PubNub Platform Services

PubNub  is a real-time messaging and event streaming platform that we use in an application where users can raise complaints about problems in their homes. All real-time technicians available at that time receive push notifications on their phones or real-time messages indicating an open complaint, and they can accept it immediately. When one message needs to be sent to multiple people, we use PubNub .

We have channels in PubNub where users can publish requests. For example, when I need a technician in my home, I immediately publish a message to a PubNub channel. All subscribers, such as all technicians available in the market, consume the message from that particular channel so that everyone receives the real-time message without any latency. PubNub can also be used for chat and messaging applications. We use it to see how many technicians are available in the market at any given time, which is an online and offline status feature. We are using the Python SDK to handle PubNub functionality.

The client publishes a message to a channel whenever a person needs a technician. PubNub instantly delivers it to all clients subscribed to that channel. Suppose there are 10 million users or technicians; it immediately delivers the particular message to all subscribers, connecting the user in milliseconds even without refreshing the app. There is a direct link available between the technician and the customer.

The fast implementation allows us to easily implement PubNub in our application without any problems. PubNub has available SDKs in multiple languages, and it is very easy to implement in the application. The documentation is quite simple and easy to understand. Auto-scaling can handle millions of concurrent connections, unlike the problems we see in WebSocket connection management. I have not seen any problems with PubNub in this regard. It also stores previous messages so that no message is lost. If I send a message and the person is not available at that time, whenever they come online, it will immediately fetch the message. It has a message history feature for storing and retrieving previous messages. Regarding security, it provides access management in three ways: user management, channel-based security, and group roles.

The fast auto-scaling and fast implementation are the best features in my daily work because users usually face problems with connection management in WebSocket. With PubNub, we do not need to worry about it at all.

PubNub has positively impacted my organization by reducing implementation time and developers' work. If we were using something else like WebSocket instead of PubNub, we would need our own infrastructure to manage live connections and to check whether the connection is lost or not. With PubNub, it is very easy to implement, enabling fast development. It has reduced the developers' time by 40-50%.

Regarding PubNub improvements, we do not have any control over infrastructure, network configuration, or internal message routing. Sometimes a company needs these aspects as well. They may want a network configuration where messages are stored or internal message routing for how messages route between channels and users. PubNub completely manages this. PubNub could consider offering an optional setup in the future for users who want to manage these aspects themselves.

I have been using PubNub for around four years.

PubNub is stable.

PubNub allows scalability. I have seen it support 10 million concurrent users from my own experience, and it works fine without any latency or issues.

I have not had a chance to connect with customer support, but I find the documentation and SDKs to be very good, easy to implement, and detailed.

I have previously used Kafka, but it has a different use case as it is a message broker. For our use case, PubNub is a better choice because it allows one subscriber and millions of consumers, which is essential.

The setup cost is very low. Regarding pricing, when the data scales, the pricing increases gradually, but PubNub does not charge much in the initial phase.

We see a return on investment with time saved for developers, and the user experience increases. While we do not have a specific metric for user experience, we have saved around 40% of the development time because without PubNub, we would have to manage connections ourselves if we were using WebSockets. PubNub handles everything and allows fast implementation and development.

The setup cost is very low. Regarding pricing, when the data scales, the pricing increases gradually, but PubNub does not charge much in the initial phase.

We have evaluated other options like RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka , but we stuck with PubNub because it does not charge much in the initial phase and is very easy to implement.

I would advise others to use PubNub if they want quick real-time communication, do not want to manage WebSocket or infrastructure, and need global scalability. If your team is small and wants faster development, then go for PubNub. I do not see any need for improvement; it is totally the best.

Regarding PubNub's security, it provides three levels of security: user-level, group-level, and channel-level. No person who does not have access to a channel can subscribe to that channel or see its messages. The security is totally good and secure. It also provides end-to-end encryption support, secure TLS connections, role-based permissions, and token-based authorization.

I gave PubNub a rating of nine out of ten because of the many features discussed, but I deducted one point because the cost increases with scale. If there are millions of users, like 10 million concurrent users, the cost will gradually increase. Additionally, PubNub does not give us control over infrastructure, network configuration, and internal message routing, which also contributed to the deduction.

We are mostly using PubNub  for payload sending and for live chat. We are a mobile-based application with an admin side, so it's a live chat application. Whenever a user comes online or offline or sends a live chat request to someone or a message, we use PubNub  for that.

If we had implemented all of this on our own, we would have had to hire at least 50 more employees for that, so we are very happy with PubNub and we have saved a lot of time. We only have to integrate it and all of the other things are done by PubNub, so that's the best part for us.

The channel subscription or publish-subscribe function is valuable to us because we can publish on a channel and all of the live users who are using our application can listen to that channel and the payload is received at their end, so that's the best part.

This is our application's main feature and it's working great. If we had implemented all of this on our own, we would have had to hire at least 50 more employees for that, so we are very happy with PubNub and we have saved a lot of time. We only have to integrate it and all of the other things are done by PubNub, so that's the best part for us.

The subscription and the SDK part can be improved.

If the client is offline and the application is killed, and the user comes back again, sometimes the subscription to the channel is missed, so that needs to be improved at the SDK level.

