Socket.io VS phaser

Compare Socket.io vs phaser and see what are their differences.

Socket.io

Realtime application framework (Node.JS server) (by socketio)

phaser

Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering. (by phaserjs)
Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
Socket.io phaser
825 5
60,085 36,286
0.4% 99.1%
7.8 9.8
7 days ago 2 days ago
TypeScript JavaScript
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Socket.io

Posts with mentions or reviews of Socket.io. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-08.

phaser

Posts with mentions or reviews of phaser. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-13.
  • Gamedev.js Jam 2024 start and theme announcement!
    4 projects | dev.to | 13 Apr 2024
    Gold : GitHub, Phaser Studio, Arcadia
  • Introduction to JavaScript: Empowering Web Development with Interactivity
    4 projects | dev.to | 25 Mar 2024
    Versatility: JavaScript is not limited to web browsers. It's used in a variety of environments, including mobile app development (using frameworks like React Native), game development (using libraries like Phaser), and even serverless computing (using platforms like AWS Lambda).
  • A developer portfolio as a 2D top-down walking simulator
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    This reminds me of my first real dev job, 10y ago, making small facebook games with https://phaser.io it was actually kind of fun now that I think back.
  • Aftermath of switching from VSCode to Neovim
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Feb 2024
    Is it worth it? I think while attempting to create a game engine with the Canvas API and vanilla JavaScript. (I quickly ditched that idea and started using PhaserJS)
  • Phaser: A fast, fun and free open source HTML5 game framework
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
    I didn't try to build anything with Phaser, but I evaluated it a bit when trying to pick a game engine for a 2D web game.

    The tech didn't impress me that much, but it also seemed like the most mature 2D game engine available in JS.

    Notably, Phaser 4 was announced ~four years ago and was an attempt to get the project written natively in TypeScript. It looks pretty dead in the water - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser and having a "best effort" TypeScript experience layered onto Phaser 3 didn't excite me.

    Additionally, with browsers gaining support for WebGPU, I expect any game engine worth their snuff to begin rapidly adopting support for WebGPU. As best I can tell, any hope of Phaser supporting WebGPU is lumped into Phaser 4, so... not much to say there.

    Overall, it was a little tough for me to tell if I was being overly critical and viewing a mature product as a ghost town, but that's the impression I took away from it.

    As far as I can tell, BabylonJS is king in town for a TypeScript game engine, but its focus is 3D experiences. I didn't find an especially compelling 2D game engine. I ended up making a prototype using React + PixiJS + React-Pixi, but that was hardly an engine and had significant performance issues.

    Now I am building in Rust with Bevy. It's slow going, creating UI elements sucks right now, but the underlying tech is super solid and I feel good about what I write and what I learn even if I'm dismayed at the pace in which I am creating.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Socket.io and phaser you can also consider the following projects:

Primus - :zap: Primus, the creator god of the transformers & an abstraction layer for real-time to prevent module lock-in.

kaboom.js - 💥 JavaScript game library

SocketCluster - Highly scalable realtime pub/sub and RPC framework

Excalibur - 🎮 Your friendly TypeScript 2D game engine for the web 🗡️

Centrifugo - Scalable real-time messaging server in a language-agnostic way. Self-hosted alternative to Pubnub, Pusher, Ably. Set up once and forever.

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

peerjs - Simple peer-to-peer with WebRTC.

cocos-engine - Cocos simplifies game creation and distribution with Cocos Creator, a free, open-source, cross-platform game engine. Empowering millions of developers to create high-performance, engaging 2D/3D games and instant web entertainment.

Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

A-Frame - :a: Web framework for building virtual reality experiences.

Mercure - 🪽 An open, easy, fast, reliable and battery-efficient solution for real-time communications

melonJS - a fresh, modern & lightweight HTML5 game engine