What do you like best about the product?

Our product provides real-time reproduction of keystrokes from one client's keyboard to the displays of all others. For our end-users, who rely on our product as their primary means of communication on a continual basis, the most important feature of Ably is its incredible speed and reliability across many geographies. For our developers, the most important feature of Ably has been its ease of integration into many mobile platforms and servers (iOS, web, linux) using many different programming languages (Swift, Javascript, Go).

The Ably SDKs are well documented and easy to use, and the implementation behaves exactly as expected from the docs. We have been delighted with the support provided by the Ably team, who are available seemingly day and night. And the few times we've had questions in their off hours, the Ably community on Discord has been very helpful.

Last but certainly not least, we were able to develop our entire app and test it with users in production environments before we ever committed to a paid contract with Ably. This allowed us to fully explore the platform without the time pressure of a "free trial period." As an open-source provider on a shoestring budget, this set Ably well apart from other providers we looked at.

What do you dislike about the product?

Our only complaint has been the lack of a comprehensive glossary/index to all the SDK docs. There is an incredible wealth of documentation available, but because of the specialized vocabulary, it's not always easy to know what to search for. Luckily, the Ably support team - which chats with you in real time when you submit a question - is always able to point you in the right direction.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our product services the non-verbal community, enabling users who can't speak to participate in spoken conversations by typing their part and having their typing show up in real time on the devices of speaking participants. Our most critical business need is for every single keystroke to appear instantly (and reliably) on the screens of multiple participants spread over many geographies. Ably excels at this kind of realtime delivery of small packets of information. Without this speed and reliability, our users could not communicate effectively.