latencies increase for clients the further they are from your chosen data center. | Rails ActionCable Unknown. |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Pusher Yes | Rails ActionCable No |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Pusher Yes | Rails ActionCable No |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Pusher Partial For GitHub and Google. | Rails ActionCable No |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Pusher Partial Requires you to implement an endpoint they will call to check if operation is allowed. | Rails ActionCable Yes |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Pusher Yes | Rails ActionCable No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Pusher No | Rails ActionCable No |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Pusher
| Rails ActionCable None. |
Alternatives to Pusher and Rails ActionCable
Whilst both Pusher and Rails ActionCable 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 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.
Alternatives to Rails ActionCable
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.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Discover how Pusher and Rails ActionCable stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Pusher and Rails ActionCable 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