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Firehose.io vs Pusher: What are the differences?
What is Firehose.io? Build realtime Ruby web applications. Firehose is both a Rack application and JavaScript library that makes building real-time web applications possible.
What is Pusher? Hosted APIs to build realtime apps with less code. Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.
Firehose.io and Pusher can be categorized as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.
Some of the features offered by Firehose.io are:
- Firehose embraces RESTful design prinicpals and consequently works great with any library that speaks HTTP
- Integrates with Backbone.js and Ember.js
- Hook it into an ORM, like ActiveRecord
On the other hand, Pusher provides the following key features:
- Easily build scalable in-app notifications, chat, realtime graphs, geotracking and more in your web & mobile apps with our hosted pub/sub messaging API.
- Send programmable push notifications to iOS and Android devices with delivery and open rate tracking built in.
- Easily add 1-1 and group Chat to your web & mobile apps. Presence, message storage, rich media, notifications, typing indicators and more.
I am building an IoT application that will utilize connected air quality sensors to provide real-time indoor air quality in offices. I want to be able to share this data with a few different databases, etc.
Wondering if anyone has any advice on which real-time streaming API would be best for this sort of application, or even how I should think about it?
For IoT, we support MQTT along with websockets and SSE. The pattern you're suggesting that involves harvesting data from devices and soaking into a database is easy to achieve with one of the Ably integrations (Serverless functions/webhook) . Here are some tutorials to do things like this: https://ably.com/tutorials/reactor-event-zapier#step2-mqtt-ably
We use Pusher at www.justlearn.com. It works fine. When you reach more users, Pusher gets expensive. We use Pusher for live chat between users. Their software is easy to use. We have had issues with auth on Pusher.
Pros of Firehose.io
- RESTful2
- Rails gem2
- Works with ActiveRecord2
- Clean way to build real-time web applications1
Pros of Pusher
- An easy way to give customers realtime features55
- Websockets40
- Simple34
- Easy to get started with27
- Free plan25
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy and fast to configure and to understand11
- JSON9
- Happy6
- Azure Add-on6
- Support5
- Push notification4
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Cons of Firehose.io
Cons of Pusher
- Costly10