Pusher vs Stream
Discover how Pusher compares to Stream, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as scalability, pricing, security, and their chat features.
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
What is Stream?
Stream (formerly GetStream) is a platform for building scalable, realtime chat and activity feed applications. It provides APIs and SDKs to easily integrate messaging, video calls, and social feeds into apps.
Compare Pusher and Stream
Let’s compare Pusher and Stream, looking at key elements of their offering such as their scalability, pricing, security and chat feature set.
| Scalability | |||
Concurrent connections | Number of users that can be supported in a single chat. | Pusher Unknown. | Stream 2500 users supported in a single chat. Supported within Start and Elevate packages. Overages apply if you exceed plan quota - $0.79 per additional concurrent user. Read more |
Connections | Number of connections that can be handled across the platform. | Pusher 30k per month Growth Plus plan - custom plans may support higher number of connections. Pusher pricing page | Stream |
Channels / rooms | Number of channels or rooms that can be handled across the platform. | Pusher Unlimited. | Stream Unlimited. |
Messages | Number of messages that can be handled across the platform. | Pusher | Stream Unlimited. |
Message throughput | Number of messsages that can be published per second. | Pusher 10 messages per second. Limited to 10 messages per second per client connection. | Stream 5 messages per second. When concurrent connections exceeds 100 in a group messages are throttled to 5 per second. |
| Data integrity | |||
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Pusher No | Stream 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 | Stream 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 | Stream 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 | Stream
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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 | Stream Yes Stream has data centers located around the world, including:
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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. | Stream 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. | Stream Yes Stream's chat infrastructure does not rely on a single data center due to global edge network support, thus avoiding a single point of failure and congestion. |
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. | Stream Stream does not provide a global latency figure. However, it achieves a region-based average roundtrip latency of 170 ms between Amsterdam and the US East. |
Server-side batching | Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios. | Pusher Partial Pusher provides a Batch Events API for server-side batching, allowing developers to send multiple events in a single API call. | Stream |
Connection state recovery | Automatically re-establish failed connections and replay missed messages. | Pusher Partial Pusher provides some level of connection state recovery but doesn't offer built-in, automatic recovery. | Stream Yes Stream SDKs automatically attempt to recover the connection and ensure that a connection to Stream chat is always kept alive. That chat state is recovered when the user's internet connection comes back online. |
| Ecosystem support | |||
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Pusher
| Stream WebSocket. |
Supported languages | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Pusher
| Stream
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| Chat room types | |||
Multi-type chat support (group, DM, supergroups) | Enables chat experiences to be tailored to various user needs, from one-on-one to large, scalable group discussions. | Pusher Pusher does not offer predefined features for chat rooms, but you can use Pusher Channels API to build:
| Stream Stream provides the following chat room types:
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| Chat room management | |||
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Pusher Yes | Stream 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. | Pusher | Stream No |
Typing indicators | Show when others are typing in a chat room, enhancing realtime communication flow. | Pusher Partial Pusher does not provide built-in typing indicators natively, but you can implement typing indicators using Pusher Channels or Presence Channels by sending custom events to notify users when someone is typing. | Stream Yes Stream supports typing indicators, which appear on the channel list item where someone is typing or in the chat channel view. |
Room reactions | Customize the chat environment with reactions and other shared room states. | Pusher Partial Pusher does not provide built-in support for room reactions or managing room states directly. However, you can implement these features using Pusher Channels by creating your custom logic. | Stream No |
| Chat message attributes | |||
Message edits and deletes | Allow users to modify or remove messages. | Pusher No | Stream Yes |
Message reactions & emoticons | Boost engagement by enabling users to quickly express emotions or feedback on messages. | Pusher No | Stream Yes |
Rich text support | Enhance messages with rich text formatting in chat. | Pusher No | Stream Yes Stream SDKs offer markdown formatting for channel messages. |
Media attachments | Support for sharing images, videos, and files in chat. | Pusher No | Stream Yes |
| Chat application and user state | |||
In-app notifications | Notify users of important events from other chat rooms without them leaving the current chat, keeping them engaged and informed. | Pusher Yes | Stream Partial Stream only supports in-app notification feeds. |
Role-based permissions | Control user roles and permissions to ensure proper access and moderation. | Pusher Partial Pusher itself does not directly provide built-in role-based permissions. However, you can implement it in Pusher Channels using Pusher's user authentication and authorizing mechanics. Read more | Stream Yes |
