Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

PubNub VS MongoDB

Compare PubNub VS MongoDB and see what are their differences

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PubNub logo 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.

MongoDB logo MongoDB

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.
  • PubNub Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • MongoDB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

PubNub features and specs

  • Real-time Messaging
    PubNub provides real-time messaging capabilities, allowing for efficient, low-latency communication between clients and servers. This is ideal for applications that require instant data updates, such as chat apps, live dashboards, and multiplayer games.
  • Global Infrastructure
    The service operates on a global network of data centers, ensuring that messages are delivered quickly and reliably across different geographic locations. This reduces latency and enhances the performance and user experience of apps that serve a global user base.
  • Scalability
    PubNub can handle millions of messages and connections simultaneously, making it highly scalable for applications with substantial user bases or high traffic requirements.
  • Security
    PubNub offers a range of security features including TLS encryption, token-based authentication, and access management to ensure that data is securely transmitted and received.
  • Extensive SDKs
    The platform provides extensive SDKs (Software Development Kits) for a wide variety of programming languages and platforms, making it easier for developers to integrate PubNub into their applications.
  • Feature-rich
    Besides messaging, PubNub offers additional features like presence, storage and playback, message history, and mobile push notifications, which add significant value to developers.
  • Reliability
    With multiple layers of failover and redundancy, PubNub is designed to deliver high availability and uptime, which is critical for mission-critical applications.

Possible disadvantages of PubNub

  • Cost
    PubNub can be expensive for large scale applications or startups with limited budgets. The pricing model is based on usage, making it difficult to predict costs for applications that experience rapid growth or variable traffic.
  • Complexity
    The platform offers a rich set of features, which can make it complex for new developers to fully understand and implement. The learning curve can be steep, particularly for those who are unfamiliar with real-time messaging systems.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Relying heavily on PubNub's infrastructure and APIs means that migrating to another service can be challenging and time-consuming. This can create a dependency that might be problematic if you ever need to switch providers.
  • Latency Variability
    While PubNub generally offers low-latency performance, there can be variability in latency due to network conditions or other factors, which might affect time-sensitive applications.
  • Limited Customization
    Although PubNub offers many features, there can be limitations in terms of customizing certain functionalities or integrating with specific business requirements that are not directly supported by the platform.
  • Documentation
    While PubNub provides comprehensive documentation, some users report that it can be inconsistent or lacking in certain areas, making it difficult to troubleshoot specific issues or fully utilize advanced features without additional support.
  • Dependency on Internet
    As a cloud-based service, PubNub relies on a stable internet connection. Applications that need to function in environments with unreliable or no internet connectivity may face challenges using this service.

MongoDB features and specs

  • Scalability
    MongoDB offers horizontal scaling through sharding, allowing it to handle large volumes of data and enabling distributed computing.
  • Flexible Schema
    It allows for a flexible schema design using BSON (Binary JSON), making it easier to iterate and change application data models.
  • High Performance
    MongoDB is optimized for read and write throughput, making it suitable for real-time applications.
  • Rich Query Language
    Supports a rich and expressive query language that allows for efficient querying and analytics.
  • Built-in Replication
    Provides robust replication mechanisms for high availability and redundancy.
  • Geospatial Indexing
    Offers powerful geospatial indexing capabilities, useful for location-based applications.
  • Aggregation Framework
    Enables complex data manipulations and transformations using the aggregation pipeline framework.
  • Cross-Platform
    Works on multiple operating systems, enhancing its versatility and deployment options.

Possible disadvantages of MongoDB

  • Memory Usage
    MongoDB can consume a large amount of memory due to its use of memory-mapped files, which may be a concern for some applications.
  • Complex Transactions
    While MongoDB supports ACID transactions, they can be more complex to implement and less efficient compared to traditional relational databases.
  • Data Redundancy
    The flexible schema design can lead to data redundancy and increased storage costs if not managed carefully.
  • Limited Joins
    Joins are supported but can be less efficient and more limited compared to relational databases, affecting complex relational data querying.
  • Indexing Overhead
    Extensive indexing can introduce overhead and impact performance, especially during write operations.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires a different mindset and understanding compared to traditional relational databases, which can present a learning curve for new users.
  • Lacks Mature Analytical Tools
    The ecosystem for analytical tools around MongoDB is not as mature as those for traditional relational databases, which might limit advanced analytics capabilities.
  • Cost
    The cost of using MongoDB's cloud services (MongoDB Atlas) can be high, especially for large-scale deployments.

