9👍
There are a few differentiating factors, these are:
- Do you want to manage the scaling and hosting of your realtime infrastructure?
- Do you want to receive data from your clients in realtime?
- Do you want to be able to interact with the data between clients?
There’s basically a few different use-cases for websockets, and at present no hosted solution can offer you two of those things. The current use cases I can think of are:
- Server
--[ WebSocket ]->
Clients - Server
<-[ WebSocket ]--
Clients - Server
<-[ WebSocket ]->
Clients
Services like PusherApp target the first use-case, as it’s fairly difficult to support the other two options with a hosted service. (Read: while it’s difficult, it’s just a bit impractical and doesn’t give you the full benefits of using websockets.)
Source:stackexchange.com