At a glance — how these 3 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 10,447 · Go | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 5,622 · TypeScript | Mainstream | Stale | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 1,577 · PHP | Established | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
The alternatives
centrifugo
Scalable real-time messaging server in a language-agnostic way. Self-hosted alternative to Pubnub, Pusher, Ably, socket.io, Phoenix.PubSub, SignalR. Set up once and forever.
centrifugal/centrifugo Updated 2026-06-16 soketi
Next-gen, Pusher-compatible, open-source WebSockets server. Simple, fast, and resilient. 📣
soketi/soketi Updated 2025-03-03 reverb
Laravel Reverb provides a real-time WebSocket communication backend for Laravel applications.
laravel/reverb Updated 2026-06-25 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
Pusher is the rare SaaS where a drop-in replacement genuinely exists — so the real question is whether you ever needed Pusher's protocol at all.
Pusher is an unusual entry in this directory because, unlike most SaaS migrations, one of the alternatives is genuinely drop-in. Soketi implements the Pusher protocol, which means your existing client SDK code keeps working with nothing more than an endpoint change. That’s rare enough that it reframes the whole evaluation. The interesting decision isn’t “can I leave Pusher” — clearly yes — it’s “do I want protocol compatibility, or do I want to leave the Pusher model entirely?”
If you want the path of least resistance, Soketi (5.6k stars, TypeScript, AGPL-3.0) is the most direct. A single Docker container handles low-to-moderate concurrency; you set SOKETI_APP_ID, SOKETI_APP_KEY, and SOKETI_APP_SECRET to match your server config, repoint your client, and you’re broadcasting. The two things I’d flag before treating this as a no-brainer: it’s AGPL, which is worth a glance if you’re embedding it in a commercial product; and “Pusher-compatible” means you also inherit Pusher’s mental model — channels, app keys, the same scaling questions. For real concurrency you’ll wire up the Redis adapter to run multiple nodes, and at that point you’re operating infrastructure Pusher used to hide.
That’s exactly why I’d push a higher-traffic team to look at Centrifugo (10.4k stars, Apache-2.0, Go) instead. It’s the most-starred and most permissively licensed option here, built for scale from the start, with its own protocol plus Pusher compatibility. If you’re choosing real-time infrastructure you intend to keep “set up once and forever,” the Go server designed for horizontal scale is the more future-proof foundation than a protocol-compatibility shim — even if it costs you a bit more day-one familiarity.
Laravel Reverb (1.6k stars, MIT) is the easy call in exactly one situation: you’re a Laravel shop. First-party, MIT-licensed, native to the framework. Outside that ecosystem I wouldn’t reach for it.
The thing I’d actually test before cutting over: connection limits under realistic load. Pusher quietly managed availability and connection ceilings; self-hosting hands you that responsibility, and concurrency — not features — is where these break.
Comparison notes
A nice property of replacing Pusher is drop-in compatibility: Soketi (TypeScript, AGPL) implements the Pusher protocol so your existing Pusher SDK code runs unchanged against it, and Laravel Reverb does the same for Laravel apps. If you expect to scale hard, Centrifugo (Go, Apache 2.0) is a beefier real-time server with its own protocol plus Pusher compatibility. The work you inherit is operational rather than functional — Pusher manages WebSocket scaling, connection limits, and uptime for you, while self-hosting means watching those connection limits and scaling Soketi or Centrifugo horizontally once concurrency climbs.
Migration tips
- Deploy Soketi on a VPS (a single Docker container handles low-to-moderate concurrency)
- Update your server-side Pusher SDK configuration to point to your Soketi host instead of Pusher's endpoints
- Your client-side Pusher JavaScript/native SDK code requires only endpoint configuration changes — the protocol is compatible
- Set SOKETI_APP_ID, SOKETI_APP_KEY, and SOKETI_APP_SECRET in your Soketi environment matching your server-side config
- For high concurrency, configure Redis adapter for Soketi to support multi-node horizontal scaling
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Pusher isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 3 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → centrifugo. 10,447★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → soketi. AGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
- You need a project that has shipped a release in the last few weeks → reverb. Last commit 2026-06-25 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
With a Pusher replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 3 projects here fall into:
- Permissive (centrifugo, reverb) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- Network copyleft (soketi) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 3 projects
Of the 3 projects listed, 2 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 3 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
2 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from Pusher's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 2 of 3 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
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