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Pusher vs Supabase Realtime

Discover how Pusher compares to Supabase Realtime, 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
Supabase Realtime

What is Supabase Realtime?

Supabase Realtime is a globally distributed network of real-time servers. Supabase Realtime is built on top of PostgreSQL database and enables developers to build applications with real-time data synchronization capabilities.

Suitable for:

  • Live location applications
  • Collaborative tools
  • Interactive dashboards
  • Chat applications
  • Multiplayer games

Not suitable for:

  • Non-collaborative applications
  • Offline-first applications
  • Low-data change dashboards
  • High-latency tolerance
  • Static websites

Pros:

  • Extensive documentation
  • Generous free plan
  • In-built presence
  • Open-source

Cons:

  • Difficult to self-host
  • Limited features in the self-host version
  • Message delivery is not guaranteed

Compare Pusher and Supabase Realtime

Let’s compare Pusher and Supabase Realtime, 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 Supabase Realtime. The content was last updated on 1 Aug 2024 for Pusher and on 16 Aug 2024 for Supabase Realtime. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase's Broadcast feature supports Pub/Sub messaging, allowing clients to publish messages to specific channels and have those messages received by all subscribers.

Read more
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
Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase supports chat capabilities through Broadcast for typing indicators, Presence, and Postgres Changes for messages history filesharing and emojis.

Read more
Collaboration capabilities

Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

Yes

You can build collaboration capabilities like live cursors and profile stacks using the Presence, Postgres Changes, and Broadcast features of Supabase.

State sync capabilities

Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience.

Pusher

No

Pusher has 'cache channels', but this is just persist-last.

Read more
Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase supports state sync with its Postgres Changes feature to listen to changes in the database. When the database updates, changes are pushed to the client in real time.

Read more
Presence

Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime.

Pusher

Yes

Supabase Realtime

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

No

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase Realtime's Presence feature enables occupancy tracking by allowing you to monitor user joins/leaves in channels, retrieve online user lists, and receive real-time updates on occupancy changes.

Message interactions

Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase enables message interactions using Presence for tracking, Postgres Changes for listening to changes, and Broadcast for custom events. These features can be used to build message interactions like reactions.

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.

Supabase Realtime

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.

Supabase Realtime

No

Supabase supports push notifications only with the integration of external services.

Read more
Message delta compression

Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

No

Supabase uses the Brotli compression algorithm for all responses, rather than delta compression.

Programmatic management

Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

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.

Pusher

Partial

Only in 'sandbox', which is a free plan which gives you 200,000 messages and up to 100 concurrent connections per day.

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase offers a free plan with the a limit of 200 concurrent clients and 100 messages per second.

Read more
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
Supabase Realtime

Supabase uses a tiered pricing model:

  • Free tier: Basic features with limits (200 concurrent clients, 100 messages per second)
  • Pro tier ($25/month): Higher limits and additional features (500 concurrent clients, 500 messages per second)
  • Team tier ($599/month)
  • Enterprise tier: Custom pricing with advanced features, dedicated support, and higher limits tailored to business needs.
Read more
Integrations & interoperability
SDKs

Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps.

Pusher
  • Android (uses Java library)
  • AngularJS (uses JavaScript library)
  • iOS: Swift and Objective-C
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • .NET
  • Unity
  • Flutter
  • React Native
Supabase Realtime
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Dart
  • C#
  • Kotlin
  • Swift
Supported realtime protocols

Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements.

Pusher
  • WebSockets
  • Fallback to Comet (XHR) and Long Polling for older browsers
Supabase Realtime
  • WebSockets
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
  • Own serverless functions
Supabase Realtime
  • Supabase Edge Functions
Streaming & queueing

Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

Yes

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.

Supabase Realtime

Partial

Supabase supports integration with observability tools like Sentry, New Relic, and Supabase-Grafana.

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

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supports:

  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Bitbucket Pipelines
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.

Supabase Realtime

Supabase can handle up to 10,000 concurrent clients, 2,500 channel joins per second, and 2,500 messages per second.

Read more
Guaranteed message delivery

Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

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

Supabase Realtime

Yes

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

Supabase Realtime

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
Supabase Realtime

99.0%.

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.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

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.

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.

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Multi-region data replication is natively supported in Supabase through their Publications feature.

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.

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.

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase provides a globally distributed cluster of realtime servers. The realtime servers are designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant.

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.

Supabase Realtime

Unknown.

Security & compliance
API key authentication

Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens.

Pusher

Yes

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Token-based authentication

Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system.

Pusher

Yes

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supported with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs).

Read more
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.

Supabase Realtime

Yes

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.

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase offers the Row Level Security (RLS) system, allowing fine-grained access control at the database level.

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

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Data in transit is encrypted via TLS.

Encryption at rest

Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach.

Pusher

No

Supabase Realtime

Yes

Supabase encrypts all users' data at rest using the AES-256 standard.

Compliance

Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry.

Pusher
  • GDPR compliant
Supabase Realtime
  • HIPAA
  • SOC2

Alternatives to Pusher and Supabase Realtime

Whilst both Pusher and Supabase Realtime 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.

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OneSignal is a customer engagement platform that offers push notifications, messages, and email sends for businesses to manage communication with their users.

See more alternatives to Pusher

Alternatives to Supabase Realtime

Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.

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Prisma Pulse provides realtime data synchronization and monitoring across third-party databases. Only supports PostgresSQL databases.

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Hasura is an open-source engine that provides instant GraphQL APIs that integrate with your backend.

See more alternatives to Supabase Realtime

Discover how Pusher and Supabase Realtime stack up against Ably

Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Pusher and Supabase Realtime 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