Best realtime providers in 2026

Realtime providers send messages, presence updates, and data changes between clients and servers as they happen, without a page refresh. They power chat, live dashboards, collaborative editing, multiplayer games, and notifications.

Supabase Realtime

Supabase Realtime is the best choice if you want complete set of realtime features including low-latency ephemeral messaging, presence feature, and to stream database data to the connected clients in realtime.

It’s also great if you already use Supabase and want realtime features or you are creating new projects that need a Data API, Edge Functions, Storage, or Auth.

Supabase Realtime includes three features:

• Broadcast sends low-latency messages between clients, such as chat messages, cursor positions, or game events.
• Presence tracks and syncs user state, such as who is online.
• Postgres Changes listens to database changes and sends them to subscribed clients.

To skip building common features from scratch, the Supabase Library has ready-made Realtime web components, such as live cursors and avatar stacks, and a Messaging component for chat.

Realtime is billed by messages and peak connections, and each plan includes a quota of both. For details, see Realtime pricing and Realtime limits.

Ably

Ably is a managed realtime platform for pub/sub messaging, presence, push notifications, and chat.

Ably offers a free tier for proof of concept development, and its paid plans have a monthly fee plus usage.

Ably suits apps that need presence, chat, or push notifications alongside messaging. Its usage-based billing works if your bill can move with your traffic.

Pusher

Pusher Channels is a hosted WebSocket service for publish and subscribe messaging.

Pusher has a free Sandbox plan for development. Its paid plans are priced per month and sized by daily message volume and concurrent connections.

Choose Pusher when you want predictable pricing and quick setup.

PubNub

PubNub is a realtime messaging platform with publish and subscribe messaging, presence, message storage, and serverless Functions that run on its network.

PubNub offers a free tier. Its paid tiers are priced by monthly active users (MAU) rather than by message.

Because it’s priced by MAU, choose PubNub when the same users return repeatedly and cost should track unique users rather than message volume.

Firebase Realtime Database

Firebase Realtime Database is Google’s cloud-hosted NoSQL database.

Choose Firebase Realtime Database when your app is already on Firebase or using Firebase Authentication.

Other options

You can also build realtime features yourself on an open-source WebSocket library, such as Socket.IO. This gives you full control over your infrastructure, but you run, scale, and secure the server yourself.

When to choose

• Supabase Realtime: you want complete set of realtime features, you already use Supabase, or you’re starting a new project that needs a Data API, Edge Functions, Storage, or Auth alongside realtime.
• Ably: you need presence, chat, or push notifications alongside messaging, and your bill can move with your traffic.
• Pusher: you want predictable pricing and quick setup.
• PubNub: the same users return repeatedly, and MAU-based pricing fits the workload.
• Firebase Realtime Database: your app is already on Firebase or uses Firebase Authentication.
• A self-hosted WebSocket library such as Socket.IO: you want full control over your infrastructure and can run and secure the server yourself.