Socket.IO vs Supabase Realtime
Discover how Socket.IO 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 Socket.IO?
Socket.IO is a library created in 2010 that provides realtime, bi-directional communication between clients and servers. It allows the management of connections, sending and receiving messages, and more. Built on top of the WebSocket protocol, it provides additional capabilities compared to raw WebSockets. WebTransport (a WebSocket alternative) is also supported.
Suitable for:
- Chat and messaging
- Dashboards
- Mulitplayer games
Not suitable for:
- Audio & video
Pros:
- Multiplexing and data broadcast support
- Disconnection detection and automatic reconnections
- Adapters for horizontal scaling
- Fallback support
Cons:
- Message ordering guarantees are at most once / least once only
- Memory leakage issues
- Not multi-region
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 Socket.IO and Supabase Realtime
Let’s compare Socket.IO 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 Socket.IO and Supabase Realtime. The content was last updated on 10 Jun 2024 for Socket.IO 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | Socket.IO No Need to rely on a third party - e.g. use a Redis adapter to broadcast events to clients through the Redis pub/sub mechanism. Read more | 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. | Socket.IO Partial As it's a library, you need to create the chat capabilities yourself. But this can be done using Socket.IO. | 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. | Socket.IO Partial As it's a library, you need to implement collaboration capabilities yourself. But you can do this using Socket.IO itself. | 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. | Socket.IO No The library does not support this. You would need to create a bespoke state sync capability or integrate a third party library to get state synchronisation. | 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. | Socket.IO Partial It is the duty of your application to link a Socket.IO connection to a user account. Read more | 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. | Socket.IO | 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. | Socket.IO Partial You would need to build the message interaction functionality yourself on top of Socket.IO. Learn more | 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. | Socket.IO No The Socket.IO server does not store messages. Your application has to persist messages somewhere for the clients that are not currently connected. Learn more | 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. | Socket.IO No Socket.IO not support Push notifications. You would need to build this capability yourself and/or use another library. Learn more | Supabase Realtime |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Socket.IO 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. | Socket.IO Yes The Socket.IO server is initialised in code. It is possible to configure the socket.IO server's configuration in code as well. Learn more | 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. | Socket.IO Yes Open Source framework that uses the MIT license. | 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. | Socket.IO Open Source framework that uses the MIT license. | Supabase Realtime Supabase uses a tiered pricing model:
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| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Socket.IO Client and Server APIs only.
| Supabase Realtime
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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. | Socket.IO
| Supabase Realtime
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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. | Socket.IO No It is not possible to trigger serverless functions with Socket.IO on it's own. See this Reddit post for more info | Supabase Realtime
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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. | Socket.IO No Socket.IO does not offer native queues and streaming. | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Socket.IO Yes The Socket.IO admin UI can be used to have an overview of the state of your Socket.IO deployment. | 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. | Socket.IO No | Supabase Realtime Yes Supports:
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| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | Socket.IO No published metrics. Socket.IO servers don’t communicate between them, so you need a way to route events to all clients, even if they are connected to different servers. This is made possible by using adapters, of which the Redis adapter seems to be the most popular choice. | 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. | Socket.IO Partial By default, Socket.IO provides an "at most once" guarantee of delivery. From the client side, you can achieve an at least once guarantee with acknowledgements and timeouts. | 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. | Socket.IO | 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. | Socket.IO No At least once or at most once only. | 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. | Socket.IO No It is a library, not a platform. | 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. | Socket.IO 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. | Socket.IO No | 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. | Socket.IO No As Socket.IO is a library, the implementation of it dictates points of failure and congestion. | 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. | Socket.IO Unknown | Supabase Realtime Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Socket.IO No | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Socket.IO No No native Token based auth. It is possible to use middlewares. | Supabase Realtime |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Socket.IO No No native SSO. It is possible to use middlewares. | Supabase Realtime Yes |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Socket.IO No | 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. | Socket.IO No | 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. | Socket.IO 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. | Socket.IO None. | Supabase Realtime
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Alternatives to Socket.IO and Supabase Realtime
Whilst both Socket.IO 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 Socket.IO
Azure SignalR is an Azure-hosted, fully managed realtime framework built on top of an open-source software library for Microsoft ASP.NET.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Pusher is a first-generation pub/sub messaging service that provides bi-directional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to applications.
Alternatives to Supabase Realtime
Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database by Google, allowing developers to build realtime applications for web and mobile.
Prisma Pulse provides realtime data synchronization and monitoring across third-party databases. Only supports PostgresSQL databases.
Hasura is an open-source engine that provides instant GraphQL APIs that integrate with your backend.
Discover how Socket.IO and Supabase Realtime stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Socket.IO 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
