laravel-websockets VS Pusher

I'm working on a real-time chat application but facing some issues while working with broadcasting events using the laravel-websockets package. Things were working fine yesterday and I was receiving messages from private and public channels but I don't know why I'm not receiving messages anymore.

Yes I did and even found that documentation but I just wanted to confirm that I'm on the right track. Do you suggest using Laravel-Websockets or Pusher as a broadcaster? I am inclined to use Laravel-Websockets just because it's free (so I wouldn't have recurrent costs), however I don't want to end up with limitations or issues later on.

Laravel Echo is free and part of Laravel. You need to use it with a websockets server or a service like Pusher or Ably, and that is what you pay for. But if you make your own websockets server with Laravel Websockets, as u/phoogkamer suggested, you can host your own websockets server on your infrastructure.

Laravel Websockets

I'm using beyondcode/laravel-websockets with laravel/echo on localhost. Public channels work fine, I also tested private channels by giving productId manually and it works.

https://github.com/beyondcode/laravel-websockets is an OSS Pusher implementation. /u/serenityphp

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.