Category · 5 options
Choosing realtime
Live updates between users: presence, shared cursors, collaborative boards and chat. Collaborative documents and boards want a sync engine with rooms; simple live notifications only need pub/sub. Check what the free plan counts: rooms, connections or monthly users.
Free plans and prices
In Cuely's default order for the general case. Your needs change the order; see below.
| Tool | Free plan | Paid from | At 1,000 users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liveblocks Rooms, presence and shared state for collaborative boards and documents, with React hooks. | Free: unlimited monthly active users, 500 monthly active rooms, 10 simultaneous connections per room, 3,000 realtime collaboration minutes. | Pro: $25/month billed annually. | $0/month |
| Supabase Realtime Live updates from the same vendor as your database, with no extra bill on the free plan. | Free plan: 200 concurrent peak connections and 2 million messages per month. | Supabase Pro: from $25/month. | $0/month |
| Ably Reliable pub/sub and presence, billed by users rather than messages. | Free: up to 500 monthly active users. | Pro: from $29/month (1,000 MAU), billed annually. | $29/month |
| Pusher Channels Simple channels for live notifications, with long-standing SDKs. | Sandbox (free): 200,000 messages per day, 100 concurrent connections. | Startup: $49/month (1 million messages per day, 500 concurrent connections). | $49/month |
| Cached polling (no realtime service) Live-enough numbers for crowds with no extra vendor: one cached endpoint, polled every few seconds. | No service to sign up for. On Vercel, a function response with Cache-Control: s-maxage is served from the CDN, and a cached response doesn't run the function; on Cloudflare Workers, cache the answer with the Cache API, and each poll is a Worker request. | Not stated | $0/month |
Best pick by need
From the published scores Cuely ranks with. Only needs where one tool clearly leads.
- fewer vendors: Supabase Realtime. Comes with the Supabase database and auth.
- high volume: Ably. Billing by users, not messages, suits chatty apps.
- keep costs as low as possible: Cached polling (no realtime service). No extra vendor or bill.
- Next.js or React: Liveblocks. React hooks and Next.js examples.
- prefers open source or self-hosting: Supabase Realtime. Open source and self-hostable with the rest of Supabase.
- realtime features: Liveblocks. Rooms, presence and conflict-free shared state are the product.
- sells to businesses (organizations, roles, SSO): Liveblocks. A room per team session maps well onto team tools.
- traffic comes in viral spikes: Cached polling (no realtime service). Every player reads the same cached answer, so a viral day adds cheap cached requests, not connections or messages.
- votes, scores, leaderboards or streaks (many writes to the same numbers): Cached polling (no realtime service). Fits tallies and leaderboards that only need to be a few seconds fresh.
Head to head
- Liveblocks vs Supabase Realtime
- Ably vs Liveblocks
- Liveblocks vs Pusher Channels
- Cached polling (no realtime service) vs Liveblocks
- Ably vs Supabase Realtime
- Pusher Channels vs Supabase Realtime
- Cached polling (no realtime service) vs Supabase Realtime
- Ably vs Pusher Channels
- Ably vs Cached polling (no realtime service)
- Cached polling (no realtime service) vs Pusher Channels