Power live features like chat, presence, and multiplayer sync.
4 months ago
Technically, Ably is superb. It handles connection drops and resuming sessions better than competitors like Pusher. However, we got hit with a surprisingly high bill because we didn't fully understand how 'peak connections' were calculated. Their pricing model is fair but complex. Make sure you really estimate your concurrent connections accurately before committing.
9 months ago
Ably makes building realtime chat and notifications incredibly easy. The API is intuitive and consistent. I really appreciate the 'history' feature which allows clients to catch up on missed messages if they disconnect briefly. The only downside is the dashboard UI can be a bit confusing when trying to debug connection issues or view specific channel stats. But the core service itself is bulletproof.
12 months ago
We migrated from a self-hosted WebSocket solution to Ably and the stability improvement was immediate. The guaranteed message delivery and ordering features saved us weeks of engineering time. Their client libraries are very well maintained across different languages (we use JS and Python). The 'presence' feature works flawlessly for showing who is online. Support has been very responsive whenever we had questions about scaling.
