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GDPR
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Global infrastructure for
real-time, interactive applications

You build the application. We operate the global network underneath it: pub/sub messaging, presence, data, logic, and security, at scale.

Start Building Read the docs

{ goal: 1 } → delivered

0

MESSAGES DELIVERED SINCE YOU ARRIVED

99.999%

UPTIME SLA

<0.5 ms

IN-REGION OVERHEAD

1B+

ACTIVE DEVICES

50+

SDKS

Powering

Platform

The PubNub platform, detailed.

Explore the PubNub platform, starting with Programmable Pub/Sub. From there, investigate all of the PubNub platform features to build your real-time application.

dev tools & integrations included

01THE CORE

Programmable Pub/Sub

The heart of PubNub’s technology — sending and receiving messages between humans, devices, and AIs. Low-latency publish/subscribe you can program: clients publish to named channels, and subscribe to the channels they care about.

What you can ship with it

Typing indicators, read receipts, and reactions in a chat app.

Features include:

Channels: A route clients join — named on the fly, never provisioned
Subscriptions: One connection, many channels, one set of listeners
Message Actions: Reactions, receipts, and edits on a sent message
Signals: Cheap high-frequency updates like typing indicators
Message types: Categorize the traffic that shares a channel
Channel Groups: Subscribe to thousands of channels in one call

Without it you build

Ordered delivery, catch-up after reconnect, and fan-out at scale

pubnub.publish({ channel: "scores", message: score })

Read the docs

The developer-experience surface: what you run on your machine, and what your coding agent runs for you. The docs call that second half AI development, and give it a top-level area.

What you can ship with it

A working real-time feature scaffolded by your coding agent in an afternoon.

Features include:

50+ SDKs: Idiomatic clients for web, mobile, server, and embedded
APIs: Plain REST when you’d rather not take an SDK
MCP server: Claude and Cursor can scaffold PubNub features for you
PubNub Skills: Task recipes your coding agent follows correctly
llms.txt: The documentation set in one file a model can read
Prompt templates: Starting points for what agents actually get asked

Without it you build

Client libraries for every platform your app ships on

Read the docs

The heart of PubNub’s technology — sending and receiving messages between humans, devices, and AIs. Low-latency publish/subscribe you can program: clients publish to named channels, and subscribe to the channels they care about.

What you can ship with it

Typing indicators, read receipts, and reactions in a chat app.

Features include:

Channels: A route clients join — named on the fly, never provisioned
Subscriptions: One connection, many channels, one set of listeners
Message Actions: Reactions, receipts, and edits on a sent message
Signals: Cheap high-frequency updates like typing indicators
Message types: Categorize the traffic that shares a channel
Channel Groups: Subscribe to thousands of channels in one call

Without it you build

Ordered delivery, catch-up after reconnect, and fan-out at scale

pubnub.publish({ channel: "scores", message: score })

Read the docs

Pub/Sub tells your application what is happening on a channel. Presence tells it who is currently participating, across every client, at scale.

What you can ship with it

A green "online" dot and a live viewer count that is actually correct.

Features include:

Presence events: Join, leave, and timeout as users come and go
Occupancy: How many are on a channel right now, and which of them
Presence state: Custom per-channel status like “away” or “in a call”

Without it you build

Heartbeat tracking, timeout tuning, and occupancy state at scale

pubnub.hereNow({ channels: ['scores'], includeUUIDs: true, includeState: true });

Read the docs

Real-time delivery handles what is happening now. Data storage is how the application gets at what happened before, and at the entities that were involved.

What you can ship with it

Full scroll-back history synchronized across devices, user profiles and channel directories that stay in sync, and images or documents shared in-channel.

Features include:

Message history: Replay and catch up on published messages after a dropped connection
Metadata: Structured data about users, channels, and memberships
Files: Send images and attachments on the same channels

Without it you build

A message store, a metadata service, and file hosting tied to channels

pubnub.fetchMessages({ channels: ['scores'], count: 3, includeCustomMessageType: true });

Read the docs

Visibility into the activity your applications generate once they ship, without standing up your own telemetry pipeline.

What you can ship with it

Answering "how many users were live during the match?" without instrumenting it.

Features include:

Usage dashboards: Monthly active users and transaction consumption
Operational dashboards: Live channel and connection activity

Without it you build

A telemetry pipeline, storage, and dashboards for real-time traffic

Read the docs

Running decisions and application logic on the network, right where the messages are, with no round-trip to your servers.

