How does Apinator compare to Ably in terms of features?

Apinator covers the core realtime primitives: WebSocket channels (public, private, presence), server-triggered events, client events, webhooks, and HMAC auth. Ably offers some additional services like message history persistence and higher-level pub/sub abstractions. If your use case is event broadcasting and presence, Apinator covers it fully.

Can I use Apinator without self-hosting?

Yes. Apinator offers a managed cloud option with the same APIs. You can start on managed hosting and migrate to self-hosted later — or vice versa — with no code changes.

Does Apinator support all the SDKs I need?

Apinator has server SDKs for Node.js, Python, Go, and PHP, plus client SDKs for browsers (JS), React Native, iOS (Swift), and Android (Kotlin). The REST API is also public for custom integrations.

What happens if my traffic spikes?

On a self-hosted deployment you add more server capacity. Horizontal scaling is built in — Redis pub/sub handles fan-out across nodes, so adding more WebSocket nodes behind a load balancer is the standard scaling path.

Free to Use

A More Affordable Ably Alternative

Realtime WebSocket infrastructure without the enterprise pricing.

Apinator gives you WebSocket channels, presence, pub/sub, and webhooks on infrastructure you control. No message limits, no connection limits, no per-unit billing. Self-host on any cloud or server for a fraction of Ably's cost.

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No Message Limits

Ably meters every message and charges at scale. On Apinator, your limits are only your server capacity — which you control.

Self-Hosted

Run on your own servers. Full data sovereignty, no third-party access to your event payloads.

Comparable Features

WebSocket channels, presence tracking, HMAC auth, webhook delivery, and multi-region — without the enterprise tier.

Predictable Costs

One VPS or cloud instance. Fixed monthly cost. No surprise invoices from high-traffic events.

Multi-Region

Deploy data planes close to your users across EU, US, APAC. Low-latency delivery at scale.

No Vendor Lock-In

Your infrastructure, your rules. No proprietary data formats or APIs you can't migrate away from.

Apinator vs Ably

Feature	Apinator	Ably
Pricing model	Fixed infrastructure	Per-message / per-connection
Self-hosted
Free to use
WebSocket channels
Presence channels
Webhooks
Multi-region
Data sovereignty

Quick Start

Connect, subscribe to a channel, and bind event handlers — similar to Ably but on your infrastructure.

client.js
import { RealtimeClient } from '@apinator/client'

const client = new RealtimeClient('APP_KEY', {
  host: 'wss://rt.example.com'
})

// Subscribe to a channel and bind an event
const channel = client.subscribe('notifications')
channel.bind('alert', (data) => {
  showNotification(data.title, data.body)
})

// Publish from your server (Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, ...)
import { ApinatorServer } from '@apinator/server'
const apinator = new ApinatorServer({ appId, key, secret })
await apinator.trigger('notifications', 'alert', { title: 'New order', body: '#1042' })

Frequently Asked Questions

Pusher Alternative Compare Apinator with Pusher Self-Hosted WebSocket Deploy on your own servers How WebSockets Scale Scaling WebSocket infrastructure

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