Open Source Pusher Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Pusher.
The best open source alternative to Pusher is Soketi. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Pusher alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Pusher is SAMA.
Pusher alternatives are mainly Networking & Connectivity but may also be Messaging & Event Streaming or Customer Support & Success. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Pusher.
Pusher-compatible WebSockets server you self-host, giving existing Pusher client code real-time messaging without per-connection pricing or a metered plan.
Soketi speaks the Pusher protocol, so projects already built against Pusher move over by adding a host and port and swapping the credentials. That removes both the connection and message caps of a hosted plan and the friction of testing real-time features against a metered service.
The server is built on uWebSockets.js, a C application ported to Node.js, which the project cites as performing at 8.5 times the level of Fastify and at least 10 times that of Socket.IO. It holds thousands of active connections under heavy traffic on less than 1 GB of memory and a single CPU, which is a cheap cloud instance rather than a subscription tier.
A handful of pieces make it viable beyond a laptop.
- Pusher Protocol v7: existing client libraries connect with minimal code change.
- App-based access: define the apps that gate API and WebSocket access, storing their data in static arrays, DynamoDB or an SQL server such as Postgres.
- Redis scaling: coordinate several instances as traffic grows, from one container to tens of them.
- Prometheus metrics: scrape the built-in endpoint to monitor a deployment.
- Portable deployment: containers or monoliths, with documented installs for each.
Documentation lives on GitBook, one-click deploys exist for Railway and Cleavr, and community projects add a management UI, a Filament plugin and chat components for Laravel. The maintainer is candid that release frequency depends on the time available, that maintenance has been intermittent, and that sponsorship is what would change it.
Chat server and messaging protocol built on uWebSockets, offered as an alternative to XMPP, with web and Flutter clients alongside it.
SAMA is a chat server and a messaging protocol written as a deliberate alternative to XMPP, which its authors call the only widely spread standard in this space. It arrives as a server plus working clients rather than a specification to implement yourself.
The server runs on Node.js with uWebSockets, keeps its data in MongoDB and uses Redis for cluster coordination. Nodes find each other through Redis records carrying each node's WebSocket address, establish links with a ping and pong handshake, and retry on a widening delay when a connection breaks. When a node vanishes for good, a surviving node clears the records it left behind, so user and device state does not go stale.
The API is documented one area at a time.
- Users: accounts, authentication and the calls around a user record.
- Conversations: creating and managing conversations between users.
- Messages: sending, delivering and retrieving message history.
- Activities: presence and status for connected devices.
- Address book: contact lists reconciled against server side users.
- Push notifications: delivery to devices that are not currently connected.
The server is GPL 3.0, and clients exist for the web and for Flutter in their own repositories. Local development, full deployment and end to end tests are documented on the project's docs site, and the whole stack can be exercised on a public cloud instance before anything is installed.
