Software Alternatives & Reviews

Pushcut VS Ably

Compare Pushcut VS Ably and see what are their differences

Pushcut logo Pushcut

Smart triggers and notifications that kick off your automation. NEW FEATURE: Turn a dedicated iOS device into your personal Shortcuts and HomeKit automation server! The perfect companion for Shortcuts and HomeKit.

Ably logo Ably

Serious realtime infrastructure
  • Pushcut Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-10

Pushcut is a free to download automation utility that helps you kick off your automation when it matters. Use HomeKit scenes, Shortcuts, web services, and custom URLs as notification actions that pop up exactly when they matter to you. Trigger these smart notifications from Shortcuts, HomeKit, schedules, locations, iBeacons, online services (like IFTTT, Zapier, Flow, Integromat, ...), home servers, or anywhere that knows what HTTP is.

  • Set up alerts & reminders to trigger scheduled & location-based smart notifications
  • Combine time and location triggers (eg: "weekdays at 6 PM when I am at work")
  • Schedule notifications from Shortcuts
  • Trigger notifications through a secure webhook or Pushcut API
  • Trigger notifications from third-party integrations and online services like Zapier, Integromat, IFTTT, etc.
  • Define notifications with custom titles and messages
  • Add action buttons to the notifications for quicker access
  • Run shortcuts directly from notification actions
  • Activate HomeKit scenes directly from notification actions
  • Add URLs to the push notifications and open them directly from the notifications
  • Run online actions (webhooks, HTTP requests) directly from notifications without opening any app or website
  • Execute online actions in the background based on location or iBeacon events
  • Use a powerful JSON API to deliver dynamic texts, shortcut inputs, and URLs
  • Turn a dedicated iOS device into your personal Shortcuts and HomeKit server
  • Ably Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-23

Ably is an enterprise-ready pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Everyday we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

We power the apps people, organizations, and enterprises depend on everyday like Lightspeed System’s realtime device management platform for over seven million school-owned devices, Vitac’s live captioning for 100s of millions of multilingual viewers for events like the Olympic Games, and Split’s realtime feature flagging for one trillion feature flags per month.

We’re the only pub/sub platform with a suite of integrated services to build complete realtime functionality like showing a driver’s live GPS location on a home-delivery app, instantly loading the most recent score when opening a sports app, while automatically handling reconnection when swapping networks. We guarantee low latency delivery of all messages to subscribers over a secure, reliable, and highly available global edge network.

Developers from startups to industrial giants choose to build on Ably to simplify engineering, minimize DevOps overhead, and increase development velocity.

Pushcut videos

Pushcut - The Powerful Companion for Shortcuts and Home Automation

More videos:

  • Review - SCOM0927 - Pushcut - Preview

Ably videos

How to build a collaborative environment around your product

More videos:

  • Demo - How to build an avatar stack with Ably Spaces
  • Demo - Ably 101: Serverless WebSockets at scale

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Pushcut and Ably)
Mobile Push Messaging
42 42%
58% 58
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Push Notifications
100 100%
0% 0
Web Push Notifications
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ably should be more popular than Pushcut. It has been mentiond 20 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.

Pushcut mentions (4)

  • Best way to keep time machine attached to thunderbolt display
    My personal use case is a little bit different as I am doing this on an old Mac I am using as a home server, so I am using a Pushcut automation server to get around the fact that this particular mac doesn‘t have Shortcuts. If you want to know more about that, I can get into further detail. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Shortcut to turn on work focus mode when setting a work calendar event
    Do you have a shortcut to create then calendar entries for your shifts by any chance? If so you could schedule a shortcut to be run at the same time using PushCut which sets the focus mode. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Running a shortcut with a HomeKit button
    HomeKit buttons can trigger home automations, correct? You can’t run a normal shortcut directly from a home automation, but if you have a spare device, you could use Pushcut to create a Pushcut automation server (PAS), and set up the home automation to trigger a shortcut on the PAS with a webhook. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Using deep link in HomeKit automations?
    Check out Pushcut, which is designed for precisely this sort of thing. Source: about 3 years ago

Ably mentions (20)

  • Essential guide to WebSocket authentication
    Of course, if this all sounds like a headache, you might consider Ably. Apart from solving the authentication problem, Ably provides additional features you’d need to implement on top of WebSockets like Presence and message queues, and provides production guarantees that will be time-consuming or costly to achieve on your own like 99.999% uptime guarantee, exactly-once delivery, and guaranteed message ordering. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • The top real-time notification services for building in-app notifications
    Ably is a robust real-time data delivery platform based on WebSockets with features like message ordering, presence, and connection recovery. Customers include Toyota, HubSpot, and Verizon. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Serverless WebSockets with Ably
    I reached for Ably because they had a booth at the 2022 Jamstack Conf, and probably gave me a sticker or something. (You hear that? Sponsor your local tech conference!) They have a generous free tier, which is an absolute requirement for this space, where devs like me usually want to try a product on something that doesn't make us any money, and then that translates (ideally) into recommending it in our... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Cursor Everywhere: An experiment on shared cursors for every website
    A realtime protocol like WebSockets seemed like a logical way to share real-time updates of cursor positions. Working at Ably, it was a no-brainer to use it as my WebSocket-based pub/sub broker. A pub/sub broker simplifies many aspects of projects like this, often coming with built-in features that speed up development. For instance, I wanted each browser's cursor position to be continually available to other... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Laravel Realtime with Ably & Laravel Livewire
    So let's get started. Firs thing to do is to create an account in Ably, so head there and create your account. Then, you have to create an application, give it a name, and we are good to go. The next thing to do, is to grab the API key. From the Ably dashboard, head to API Keys, you will find 2 keys, we are interested in the first one. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Pushcut and Ably, you can also consider the following products

Pusher Beams - Send push notifications programmatically at scale

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

Engagespot - Engagespot is the easiest way to build your product's multi-channel notification infrastructure. Deliver In-App, Email, Push, SMS, WhatsApp and chat notifications from your app to your users with a single API.

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.

Pushover - Real-time notifications on your Android, iPhone, iPad, and Desktop

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