What you can ship with it

Masking a banned word, or firing an alert when a sensor crosses a threshold.

Features include:

Serverless: Run your JavaScript on the message in flight — Functions
Real-time decisions: Query live data and act on what it shows — Illuminate
Auto Moderation: Mask defined words and catch spam before delivery

Without it you build

A fleet of always-on workers sitting next to your message bus

// Before Publish Function on the "scores" channel
export default (request) => {
  request.message.team = 'HOME';
  return request.ok();
};

Read the docs

How your application talks to the systems outside the real-time network.

What you can ship with it

A push notification to users who closed the app, from the same publish call.

Features include:

Mobile push notifications: Reach users who closed the app
Event forwarding: Send events on to Kafka, SQS, Kinesis, S3, and webhooks
Kafka connector: Bridge PubNub and the Kafka topics you already run

Without it you build

APNs/FCM plumbing, webhook delivery, and retry logic

Read the docs

One place that answers: “how is the real-time application secured?” It draws the boundary around everything, dev tools and integrations included.

What you can ship with it

Proving to a security reviewer that each user can only read their own channels.

Features include:

Access control: Per-user, per-channel permissions with expiring tokens
Encryption: TLS by default, and end-to-end payloads we cannot read
Audit log: Who changed what in your account, and when
SSO: Your team signs in to the admin portal with your IdP
Data deletion: Remove stored messages and metadata on request

Without it you build

An auth service, token issuance, key rotation, and an audit trail

Read the docs

The global operation underneath the platform: the part you don’t learn to use. You verify that it meets your requirements, and stop worrying.

What you can ship with it

A launch-day surge from 40k to 2M users that nobody has to be paged for.

Features include:

Global network: Users connect to a nearby edge, not a far region
Multi-region deployment: Safeguards that keep your application running when a region fails
Region pinning: Keep data in a chosen region for compliance
99.999% SLA: Contractual uptime, roughly 5 minutes a year

Without it you build

Multi-region capacity, failover, edge PoPs, and 24/7 on-call

Read the docs

Your app + PubNub

Turn your app into a realtime experience

See what adding live updates can unlock in your application.

Your Sports App with PubNub

These are just a few examples of what you can build with PubNub. Don’t see your use case? Explore our Docs

Connect. Send.
Receive. Instantly.

Low-latency publish/subscribe you can program: filter, group, annotate, persist, and moderate messages on the network itself.

pubnub.addListener({  message: (e) => render(e.message),})pubnub.channel('scores')  .subscription().subscribe() await pubnub.publish({  channel: 'scores',  message: { goal: 1 }})

Clients publish to named channels, and subscribe to the channels they care about.

You didn't buildordered delivery, catch-up after reconnect, and fan-out at scale

Read the Pub/Sub docs

Send and receive: the app publishes a message to the scores channel and three subscribed devices receive it.

IN PRODUCTION

Behind the moments that matter.

Reported customer results, not platform-wide guarantees.

All customer stories

Sports, Media, Entertainment

212M

Requests per minute

FIFA Club World Cup 2025

More than watching. Being part of it.

DAZN used PubNub to bring chat, reactions, and social viewing to football fans.

Read the DAZN story

DAZN app on a phone streaming a live match with a 1,000,000 viewer count and fan reactions

Gaming

Overnight

chat integration

Come for the dragons. Stay for the guild.

Read the Pocket Gems story

Customer Service

Up to70%

tickets automated

Answers before the question lands.

Read the Swiggy story

Digital Health

250,000

patients reached

Care that reaches you the moment it matters.

Read the ManaDr story

Our promises

What PubNub promises you.

Pick one to see what it means for you.Tap one to see what it means for you.

01Promise

Build and ship interactive features faster

Your benefits

Faster development, shorter time to market, and more engineering capacity devoted to the customer experience. Begin with programmable pub/sub and add capabilities as your application requires.

Runs on

Pub/Sub MessagingMessage PersistenceData Sync50+ SDKsMCP ServerSkills

FIRST PUBLISH28ms

$ pubnub publish -c orders.live → delivered · 4 subscribers · 28ms → persisted · replay available

Your benefits

Faster development, shorter time to market, and more engineering capacity devoted to the customer experience. Begin with programmable pub/sub and add capabilities as your application requires.

Runs on

Pub/Sub MessagingMessage PersistenceData Sync50+ SDKsMCP ServerSkills

The real engineering problem

Real-time is easy.
At demo scale.

