
Ably
Pusher
Socket.io
PubNub
Firebase
Chat by Stream
Liveblocks
Tip Tap
NodeBB
Discourse
XenForo
phpBB
Flarum
MyBB
Vanilla Forums
Vanilla
We help teams deliver resilient AI UX and high-performance live experiences that stay fast and in sync worldwide. We provide the global realtime layer for AI agents, chat, notifications, live dashboards, and collaboration - engineered to handle peak demand without self-managed infrastructure.
Teams like HubSpot and Intercom use Ably to avoid the cost and complexity of building and operating realtime systems, while still getting predictable performance at serious scale, handling 2T+ API operations per month. Ablyโs Pub/Sub, Chat, and AI Transport products are unified by design, with developer-friendly APIs and SDKs that integrate across your stack.
Ably
NodeBBNodeBB is recommended for businesses, communities, and developers who require a customizable and real-time forum solution. It's particularly suitable for tech-savvy users who want to leverage Node.js and those looking to integrate forums with existing web applications.
NodeBB is a next-generation discussion platform that utilizes web sockets for instant interactions and real-time notifications. NodeBB forums have many modern features out of the box such as social network integration and streaming discussions. NodeBB is an open source project which can be forked on GitHub.
I was lucky enough to stumble on NodeBB in the early days right as we were transitioning a large user base from another forum and needed a platform that could handle the volume and speed of interactions that our users demanded. We took a big risk on NodeBB in 2014 when it was brand new and it has paid off in spades over the years. For seven years our users have consistently raved about ease of use and performance of the platform while on the back end we have been thrilled with the ease of management and low resource needs of hosting even for a site hitting hundreds of millions of hits per month. It is modern, regularly updated, has a great community and team behind it. We've always gotten lots of support and know that we made the right choice and continue to choose NodeBB as our forum of choice.
Based on our record, Ably should be more popular than NodeBB. It has been mentiond 26 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
During this weekโs AWS us-east-1 outage, Ably maintained full service continuity with no customer impact. This was our multi-region architecture working exactly as designed; error rates were negligibly low and unchanged throughout. Any additional round trip latency was limited to 12ms, which is below the typical variance in any client-to-endpoint connection, and well below our 40โ50ms global median; this is... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
Services like Pusher and Ably are experts in real-time messaging. They provide robust APIs for pub/sub channels, allowing you to broadcast events to clients reliably. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
Ably is a real-time infrastructure platform that focuses on delivering low-latency, reliable messaging across global distributed systems. It's designed for developers building event-driven applications, including chat, but also supports broader use cases like live dashboards, GPS tracking, and collaborative tools. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
For our web socket-based application, weโll be using Next.js and Ably, a service that allows us to easily integrate and manage real-time capabilities in our apps powered by web socket. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
Ably offers various solutions for developers, with their most popular being realtime messaging based on the pub/sub model. When you publish a message to a channel, all devices connected to that channel receive it instantly. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.... - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
I wrote about this a while ago for Slack/forums: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 but the points still hold. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $). Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
You said it's based on. This means that there are modifications to the implementation of nodebb. So where is your modifications' source code then? stackfoss/stackfoss is just a single readme file. Source: over 3 years ago
Pusher - Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps.
Discourse - Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)
XenForo - Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.
PubNub - PubNub is a real-time messaging system for web and mobile apps that can handle API for all platforms and push messages to any device anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second without having to worry about proxies, firewalls or mobile drop-offs.
phpBB - Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit-card sized computer. The official website uses phpBB for their discussion forums. phpBB is not affiliated with nor responsible for any of the sites listed on the showcase.