PubNub

About

Managed realtime network: apps publish and subscribe to channels through SDKs or a REST API, with presence, message history, user and channel metadata, access tokens and Functions. Chat SDKs and APNs and FCM push build on it. Billing is by monthly active users; the free plan covers 200.

What you can do with it

• Stream live updates, game state or device events to apps over channels
• Add chat with threads, reactions, typing indicators and read receipts
• Forward channel messages to phones as APNs and FCM push notifications

Get started

1. Sign up in the Admin Portal and copy the publish and subscribe keys
2. Install an SDK, for example npm install pubnub
3. Subscribe to a channel, then publish messages to it

Example

// npm install pubnub
const PubNub = require('pubnub');

const pubnub = new PubNub({
  publishKey: 'YOUR_PUBLISH_KEY',
  subscribeKey: 'YOUR_SUBSCRIBE_KEY',
  userId: 'quickstart-user',
});

const channel = pubnub.channel('quickstart-channel');
const subscription = channel.subscription();
subscription.onMessage = (event) => {
  console.log('Message received:', event.message.text);
};

// Publish only once the subscription is connected
pubnub.addListener({
  status: (event) => {
    if (event.category === 'PNConnectedCategory') {
      pubnub
        .publish({ channel: 'quickstart-channel', message: { text: 'Hello, PubNub!' } })
        .catch((error) => console.error('Publish failed:', error));
    }
  },
});

subscription.subscribe();

Details

Hosting

Hosted service

Available in

Worldwide

Official SDKs

JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, Kotlin, Swift, C#, Go, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Dart

MCP server

Remote

Works with

Unity, Unreal