Ably vs PubNub
No clear leader: PubNub (74.5) and Ably (73.7) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for realtime messaging infra. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Ably
A distributed messaging platform for building interactive features like chat, notifications, and collaboration. Provides fault-tolerant message delivery with guaranteed ordering, automatic network recovery, and multi-region redundancy.
PubNub
PubNub provides APIs and SDKs for building real-time interactive application features. It manages cloud infrastructure for messaging, presence tracking, and push notifications while handling compliance, security, and global scaling requirements.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Ably
Free tier available. Paid plans start at $29/month with per-million message and channel minute billing.
- FreeFree
- All Ably products included
- Community and email support
- No commitment
- Standard$29/month plus usage charges
- 1 day email support SLA
- Pro$399/month plus usage charges
- 4 hour email support SLA
- Datadog lite monitoring
- EnterpriseContact sales
- 24/7 mission critical support
- 99.999% uptime SLA
- Committed use discounts
- Datadog integration
- SSO and SCIM
- +4 more
PubNub
Free tier for development (200 MAU). Starter at $98/month (1,000 MAU). Pro uses tiered monthly active user pricing from $370/month with annual discounts available.
- FreeFree
- Up to 200 Monthly Active Users
- 1 million function calls per month
- 1GB data storage (7 days retention)
- 1 million push notifications per month
- No credit card required
- Starter$98/month including 1,000 MAU
- 1,000 Monthly Active Users included
- 99.999% uptime SLA
- SAML SSO
- HIPAA compliance with BAA
- Bizops Workspace for user and channel management
- +3 more
- ProContact sales
- Usage-based pricing: Tier 1 (up to 10K MAU), Tier 2 (10K-50K MAU), Tier 3 (50K+ MAU)
- Enterprise features included
- 99.999% uptime SLA
- SAML SSO
- HIPAA compliance
- +8 more
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Ably
- AWS Lambda
- Microsoft Azure Functions
- Google Cloud Functions
- Cloudflare Workers
- AWS Kinesis
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- AMQP
- AWS SQS
- Pulsar
- Zapier
- IFTTT
- Datadog
- BigQuery
- Terraform
- Netlify
- HTTP Webhooks
PubNub
Not documented yet.
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.