11 Best Software to Build Real-time Applications

A powerful real-time application-building software can launch your next micro-blogging app like Twitter or a video streaming platform like YouTube in the blink of an eye.

Any messaging app or an online gaming platform that makes you feel lively with its instant responses is labeled as a real-time application.

Whether you are a business owner who wants to streamline your services online or an individual with a startup idea to build the next lively app that addicts your audience, this list of the best software to build real-world applications can automate the process for you.

You can also check these top AI tools to automate and build apps faster.

How do you identify real-time applications?

Some of you may be unsure of the term real-time application, but definitely use them whether for work or entertainment, as they are indispensable in this computer world.

To give you a clear picture, Netflix, Spotify, Maps, and Uber are all real-time applications that respond to you in no time. These applications are absolutely known for their responsiveness to delivering a seamless user experience.

So, you can say something that replies to you instantly and demands you to stay active and engaged with the app while using it is called a real-time application.

On the other side, if you notice a wait for the response, then it should be a non-real-time application. For instance, when you send an email, it stays in the email server until the recipient checks for the inbox, while the notification pops up instantly in the case of WhatsApp.

You would majorly see real-time applications in video streaming, gaming, stock trading, and traffic monitoring industries, while file storage systems like google drive, photo editing software, and doc editing platforms like Word that don’t require real-time data processing are the use cases of non-real-time applications.

Without any further ado, let’s jump into the list of the low code and best software to build real-time applications.

Ably

If you’re looking for a platform that can build real-time experiences for you, Ably is a perfect choice. You get a variety of APIs and SDKs to build and scale real-time applications.

Its pub/sub infrastructure is what makes it perfect for both ends of the message delivery structure. The channel acts as a mediator here to receive and deliver data.

Live location in WhatsApp updates you on the exact whereabouts of your chat partner. With Ably, you can implement this by creating a channel between publishers and subscribers to talk in real-time, and the tool is so fast that it can route the data to the right client globally in as short as 60ms.

Features:

• Its presence feature allows you quickly create a chat room or an online multiplayer game as it tracks active people across devices.
• Employs Token authentication for reliability and role-based access.
• 7 physical data centers and 385 edge acceleration points of presence to ensure high availability and speed.
• Well-packed for B2C business models.

ZEGOCLOUD

ZEGOCLOUD is a real-time communication cloud service vendor that offers one-stop audio and video chat solutions for over 100 application scenarios. With ZEGOCLOUD’s developer-friendly SDKs, you can quickly build real-time applications in minutes, using just a few lines of code, eliminating the need to start from scratch.

ZEGOCLOUD ‘s solutions cater to a wide range of industries, including social entertainment, online education, e-commerce, telehealth, gaming, and fitness.

As a leading-edge vendor, ZEGOCLOUD leverages advanced technologies such as AI denoise, video super-resolution, and virtual avatars, accumulating a staggering 3 billion call minutes per day.

Features

• New users enjoy a free trial of 10,000 minutes.
• API options available for different levels of needs: Scenario-based UIKits and low-level core SDK.
• Rich developer resources.
• Support 15,000+ end-user device models across all major OS platforms.
• Professional technical support is available 24/7.

Pusher

Pusher is a cloud-based solution that delivers a powerful real-time experience for both mobile and web apps.

Pusher has truly mastered implementing multi-user gaming, collaborative editing, live tracking, and in-app messaging into your online businesses, closing more conversions.

You have APIs whether to build a real-time application from scratch or want to extend real-time functionalities to the existing ones.

Slack, Datadog, and Sematext are popular tools that can integrate well with Pusher to leverage real-time messaging or alerting systems.

Features:

• Websocket fallbacks for low latency and staying connected in any circumstance.
• Can manage really high volume, like I could say, billions of messages each month.
• SDKs and library support for all major programming languages.
• Flexible payment options for any scale.

PubNub

People don’t buy if you can’t show what they get from your offerings. PubNub uses this trick to attract potential developers and businesses to invest in them.

Want to explore the surface of the tool? Go to PubNub and scroll down until you see a collaborative drawing tool. Here, you can add your pencil marks to the same canvas where other active users across the globe are drawing.

By now, you should sense how responsive and real-time the tool is.

PubNub employs a publish-subscribe message communication system, in its terms called a Data stream network. That is, publishers can share real-time data instantly to any device subscribed to the stream via channels.

Features:

• Utilized by Fortune companies like Hotstar, e-Bay, and Delivery Hero.
• Data transmission is under a quarter of a second.
• Easily integrate SDKs for custom apps.
• Data streaming services for IoT devices.

