Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Pusher VS React

Compare Pusher VS React and see what are their differences

Pusher logo Pusher

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

React logo React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
  • Pusher Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • React Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-19

Pusher features and specs

  • Real-Time Capabilities
    Pusher offers real-time data transfer, enabling instant updates and live feeds without the need for page refreshes. Its WebSockets-based architecture ensures low latency communication.
  • Ease of Use
    The API is straightforward to integrate, with comprehensive documentation and SDKs for various programming languages and platforms, making implementation quick and painless.
  • Scalability
    Pusher can handle a large number of concurrent connections, making it suitable for applications that need to scale seamlessly as user demand grows.
  • Security
    Pusher provides built-in authentication and authorization options, ensuring that data is secure and accessible only to authorized users.
  • Managed Service
    As a managed service, it eliminates the need for maintaining the infrastructure for real-time functionality, freeing up resources and reducing operational complexity.

Possible disadvantages of Pusher

  • Cost
    Pusher can become expensive, especially for applications with high traffic or requiring a large number of concurrent connections, making it less suitable for startups or small-scale projects on a tight budget.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Relying heavily on Pusher's services can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another service or in-house solution in the future.
  • Limited Offline Functionality
    Pusher is designed for real-time online communication, and it does not inherently support offline capabilities, which can be a limitation for applications that need to function without a constant internet connection.
  • Complexity for Advanced Use Cases
    While it's easy to set up for basic use cases, implementing more complex scenarios may require additional configuration and a deeper understanding of the architecture.
  • Latency
    Even though Pusher boasts low-latency communication, network conditions and geographical distances can still introduce lag, which might not be acceptable for ultra-low-latency requirements like high-frequency trading.

React features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
  • Virtual DOM
    React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
  • JSX Syntax
    React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
  • Unidirectional Data Flow
    React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
  • Extensive Documentation
    React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

  • Steep Learning Curve
    React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
  • Boilerplate Code
    Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
  • Fast-Paced Development
    React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
  • Complexity in Larger Applications
    As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
  • SEO Challenges
    React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

Pusher videos

Mark Kermode reviews Pusher

More videos:

  • Review - Pusher (1996) - Movie Review
  • Review - Film Recommendations: The Pusher Trilogy

React videos

What Is React?

More videos:

  • Review - NOT Worth Buying? Nike EPIC REACT FLYKNIT 2 vs Epic React REVIEW
  • Review - NIKE REACT INFINITY RUN FLYKNIT REVIEW | The Ginger Runner

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Pusher and React)
Mobile Push Messaging
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
13 13%
87% 87
Web Push Notifications
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Pusher and React. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

Pusher Reviews

SignalR Alternatives
Pusher as a signal Alternative comes into the picture when it is simple and has free plans for the fallback of SSE to make the frame and log polling also available to the developers for troubleshooting as well.
Source: www.educba.com

React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.
Source: solguruz.com
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.
Source: www.kiwop.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...
Source: www.bocasay.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React seems to be a lot more popular than Pusher. While we know about 814 links to React, we've tracked only 55 mentions of Pusher. 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.

Pusher mentions (55)

  • 5 Must-Watch Tutorials to Build Your SaaS App in 2025
    In this tutorial, you’ll create a Next.js project with TailwindCSS and build custom authentication pages for Clerk without the watermark. This means you’ll create a custom Clerk authentication component, allowing you to have a UI without the Clerk branding in the authentication component. You’ll then set up file uploads using Uploadcare and create custom theming with Shadcn UI for light and dark modes. A real-time... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • PubNub vs Pusher creating a realtime messaging app in React
    When talking about general IM applications, having the ability to speak to someone in real-time opens up the door to so many unique possibilities. Our world has become ever more connected as a result of these newfound capabilities. In todays article we will learn all about messaging as we build a real-time messaging application. The application will be able to connect to two different real-time application... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • 10 Must-Use APIs for Your Next SaaS Project
    For real-time notifications, Pusher’s APIs allow you to implement in-app notifications, chat features, and collaboration tools easily. You can find it here. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • How to Build a Real-time Chat App with Laravel, Vue.js, and Pusher
    Pusher is a cloud-hosted service that makes adding real-time functionality to applications easy. It acts as a real-time communication layer between servers and clients. This allows your backend server to instantly broadcast new data via Pusher to your Vue.js client. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Show HN: Webhooked.email (2023)
    Feature request received! Pusher as in this thing -- https://pusher.com/ right? Any other places you want to push to? Slack? - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
View more

React mentions (814)

  • Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
    One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / about 20 hours ago
  • Next.js Localization: How to Build a Multilingual Website with Next-Intl
    Next.js is a very popular framework built on top of the React.js library and it provides the best Development Experience for building applications. It offers a bunch of features like:. - Source: dev.to / 14 days ago
  • Web Development Using React Framework
    Explore the official React documentation. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
    We’ll be creating the components package inside the packages directory. In this monorepo package, we’ll be building React components which will be consumed by our Next.js application (front-end package). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Migrating from AngularJS to React
    After evaluating our options including upgrading from AngularJS to Angular (the name for every version of Angular 2 and beyond) or migrating and rewriting our application in a completely new JavaScript framework: React. We ultimately chose to go with ReactJS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Pusher and React, you can also consider the following products

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

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

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

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

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.

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps