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I'm pretty new to programming so please excuse me if the answers to my questions are pretty straightforward.

I'm looking for mobile (Android + IOS)/web push notifications tools that can handle push notifications in real-time across devices. Through my research, I found a lot of tools / API but I don't know what are the pros and cons of all these tools. To be honest, I'm pretty lost.

During my research, I spotted the list of tools below but it's really hard to know which of them suits the best my needs.

  • OneSignal
  • Firebase Cloud Messaging
  • PubNub
  • Pusher
  • Ably
  • Braze
  • Batch
  • Vero
  • Twilio
  • PushWoosh
  • Airship
  • Socket.io
  • Faye

I found some of them on this Benchmark which is interested but a bit outdated.

In the meantime, I would also need this tool to trigger push notifications based on GPS data. Meaning that when a user enters a geofence, he would instantly receive a push notification. I'm not sure this is possible with all the suppliers above.

The tool I need should be quite easy to set up as it is for a startup that needs to go pretty fast to market. On top of that, Price and reliability as well as scalability are also very important.

Is someone here having heard/used one of this tool and would be up to give feedback about them? If so, I would be more than grateful

If you have used a tool not listed above that could suit my needs, I'd also be more than happy to discuss about it.

Thanks a lot,

P.S.: I'll use Ruby on Rails 6 and React Native for this project

bali85
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    Well, this question will probably get flagged for not being appropriate for Stack Overflow. But for what it's worth, PubNub will do everything you want to do. Disclaimer: I work for PubNub and some other vendors you listed will also work but I am obviously biased toward PubNub. There are so many bonus features that PubNub provides that you may not even have considered. Give the docs a look and see if it is for you: https://www.pubnub.com/docs/platform/overview – Craig Conover Jun 21 '20 at 16:14
  • Thanks for your honesty Craig, In your opinion, what are the main competitive advantages of PubNub over 1/ Firebase and 2/ Pusher? – bali85 Jun 21 '20 at 21:16
  • And Braze and Vero seem really easier to use. Is PubNub better than these tools? If so, why? – bali85 Jun 21 '20 at 21:19
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    Braze doesn't look anything like what PubNub, to me. It looks like a package product for Customer Engagement that has Push Notifications. PubNub is realtime communication platform (messaging and push notifications and much more) that enables you to build this into an offering like Braze and any other use case. – Craig Conover Jun 23 '20 at 16:43
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    Vero looks much more interesting and more overlap (but not much) with PubNub but really just in the Mobile Push Notification space and it seems to build a vertical offering for sending push notifications in a DnD workflow. Again, Vero is an offering that could use PubNub as the communication platform on which this is implemented. – Craig Conover Jun 23 '20 at 16:47

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I am from Ably, and given you asked how we stack up against the rest, I wanted to help with that. Unfortunately I can only comment on Ably, Pusher and PubNub from that list as those two competitive products are more directly comparable.

Why those three? Ably, PubNub and Pusher are all internet-native pub/sub systems first, but also include mobile native push notification support (for Apple Push Notification Service and (Google) Firebase Cloud Messaging). Typically when an app is open, it's far more efficient and reliable to use a pub/sub socket based connection, which all three services provide (well PubNub is HTTP based, but over a TCP socket, and the others are Websockets), and when the app is closed, a mobile push notification can be used to communicate with that app by showing a visual message on the device, or send a data message that wakes the app and performs a small amount of work.

If you want to compare the services easily, please see:

I hope that's useful. If you do look at the others, I'd love to hear how they stack up.

Matt, tech co-founder, Ably Realtime

Matthew O'Riordan
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How geographically scattered will the users to be connected be? PubNub has excellent comittmenta to delivery, especially across global locations.

nfodor
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  • In the first place, most of the users will be based in France and Europe then we could quickly need to have a good delivery for USA, New Zealand, Australia, Brasil ... – bali85 Jun 21 '20 at 21:14
  • PubNub has 99.999% uptime SLAs for all paid accounts plus support plans with fast SLA response time (and Free support is likely the best dev support you've ever had). Mobile Push Notifications (APNS and FCM) are builtin to the publishing of a message. My advice would be to engage PN Support who can get you connected with someone that can discuss your requirements and pricing in detail, for free and no obligation. – Craig Conover Jun 22 '20 at 16:55