Publish, subscribe, messages appear: any team can ship that in a weekend, and for the ten people in the room it works perfectly. The real engineering problem is everything that surfaces between the demo and a global audience.

Concurrent users

32

10 · the demo1001K10K100K1M++

Demo night

Private beta

Public launch

The playoff moment

Drag the audience →

At this scale, honestly? A weekend prototype works fine. Keep dragging.

What surfaces as the audience grows

0 / 6 surfaced

Users
System you now own
Build it yourself

~50

Catch-up after dropped connections

your first user in a tunnel: gap detection, replay, dedupe

NOT YET

NOT YET

~50

Ordered delivery

exactly-once semantics under churn

NOT YET

NOT YET

~200

Presence

who’s online, in what state; valuable from day one, hard to keep true

NOT YET

NOT YET

~500

Per-user access control

grants, revocation, audit

NOT YET

NOT YET

~2K

Surge capacity & multi-region failover

one viral post, one match day: traffic is a step function

NOT YET

NOT YET

~5K

24/7 operation, indefinitely

real production traffic means a pager rotation, forever

NOT YET

NOT YET

operated as one managed network since 2012

0 to build & staff

0 already run

The real engineering problem

Real-time is easy.
At demo scale.

Publish, subscribe, messages appear: any team can ship that in a weekend, and for the ten people in the room it works perfectly. The real engineering problem is everything that surfaces between the demo and a global audience.

What surfaces as the audience grows

As the audience grows, six systems you’d otherwise build and operate yourself surface one by one. Or run on one managed network that has operated them since 2012.

FROM ~50 CONCURRENT USERS

Catch-up after dropped connections

your first user in a tunnel: gap detection, replay, dedupe

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

Ordered delivery

exactly-once semantics under churn

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

FROM ~200 CONCURRENT USERS

Presence

who’s online, in what state; valuable from day one, hard to keep true

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

FROM ~500 CONCURRENT USERS

Per-user access control

grants, revocation, audit

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

FROM ~2K CONCURRENT USERS

Surge capacity & multi-region failover

one viral post, one match day: traffic is a step function

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

FROM ~5K CONCURRENT USERS

24/7 operation, indefinitely

real production traffic means a pager rotation, forever

YOURS TO BUILD & RUN

PUBNUB OPERATES IT

operated as one managed network since 2012

6 to build & staff

6 already run

FOURTEEN YEARS OF OPERATIONS

Battle-tested. It's in PubNub's nature.

What you can't find anywhere else is someone who's been operating real-time at planetary scale for fourteen years, including the live streams that set world records for audience size.
Here's what that operation looks like, year by year.

1B+

DEVICES

10,000s

OF APPS

50+

SDKS

2026Fourteen years of five nines

Fourteen years in, the PubNub global network is as reliable as the day it went live, and the team behind it works as hard as ever to keep every customer online.

WHY CUSTOMERS DEPEND ON PUBNUB

Fourteen years operating the PubNub platform at planetary scale is not something a competitor spins up, and it's not something you should ever have to build.

2012
The network goes live
PubNub is founded and the real-time network takes its first production traffic: a global real-time layer developers can build on from their first line of code.
2013
SDKs everywhere
PubNub SDKs expand across web, mobile, and embedded: one API for every runtime.
2014
Beyond transport
Presence and Storage & Playback: the PubNub network starts carrying state and history alongside messages.
2016
Logic on the network
PubNub Functions launches: code running where the messages are, intercepting messages in real time and transforming them on the fly.
2018
The PubNub five-nines promise
The 99.999% SLA becomes the standard for PubNub, putting in writing the reliability customers already depended on.
2020
A billion devices
Billions of connected devices across tens of thousands of applications. Surges from global lockdown-era traffic are absorbed as normal.
2022
Residency & regions
Region pinning and data-residency controls mature. PubNub puts multi-region control in customers’ hands.
2024
The decisioning loop
PubNub Illuminate launches: a real-time decision platform that lets customers interrogate and act on live traffic.
2025
Built for coding agents
PubNub launches its MCP server and Skills for coding agents, taking a working real-time feature from days of integration to hours.
2026
Fourteen years of five nines
Fourteen years in, the PubNub global network is as reliable as the day it went live, and the team behind it works as hard as ever to keep every customer online.

WHY CUSTOMERS DEPEND ON PUBNUB

Fourteen years operating the PubNub platform at planetary scale is not something a competitor spins up, and it's not something you should ever have to build.

