Centrifugo VS Pusher

Hello, I am author of https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo. Our users can choose from WebSocket, EventSource, WebTransport (experimental stabilize in the future). WebRTC is out of scope as the main purpose is central server based real-time json/binary messaging, and WebRTC makes things much more complex since it shines for peer-to-peer and rich media communications.

What I'd like to add is that Centrifugo also supports HTTP-streaming – not mentioned by the OP – but this is a transport which has advantages over Eventsource - like possibility to send POST body on initial request from web browser (with SSE you can not), it supports binary, and with Readable Streams browser API it's widely supported by modern browsers.

Another thing I'd like to mention about Centrifugo - it supports bidirectional WebSocket fallbacks with EventSource and HTTP-streaming, and does this without sticky sessions requirement. I guess nobody else have this at this point. See https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2022/07/19/centrifugo-v4-releas.... Which solves one more practical concern. Sticky sessions is an optimization in Centrifugo case, not a requirement.

If you are interested in topic, we also have a post about WebSocket scalability - https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2020/11/12/scaling-websocket - it covers some design decisions made in Centrifugo.

Check out https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo - it was initially designed to be a standalone language-agnostic real-time messaging server. So it may be used with Django without radical change in the existing application and using ASGI. It can also provide a much better performance if you care about it.

https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo

It's a complete solution, including server, admin panel and client library.

We're an European company and use OVH, Hetzner and others.

Hello! Theoretically you can take a look at https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo - which is a standalone self-hosted real-time messaging server. It does not have native support for Laravel and not compatible with Pusher protocol, though integrating with any backend system, including Laravel: see the blog post https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2021/12/14/laravel-multi-room-chat-tutorial, also has some helper packages:

Hello, it's also possible to design an app in a way that its core will be built with Python, but WebSocket part delegated to something external and efficient like https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo – the benefit of the approach is that application business logic is completely decoupled from the real-time transport layer. This may lead to a scalable design with graceful degradation. I think this is especially useful when you already have backend built with Django and need to handle millions of concurrent connections.

Centrifugo https://centrifugal.dev/ https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo

Pusher Channels is a real-time notifications service that empowers developers to swiftly integrate real-time functionality, like live notifications and chat, into web and mobile apps using WebSockets. Pusher is known for reliability and scalability and is used by Buffer, GitHub, and Datadog.

Pusher

Typically, you don't do websockets. There are some great products out there that give you the same capabilities. I recently started working with Pusher for my Remix applications and am loving it!

According to Vercel's website SocketIO is NOT supported, however Pusher Channels is recommended in it's place. Not sure what it is, but it supposedly is supported by vercel and potentially can help.

Pusher is a hosted service that makes it super-easy to add real-time data and functionality to web and mobile applications. It sits as a real-time layer between your servers and your clients. Pusher maintains persistent connections to the clients — over WebSocket if possible and falling back to HTTP-based connectivity — so that as soon as your servers have new data that they want to push to the clients they can do, instantly via Pusher.

Then watchPosition from @react-native-community/geolocation is definitely the way to go. Here's a link to the example in their repo. This will constantly update the position state variable, which you can then send to a realtime service which other users are subscribed to and consuming. (Depending on your implementation, could be a websocket or some pub/sub service... I've worked with Pusher Channels before for something similar.)

An easy way to start with is to use external Pusher channels service It requires 0 devops and everything works very well, for free at least at the beginning. However, like any external service, it can't scale without paying. "Pay as you grow".

I see that NextJS now recommends a pub/sub approach Vercel Support Your client will need to subscribe to the events from a 3rd party service like Pusher Channels and the Pub should be handled by a serverless function

Centrifugo is very similar to pusher.com Channels product (https://pusher.com/channels) – but self-hosted. Also – somewhat similar to socket.io - but not a library, so can work with any backend. Centrifugo is pretty unique in terms of available features sum – so can't say that there is a direct analogue I've heard about - sth from one product, sth from another, sth unique. And of course there are alternatives which can do what Centrifugo can't since the market of real-time servers is quite big.