UI kit | Customizable UI elements for a seamless chat integration. | Pusher No | Stream Yes Stream offers UI kits for social media design and chat interfaces. |
| Storage and history | |||
Synchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, before the message is broadcast to participants. | Pusher No | Stream Yes |
Asynchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, after the message is broadcast to participants. | Pusher No | Stream |
Manual moderation via dashboards | Tools for moderators to detect harmful messages and manage them effectively. | Pusher No | Stream Yes Stream offers manual moderation capabilities through its Chat Dashboard, which allows you to do standard moderation tasks. Read more |
Ban users | Remove problematic users from the chat to maintain a healthy environment. | Pusher Partial Pusher supports banning users through its server SDKs but only terminates the user’s active connections. | Stream Yes |
| Dev tools | |||
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Pusher Yes Pusher supports programmatic management of its services via APIs, Webhooks, SDKs, and serverless functions for Pusher Channels. Read more | Stream Yes |
| Pricing | |||
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 based on number of messages and concurrent connections. See more information | Stream Stream's pricing plan is based on MAUs. Overages apply for additional MAU's and peak concurrent connection - over set quota. Read more |
Pricing illustration | An example price based on 5 live streaming chat events and 50K attendees. | Pusher $1199 minimum. Could not calculate exactly. Would need a custom enterprise plan as Growth Plan Plus only supports 90M messages a day. | Stream $22,186.50.
Note: Assumes same users attend each event, to keep MAU at minimum. |
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. | Stream Yes Offers:
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Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Pusher Pricing is based around the number of messages per day and concurrent connections.
Source: Pusher pricing page | Stream
Overages:
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| Support for additional realtime features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Pusher Yes | Stream No |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Pusher No | Stream No |
Database sync capabilities | Database sync capabilities enable realtime updates between your database and UI, ensuring the UI reflects changes in the database instantly, with data consistency, and without the need for polling. | Pusher No | Stream No |
Notifications | Send notifications directly to users screens, from chat responses to news alerts, or game updates, whether or not an application is open and running. | Pusher Yes Pusher supports push notifications through its Pusher Beams API. | Stream Yes |
Asset tracking | State-of-the-art asset tracking across last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. | Pusher Yes Pusher supports asset tracking. Pusher Channels can be used to display the current location of assets on a map in realtime. | Stream No |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
AI models | Allows you to integrate AI models, like GPT, into your app. | Pusher No | Stream Yes Stream supports integration with AI models from OpenAI, HuggingFace, Claude, or any LLM for its chat and voice AI SDKs. |
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 Yes | Stream No |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Pusher No | Stream 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. | Stream No |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Pusher Yes | Stream Yes Stream uses API keys for authentication. You must include an API key when sending an authenticated request to Stream. |
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 Yes Pusher supports authentication with Github SSO. | Stream Yes Stream offers Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication through GitHub Organizations and SAML 2.0. The SSO is available to organizations on Stream's Enterprise Chat or Feeds plan. Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Pusher Partial Pusher provides a mechanism for implementing rules and permissions primarily through its Channels service. It requires you to implement an endpoint which they will call to check if an operation is allowed. | Stream Yes Stream applications offer customizable built-in roles. Users receive a role with permissions for the whole app and can also have channel-specific roles for single or multiple channels of the same type. |
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 | Stream No Stream does not natively implement E2EE. It encrypts messages in transit using TLS 1.2 and at rest with AES256. Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Pusher
| Stream Stream is compliant with five standards and regulations to ensure the security and privacy of its users' data:
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Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Pusher and Stream. The content was last updated on 8 May 2025 for Pusher and on 23 May 2025 for Stream. 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 Pusher and Stream
While both Pusher and Stream 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
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
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.
Alternatives to Stream
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
Sendbird offers APIs and SDKs for live chat, realtime messaging, push notifications, and calls with WebSocket connections, UI kits, and backend integrations.
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 Stream stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Pusher and Stream 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