BUILD VS BUY

Answer your team’s questions before they ask.

These are the objections we hear most before teams become customers, and plenty of today’s customers raised them too. Pick one to see the answer that turned them into long-time PubNub fans.These are the objections we hear most before teams become customers, and plenty of today’s customers raised them too. Tap one to see the answer that turned them into long-time PubNub fans.

01Our answer

You can, but the socket is the easy part. The hard part is everything around it: ordered delivery, presence, catch-up after a dropped connection, per-user access, and failover across regions at five nines, operated 24/7. That’s a dedicated team and an on-call rotation, indefinitely. With PubNub, you ship the feature and skip the rotation.

Only if engineering time is free. The real cost of DIY is headcount, an on-call rotation, and the roadmap you delay while presence and scale are “almost done.” Every engineer keeping your real-time layer up is one who isn’t building your product. With PubNub, you pay for what you use, and that headcount goes back to your roadmap.

DIY cost, roughly

Engineers on your real-time layer: 7

$2.7M

to build & operate for 2 years, before your first differentiating feature

$0

platform-team overhead with consumption pricing

A fair question to ask of any vendor. Your application, backend, and business logic stay yours; PubNub sits behind a thin SDK layer you can wrap in your own interface from day one. Your data lives where you choose, with storage lockable to EU-only, US-only, or APAC-only regions, and message history stays retrievable through the API whenever you need it. You’re renting operations, not handing over your architecture.

No. On the backend, you program the behavior (Functions running on the network, subscribe filters, message actions, channel groups) while PubNub runs the reliability and scale. On the frontend, nothing is imposed: no UI kit you have to adopt, no widgets to restyle, so every screen looks and works exactly the way you design it. You own the logic and the experience; PubNub keeps it running at five nines.

Built on PubNub

The control plane for the Internet of Agents.

Connect and control agents across every framework, provider, and API, wherever they're hosted. No inbound ports, no tunnels, no firewall changes. Zero Trust by default.

Any framework
Every framework, provider, and API
Reach anywhere
Behind your firewall, in your VPC
Secure & instant
Global, sub-100ms, Zero Trust calls
Agents ↔ humans
People step into any loop, natively

Explore Blocks.ai

FAQ

Answered the way we'd answer in the room.

Pick a question to see the answer.Tap a question to see the answer.

01Our answer

channel: faq.live2 subscribers

What is PubNub, in one sentence?

you · publish()

Global infrastructure for real-time, interactive applications. You build the application. We operate the global network underneath it: pub/sub messaging, presence, data, logic, and security, at scale.

pubnub · delivered in 18ms ✓✓

Programmable pub/sub messaging is just one part of what PubNub offers. Operating everything around it (ordered delivery, catch-up after a dropped connection, presence, per-user access control, security, ultra-low latency, and multi-region failover at five-nines) is a multi-year platform effort completely removed from your workload with PubNub’s global infrastructure. We also offer: data and analytics handling, security built in, configurable logic all managed for you.

GET STARTED

Build the live experience

PubNub will operate the infrastructure underneath it.

Start Building Read the docs

Add it to the architecture you already have, with no re-platforming
Secured by default

Programmable Pub/Sub

Developer Tools+

Programmable Pub/Sub+

Presence+

Data storage+

Analytics+

Logic+

Integrations+

Security+

Network+

More than watching. Being part of it.

Build and ship interactive features faster+

Keep every user, device, and service in sync+

Scale globally without rebuilding+

Save on infrastructure and operations teams+

Get peace of mind across your entire live application layer+

The network goes live

A billion devices

Fourteen years of five nines

“We’ll just build it on AWS / a WebSocket layer.”+

“Isn’t this just pub/sub-as-a-service?”+

“Real-time isn’t a priority for us.”+

“Our stack is already built. We don’t need another platform.”+

“It’s cheaper to do it ourselves.”+

“We’re worried about lock-in.”+

“How do we know it’s secure / compliant enough for us?”+

“If PubNub runs it, do we lose control?”+

The control plane for the Internet of Agents.

Any framework

Reach anywhere

Secure & instant

Agents ↔ humans

What is PubNub, in one sentence?+

Isn’t this just WebSockets / pub/sub? I can do that myself.+

What counts as a “real-time, interactive application”?+

Do I have to rip out or rebuild my stack?+

What languages and platforms do you support?+

How do you handle scale and reliability?+

How is it secured?+

Where does my data live? Can I control regions?+

How does this work with AI and agents?+

How does pricing work?+