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Pusher vs SignalR: What are the differences?
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; SignalR: A new library for ASP.NET developers that makes developing real-time web functionality easy. SignalR allows bi-directional communication between server and client. Servers can now push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR supports Web Sockets, and falls back to other compatible techniques for older browsers. SignalR includes APIs for connection management (for instance, connect and disconnect events), grouping connections, and authorization.
Pusher and SignalR can be categorized as "Realtime Backend / API" tools.
"An easy way to give customers realtime features" is the top reason why over 44 developers like Pusher, while over 7 developers mention "Supports .NET server" as the leading cause for choosing SignalR.
SignalR is an open source tool with 7.73K GitHub stars and 2.19K GitHub forks. Here's a link to SignalR's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Pusher has a broader approval, being mentioned in 123 company stacks & 42 developers stacks; compared to SignalR, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.
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 Pusher
- An easy way to give customers realtime features54
- Websockets40
- Simple35
- Easy to get started with27
- Free plan25
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy and fast to configure and to understand11
- JSON9
- Azure Add-on6
- Support5
- Happy5
- Push notification4
Pros of SignalR
- Supports .NET server28
- Real-time19
- Free15
- Fallback to SSE, forever frame, long polling14
- WebSockets13
- JSON8
- Simple8
- Open source7
- Ease of use5
- Cool5
- Azure0
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Cons of Pusher
- Costly9
- Aa0
Cons of SignalR
- Requires jQuery2
- Expertise hard to get2
- Weak iOS and Android support1
- Big differences between ASP.NET and Core versions1