PubNub videos

Realtime Bike Tracking App with MediaTek and PubNub

More videos:

  • Review - Streaming Realtime Analytics with Keen IO and PubNub
  • Review - PubNub IOT House Training Video

MongoDB videos

MySQL vs MongoDB

More videos:

  • Review - The Good and Bad of MongoDB
  • Review - what is mongoDB

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PubNub and MongoDB)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Mobile Push Messaging
100 100%
0% 0
NoSQL Databases
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using PubNub and MongoDB. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare PubNub and MongoDB

PubNub Reviews

2023 Firebase Alternatives: Top 10 Open-Source & Free
PubNub is another new but advanced Firebase alternative in our list. It handles 3 trillion monthly calls with 99.999% uptime and accesses 800 million devices over the globe. The renowned customers of PubNub are Kustomer, vFairs and Swiggy.
SignalR Alternatives
Pubnub is considered one of the good alternatives to SignalR because it comes to the rescue when secured data streams get exchanged over the network with API that helps in connecting with the applications to the real-time one.
Source: www.educba.com
Firebase Alternatives – Top 10 Competitors
Pubnub IoT Device Control Real-time updates Storage & Playback Stream Controller Push Notifications Analytics Access Management
Top 10 Alternatives To Firebase
PubNub is popular for its versatile streaming abilities. You can create promising web and mobile apps with PubNub.
Source: www.redbytes.in

MongoDB Reviews

10 Top Firebase Alternatives to Ignite Your Development in 2024
MongoDB’s superpower lies in its flexibility. Its document-based model lets you store data in a free-form, schema-less way, making it adaptable to evolving application needs. Need to add a new field or change the structure of your data? No problem, MongoDB handles it with ease.
Source: genezio.com
Top 7 Firebase Alternatives for App Development in 2024
MongoDB Realm provides a robust alternative to Firebase, especially for apps requiring a flexible data model. Key features include:
Source: signoz.io
Announcing FerretDB 1.0 GA - a truly Open Source MongoDB alternative
MongoDB is no longer open source. We want to bring MongoDB database workloads back to its open source roots. We are enabling PostgreSQL and other database backends to run MongoDB workloads, retaining the opportunities provided by the existing ecosystem around MongoDB.
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
The database added a new feature to its list of attributes called MongoDB Atlas. It is a global cloud database technology that allows to deploy a fully managed MongoDB across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure with its built-in automation for resource, workload optimization and to reduce the time required to handle the database.
9 Best MongoDB alternatives in 2019
MongoDB is an open source NoSQL DBMS which uses a document-oriented database model. It supports various forms of data. However, in MongoDB data consumption is high due to de-normalization.
Source: www.guru99.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, MongoDB seems to be a lot more popular than PubNub. While we know about 18 links to MongoDB, we've tracked only 1 mention of PubNub. 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.

PubNub mentions (1)

  • gRPC test-and-try with Akka Serverless and Evans
    I first learned about gRPC about five years go. Since that moment in time when an engineer at PubNub introduced me to the framework, I have let the idea of gRPC simmer more in the background, especially since I was already rather steeped in REST, Open API, Swagger, and other sundries seen in the broader API space (miss you, Mashery. There seemed to be plenty of great tooling, documentation and technologies... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

MongoDB mentions (18)

  • Creating AI Memories using Rig & MongoDB
    In this article, we’ll build a CLI tool using the Rig AI framework and MongoDB for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This tool will store summarized conversations in a database and retrieve them when needed, enabling the AI to maintain context over time. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • The Adventures of Blink S2e2: Database, Contained
    Have a Mongo database holding the various phrases we're going to use and potentially configuration data for the frontend as well. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Introducing Perseid: The Product-oriented JS framework
    It's also worth mentioning that Perseid provides out-of-the-box support for React, VueJS, Svelte, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Express and Fastify. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • DocumentDB Elastic Cluster Pricing
    Does anyone know if the most basic Elastic Cluster instance of DocumentDB carries any monthly fixed cost or is it just on-demand cost? Another words if I run like 10,000 queries against the DB per month, what kind of bill would I expect? This is for a super small app. I am currently using mongodb free tier , but want to migrate everything to AWS. Can't seem to find a straight answer to the pricing question. Source: over 2 years ago
  • I wrote some scripts for converting the UTZOO Usenet archive to a Mongo Database
    You can use either MongoDB.com's dashboard (if you host a remote database) or Mongo Compass to run queries on the data or you can modify the express middleware with your own queries. I'm still working on the API, so it's not very robust yet. I will update this when it is. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing PubNub and MongoDB, you can also consider the following products

Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

Pusher - Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps.

PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database