Most of the working of our application is working on it and we are happy with it, but there are some parts at the SDK level and the subscription level that we are not happy with it.

I have been using PubNub for about three years.

There are no positive or negative impacts right now, but most of the time we are not dealing with the payload receiving or sending problems. Most of the time there are some instances at the load peak hours or sometimes payload is missed by the application or SDK at the SDK level. Other than that, most of the time we are very satisfied with PubNub.

Most of the peak hours time there are no specific use cases for that, but we receive complaints from the client about three to ten times a week that payload is missed or the chat is stuck, and the user tried to live chat but was unable to. In most of the cases, either the client is unsubscribed from the channel or there is some slow internet connectivity issue or something like that and PubNub just failed at that point.

It was easy, and there was a time when we had an issue with the pricing, but with their support we have covered it mostly. We were trying to do something that we shouldn't have done with the subscription and the creation of the sending messages and payload, so we have updated it with the help of their support.

It's good and it has helped us in managing our issues a few of the times, so we are happy with that.

There are ones such as Firebase Live Database, but the cost of that was more than PubNub and the workarounds for the developer were more, so we have gone with PubNub.

Depending on the application, if you want to use PubNub, it's one of the best options right now available. I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.

I used PubNub  in my last company from 2018 to February 2022 for IoT products. We used it to broadcast the status of IoT devices to every client on Android or iOS phones.

For PubNub , we sent the status of CAMI, a product in which we collected data from the vehicle, including speed, humidity, temperature, and other statistics, to all clients using PubNub. This is how all client applications on Android or iOS phones received the status of the vehicle on which each car was registered.

In most cases, PubNub worked very well. We conducted load testing with multiple vehicles and multiple user accounts, and it performed quite well with 15 users and more than 50 vehicles at a single time.

I also used PubNub for one of the challenges or competitions in my company where I created an Android application that sends the location and other data about the smartphone in case it gets lost through a server to a remote web application, and we used PubNub to track the smartphone.

The best features PubNub offers include broadcasting the stats to the clients, which has been the most useful. The second valuable feature is that the data is transferred in real-time and is very quick, transferred in a fraction of seconds on a very good network like 4G. The speed of broadcasting data using PubNub channels to all registered devices on the same PubNub channel is a good feature.

We used PubNub to reduce costs, as other options to broadcast messages were costlier compared to PubNub. The speed and efficiency of PubNub, which helps transfer data in real-time with very low latency, received positive feedback from our customers. The cost reduction helped us manage our project very well.

PubNub costs less compared to other solutions in the market, saving us money when broadcasting messages to clients. The return on investment is evident when customers are happy, as they pay for our product based on its reliability, which helps our business overall.

I am not sure how PubNub can be improved because our project and scenario were fulfilled by PubNub, and we did not face any challenges with any of the features, nor do I want to improve anything. As of now, I have no challenges that would make PubNub better.

During development, we faced a challenge of getting very little support from PubNub team based on the cost of the products we were offered. I believe some basic support should be given for the features being used by the client after paying for it, rather than requiring separate purchases for support.

In my current organization, I have been working for the last four years.

Sometimes, while broadcasting, there are rare instances where the channels do not broadcast messages to all registered clients. We faced this issue, discussed it with the support team, and resolved it over time. However, it was a challenge when we had multiple clients, as one of the clients sometimes did not receive the messages.

PubNub is very scalable. As we increased the numbers in our product with client registration, we found that PubNub handled scalability very well, with no issues encountered.

Regarding customer support from PubNub, around six years ago, we did not receive good support. It seemed there were different plans or pricing for support, and we needed to pay more to get better support. If they sell any product, customer support should be provided by default without any additional costs.

We did not use any other solution before PubNub. After thorough research and investigation of solutions, we found that PubNub would be the best one to use, and in our first attempt, we found that it is very useful and helps manage all parts of our product.

Everything was managed entirely by my company on our own infrastructure.

As a developer or Technical Specialist in the team, I am not part of the pricing, setup cost, or licensing for PubNub, as that is handled by the procurement team, so I am not sure about the costs.

Although I am a developer and not sure about the exact amount cost reduced, feedback from the product team indicated that the cost was lower compared to other options, especially for broadcasting messages. According to customer feedback, they mentioned that the response time of the device was very good, providing real-time updates within a fraction of a second, even in situations where a fast-driving driver was not with the car owner. Customers could act on that situation in real-time.

PubNub costs less compared to other solutions in the market, saving us money when broadcasting messages to clients. The return on investment is evident when customers are happy, as they pay for our product based on its reliability, which helps our business overall.

We did not evaluate any other options. In the first attempt, we used PubNub and found it helpful and useful in all aspects required for our project, so there was no need to look for other solutions.

I would rate PubNub nine out of ten because there is always room for improvement; nobody is perfect.

If someone is looking for solutions for broadcasting and messaging, I definitely recommend PubNub for its speed, reliability, and prompt responses to solutions. I would recommend PubNub to my peers who are developing a similar kind of product.

We use a private cloud that is on-premises in our company. My overall review rating for PubNub is nine out of ten.