The rise of the internet has increased the demand for real-time communication, impacting apps, interfaces, and social media. While WebSockets are popular for enabling real-time interactions, they may not always be the best choice. The right technology depends on the use case, and there are several alternatives to consider.
What is a WebSocket?
A WebSocket is a protocol that provides full-duplex communication and bi-directional communication channels between clients and servers over the web. It allows real-time data transmission between the client side and the client-server without reconnecting to the server.
Why choose a WebSocket Alternative?
While WebSockets offer many features, they may not always be the most efficient choice and can add complexity to a project. Depending on the use case, WebSockets might have drawbacks that impact performance. For example, while WebSockets are known for their advanced capabilities, they can sometimes be overkill, especially when dealing with high concurrency. WebSocket connections need to remain open between the client and server, which increases server load and puts pressure on the infrastructure as the number of connections grows.
Security: WebSockets are not as secure as some alternatives and can be vulnerable to exploitation by malicious actors. Common security concerns with WebSockets include cross-site WebSocket hijacking and origin spoofing, making them less secure than other protocols.
Interoperability: While WebSockets are supported by most modern web browsers and networks, compatibility can be an issue with legacy systems. If the software is used in older browsers or networks, it's important to check if WebSockets are supported. Additionally, some networks and proxies may block WebSocket connections, so the environment where the software is deployed is a key consideration.
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WebSocket Alternatives
1. Long Polling
Long polling is an approach where the client sends an HTTP/HTTPS request to the server, but instead of receiving an instant response from the server, it entails maintaining the HTTP connection. Maintaining the HTTP connection enables the server to reply later when data becomes available, or the timeout threshold has been reached. After receiving the response, the client will immediately send the subsequent request.
Long polling achieves real-time communication without the bi-directional communication channels that WebSockets provide. The core difference is instead of maintaining a persistent connection as with WebSockets, the client will send multiple requests to re-establish the connection with the server.
2. MQTT
MQTT is a lightweight, publish-subscribe, machine-to-machine network protocol designed for remote locations with devices that have limited network bandwidth. Smart sensors, wearables, and other IoT devices typically need to use such a protocol due to their resource constraints. While WebSockets can be used for various applications, MQTT is explicitly designed for machine-to-machine communication, which is why it’s considered an alternative under these use cases. MQTT provides features like low overhead, efficient message delivery, and support for offline operation.
3. WebRTC
WebRTC is a free, open-source project providing web browser and mobile devices with real-time communication. It is written in C++ and JavaScript that provides web browsers and mobile devices with real-time communication. WebRTC is built to stream audio and video directly from peer-to-peer without needing server-side connections or additional plugins. For use cases such as live streaming, video conferences, or group calls, these functionalities can be engineered rapidly with HTML5 and JavaScript using the WebRTC API. In summary, WebRTC’s peer-to-peer nature can help reduce the server load and provide a more efficient and high-quality communication experience compared to WebSockets in these use cases.
4. WebTransport
WebTransport is a new protocol designed for low-latency, high-throughput communication between clients and servers, addressing limitations of WebSockets. It supports multiple protocols like HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC, and is UDP-based. Unlike WebSockets, WebTransport allows sending different types of data, such as images and text, over a single connection through multiplexing, improving scalability and reducing overhead.
WebTransport's UDP-based nature results in lower latency than TCP-based WebSockets, as it avoids error correction and retransmission. It also offers faster connection establishment via QUIC. Despite lacking error correction, WebTransport provides greater reliability in high-bandwidth and challenging network conditions, offering reliable streams for unidirectional or bidirectional data transfer.
5. Sever-Sent Events
Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a server push technology that allows a server to push data to a client over a single HTTP connection. SSE is a simple, efficient protocol for sending real-time updates to a web page or application, making it well-suited for specific use cases. Unlike traditional HTTP requests, which close the connection after a single response, SSE opens a long-lived connection between the server and the client, allowing the server to send multiple updates over the same connection. Compared to WebSockets’s bidirectional connections, Server-Sent Events are only unidirectional. The client only has to initiate the connection and close it. However, the limited feature set of Server-Sent Events makes it easier to implement and debug. Server-Sent Events was the start of the EventSource API, which makes it easy to implement in web browsers.
6. Short polling
One of the first developed solutions for receiving regular data updates was HTTP polling. Polling is a technique where the client repeatedly sends requests to the web server until it updates. For example, all modern web browsers offer support for XMLHttpRequest, one of the original methods of polling servers.
These earlier solutions were still not ideal for efficient real-time communication—short polling is intensive because, for every request, the non-payload data is re-sent and must be parsed, including the header HTML, the web URL, and other repetitive information that wastes resources.
7. GraphQL Subscriptions
GraphQL Subscriptions uses a publish-subscribe model to deliver real-time updates. This typically involves WebSocket connections under the hood. Use Cases include Applications already using GraphQL APIs and Real-time collaboration tools. Integrates seamlessly with GraphQL and support Strongly-typed schema. The biggest limitations are requiring a GraphQL server with subscription support and complexity in setup and debugging.
8. AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol)
AMQP is a robust protocol for message-oriented middleware. Used in financial systems and enterprise messaging. The main advantages are reliability and security. This protocol also supports transactions. It's a heavyweight compared to Long Polling and requires a dedicated message broker (e.g., RabbitMQ)
How PubNub can help with WebSocket alternatives
WebSocket protocol and its alternatives, such as WebTransport, are all valuable solutions to handling real-time communications. However, no matter what solution is selected, time will be wasted in implementing the underlying infrastructure and complexities when scaling. For example, when using particular technologies such as Socket.io to create a WebSocket server, developers will still have to take care of dynamically spawning servers around the world behind a load balancer to manage the utilization of each web server.
PubNub’s real-time data APIs allow users to develop powerful, event-driven applications to facilitate real-time communication across all devices, and use cases from consumer to enterprise. PubNub offers a variety of SDKs, such as a JavaScript SDK for web applications and a C-Core SDK for IoT applications, to ensure seamless integration with the chosen device. Moreover, PubNub allows data streaming, multiuser collaboration and live audience engagement, making it an ideal solution at any scale.
With PubNub, you don’t have to worry about selecting a suitable alternative or the underlying complexities of implementing a real-time solution.
Now that you understand when to use WebSockets or an alternative, sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo to explore what you can build with PubNub.