PieSocket

PieSocket is one of the leading app-making software developed to deploy fast, secure, and affordable real-time features into your app. It employs WebSocket and WebRTC protocols for the real-time transmission of audio, video, and data between devices and over the web.

Features:

• Implements JWT authentication token for secured channels.
• You can download logs of all your messages into a CSV file.
• Daily reports with intuitive graphs and dashboards.
• It claims to be highly available with 99.999% of uptime.
• Flexible enough to support both client-client and server-client messaging.

GetStream

Stream is a powerful cloud-based software for powering your apps with some real-time sense.

It has a powerful and scalable API well-suited for two use cases, with real-time chat messaging being the first one and building social activity feeds being the other effortless task for this app maker.

Features:

• You have SDKs of your choice available in numerous languages and frameworks like React, React Native, Android SDK, Angular SDK, and you name it.
• Pre-built chat messaging and activity feed UI kits.
• The average API response is as short as 9 ms.
• Extensive tutorials to building feeds and chats with its API.

MirrorFly

Mirrorfly makes real-time video, audio, and chat communication less complex with its APIs and SDKs.

One of the cool features is you get to add chat APIs to your applications in just 30 minutes, and the best part is it’s a lifetime free.

Build a custom feature-packed face-face chat experience via its video calling APIs and SDKs for Web and Mobile apps.

Features:

• 150+ video chat features for seamless collaboration.
• You have a 21-day free trial to test the video-calling API at no risk since it doesn’t require you to fill in the credit card details.
• Flexible pricing based on active users and required features.
• Provides developer-friendly pre-built SDKs for effortless development or integration.

Solace

Solace PubSub+ platform implements event-driven architecture to design, share, and manage events across cloud and IoT environments based on the pub/sub model.

For your information, an event is a change of state, it can be due to anything from user requests to IoT sensor readings.

Moreover, Pubsub+ event brokers will efficiently move your information across applications and devices all over the world, making Solace a perfect middleware technology.

Features:

• Design and develop event-driven real apps faster.
• PubSub+’s mission control makes it flexible to deploy and manage event brokers anywhere on the cloud or on-premise and connect to the mesh.
• Event portal to visualize and optimize the event flow of your ecosystem.
• Event management, event streaming, and event monitoring are all in one place.
• Perfect for large and modern enterprises.

Redis

Redis is a perfect software that’s a game changer for developers with less and simple code solutions allow architects to boost performance and scalability and make scaling from code to production a breeze for the DevOps team.

To reduce the complexity of building and managing real-time applications, Redis Enterprise has streams to collect data, PubSub for data distribution, JSON for storage, and Redis search for indexing.

Redis is the trusted choice of over 10000 companies that rely on this platform for building real-time customer experiences.

Features:

• It claims to have a database that’s as fast as a caching system.
• Built for speed and simplicity.
• Microsoft, FedEx, Adobe, and Groww are among the top-tier brands to trust Redis.
• It can be deployed both on-premise and cloud.

Hazelcast

Businesses used to run batch jobs on the data and wait for insights until the job was done, but today’s world demands processing data and getting responses parallelly. Thanks to Hazelecast, it is here to address this core functionality, data processing in real-time with instant responses.

Hazelcast is a distributed computing platform for storing and processing a high volume of data in real-time. The platform allows you to quickly build and deploy real-time applications at any scale.

Moreover, the platform supports jupyter notebooks, python, and other MLOps tools used by data scientists/Engineers to integrate and manage ML models in real-time.

Features:

• Seamless access to data at rest and data in motion.
• You can perform SQL querying for accessing in-memory storage.
• Uses WAN replication for multi-cloud deployments.
• Hazlecast enterprise cluster automatically shifts to disaster recovery clusters to avoid disruption in case of an outage.

Socket.IO

Another popular software that builds real-time applications and is used by top-tier brands like Microsoft, Trello, and NASA is Socket.IO.

We call it a library that implements WebSockets to build a minimal overhead communication channel between clients and servers. In case the WebSockets are down, it automatically turns to HTTP protocol for a reliable and continuous connection.

Features:

• Documentation is more like a tutorial that helps you to build applications from scratch.
• Socket.IO’s unique APIs for both server-side and client-side implementations of several languages and frameworks.
• Huge community, meaning you get free help for many blocks.
• It can create multiple rooms and namespaces, and clients can subscribe to their preferred ones.

Final Words

I know it can be challenging either if we have tons of options to choose from or no choices at all. There are a plethora of software platforms in the market, providing various functionalities to build real-time applications.

So, we’ve done the research for you and marked the best real-time app-building software programs in this list, with their unique features and use cases.

Hope it helps you find the right tool to build your next big real-time application.

You may also explore some best low-code or no-code platforms to build amazing products.