Supabase Realtime vs Twilio
Discover how Supabase Realtime compares to Twilio, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as core features, pricing, reliability, and scalability.
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.
What is Twilio?
Twilio is a cloud platform that enables developers to build real-time communications features for their applications. It provides APIs for voice, SMS, video, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.
Compare Supabase Realtime and Twilio
Let’s compare Supabase Realtime and Twilio, 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 Supabase Realtime and Twilio. The content was last updated on 9 Oct 2024 for Supabase Realtime and on 30 Oct 2024 for Twilio. 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 If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please contact us.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. | 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 | Twilio |
Chat capabilities | Accelerates the time to implement rich chat experiences with features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and 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 | Twilio Yes Twilio offers 1-on-1 messaging, group chats, message history, read receipts, typing, and file sharing via its Conversations API. |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Supabase Realtime Yes You can build collaboration capabilities like live cursors and profile stacks using the Presence, Postgres Changes, and Broadcast features of Supabase. | Twilio No |
State sync capabilities | Enables realtime data synchronization across devices and users, ensuring a cohesive and up-to-date user experience. | 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 | Twilio No Twilio Sync allows realtime updates for synchronized data across users and devices. However, for database-to-UI state sync, Twilio would require third party products. |
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio Yes Twilio offers presence functionality through its Conversations SDK, which has a built-in Reachability Indicator feature. 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. | 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. | Twilio No |
Message interactions | Enables interaction with previously-sent messages, facilitating the implementation of features like message reactions and threads. | 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. | Twilio Yes Twilio offers message interactions through its Conversations and Messaging Services. It also provides Flex, which supports messaging interactions through web chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. |
Message history | Enables clients to catch up on missed messages when inactive, ensuring a user doesn’t miss any important messages. | Supabase Realtime No | Twilio Yes Twilio allows you to retrieve and modify message history through its Programmable Messaging API. |
Push notifications | Cross-platform push notifications make it possible to deliver important and timely messages to users even when they’re inactive. | Supabase Realtime | Twilio Yes Twilio offers push notifications through its Twilio Notify API. |
Message delta compression | Minimizes bandwidth and can reduce latency, particularly in scenarios where continuous updates are sent. | Supabase Realtime No Supabase uses the Brotli compression algorithm for all responses, rather than delta compression. | Twilio No |
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio 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. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase offers a free plan with the a limit of 200 concurrent clients and 100 messages per second. Read more | Twilio Yes Some of (not all) Twilio's services have a free plan. Twilio also offers a free trial. |
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. | Supabase Realtime Supabase uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly active users (MAUs):
| Twilio Pay as you go:
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| Integrations & interoperability | |||
SDKs | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Supabase Realtime
| Twilio
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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. | Supabase Realtime
| Twilio
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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. | Supabase Realtime
| Twilio
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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. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio Yes |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Supabase Realtime Partial Supabase supports integration with observability tools like Sentry, New Relic, and Supabase-Grafana. | Twilio Yes Twilio provides observability through insights and monitoring dashboards for voice, messaging, and flex. The dashboards give metrics like time range, delivery status, messaging traffic, errors, responses, etc. |
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. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supports:
| Twilio No |
| Quality of Service | |||
Scalability | Scalability is vital as it ensures the service can handle increased data load or users without compromising performance. | 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 | Twilio
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Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Supabase Realtime No | Twilio Yes While Twilio ensures reliable delivery, it typically follows at-least-once or best-effort delivery models. That means messages may be delivered more than once in rare cases, such as during network failures or retry attempts. |
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. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio No Twilio sends SMS messages in the order they are queued, but they are delivered individually. That means that if you send multiple SMS messages to the same user quickly, Twilio cannot guarantee that the messages will arrive in the order you sent them. Read more |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Supabase Realtime No | Twilio No Twilio doesn't guarantee exactly-once delivery by default. However, it can implement de-duplication in the receiving service by checking if an event with the same ID has already been received, and discarding duplicates. Read more |
| 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. | Supabase Realtime 99.0%. Read more | Twilio
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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. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio Yes Twilio has a global edge network of network edges called Twilio Edge Locations, which allows you to control the geographic location where your application's network traffic enters and exits Twilio's platform. |
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. | Supabase Realtime Yes Multi-region data replication is natively supported in Supabase through their Publications feature. Read more | Twilio Yes Twilio provides multi-region data replication to enhance message durability. |
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. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase provides a globally distributed cluster of realtime servers. The realtime servers are designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant. | Twilio Yes Twilio's "Super Network" and hybrid cloud infrastructure reduce the risk of a single point of failure and congestion. The design is built with redundancy and scalability to minimize potential disruptions. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Supabase Realtime Unknown. | Twilio Unknown. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio Yes |
Token-based authentication | Provides a means to securely authenticate user devices against your user management system. | Supabase Realtime | Twilio Yes Twilio uses token-based authentication (JWTs) for client-side SDKs like Voice, Conversations, Sync, and Video. |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Supabase Realtime Yes | Twilio Yes Twilio offers SSO authentication for customers with a supported Twilio Editions Package. |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase offers the Row Level Security (RLS) system, allowing fine-grained access control at the database level. | Twilio Yes Twilio manages permissions and operations through its Console and Access Control features. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Supabase Realtime Yes Data in transit is encrypted via TLS. | Twilio No |
Encryption at rest | Ensures data stored by the service is secure and compliant, while also mitigating the risks of a data breach. | Supabase Realtime Yes Supabase encrypts all users' data at rest using the AES-256 standard. | Twilio Yes Twilio uses TLS 1.2 to encrypt customer data at rest. |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Supabase Realtime
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Alternatives to Supabase Realtime and Twilio
While both Supabase Realtime and Twilio 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 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.
Alternatives to Twilio
Vonage provides SMS, voice, and video APIs for customizable communication solutions.
Bird (formerly MessageBird) provides SMS, voice, chat, and video APIs for omnichannel communication.
Agora provides APIs for realtime voice, video and live streaming.
Discover how Supabase Realtime and Twilio stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Supabase Realtime and Twilio 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
