When choosing between realtime messaging infrastructure and complete collaboration solutions, most teams focus on the wrong metrics. The real question isn't about WebSocket connections or message throughput: it's about whether you want to spend months building collaborative features or days integrating them. Finding the right solution for collaboration and workflow management means understanding what you're actually signing up to build versus what you get out of the box. In this guide, we'll discuss the key decision factors to consider when choosing the right tool to achieve your collaboration and engagement goals. We will compare Velt and Pusher, discussing implementation complexity, scalability considerations, and the hidden costs of each approach so that you can choose the best realtime collaboration SDK for your team's needs.

TLDR:

• Velt offers 25+ collaboration features in 10 lines of code vs Pusher requiring months to build basic features

• Pusher provides messaging infrastructure only; you build all UI components and workflows from scratch

• Velt includes comments, live cursors, video calls, and screen recording ready-made with full customization

• Velt scales to 200M comments with dedicated support vs Pusher's expensive per-message pricing model

What Pusher Does and Their Approach

Pusher operates as a pub/sub messaging service that offers bidirectional hosted APIs for adding realtime features to apps. Their approach focuses on WebSocket technology to allow instant data transfer between servers and clients through channel-based communication.

They target developers building realtime updates, dashboards, and basic collaborative features with an infrastructure-first approach. You get the pipes, but you build everything else.

The core of Pusher's offering revolves around channels where clients can subscribe to receive messages and servers can publish updates. This works well for simple use cases like live notifications or basic data synchronization. But when you need actual collaboration features, that's where things get complicated.

Their model assumes you have the development resources to build complete UI components, handle message persistence, and create user-facing collaboration workflows. For teams with specific infrastructure requirements and unlimited development time, this approach can work. But most product teams need to ship features, not spend months building commenting systems from scratch.

What Velt Does and Our Approach

Velt offers a complete collaboration layer that drops into any JavaScript stack with 25+ pre-built features. Our approach combines both frontend components and backend infrastructure in one package, letting developers add features like comments, live cursors, video huddles, and screen recording with minimal code.

We serve product-led SaaS companies building editors, dashboards, and design tools who want world-class multiplayer functionality without maintaining complex infrastructure. The collaboration software market is growing rapidly, and teams need solutions that let them focus on their core product instead of rebuilding collaboration features.

Our SDK includes everything from realtime presence and contextual comments to voice huddles and screen recording. Each component works out of the box but remains fully customizable to match your brand and workflows.

Velt provides both the frontend SDK and backend APIs in one solution, eliminating the need to build collaboration features from scratch while maintaining enterprise-grade security and scalability.

The key difference is that we've already built the collaboration features your users expect. You get Figma-style comments, live cursors, presence indicators, and notification systems that integrate in minutes, not months. We've written extensively about the best commenting SDKs if you want to see how we compare across the collaboration space.

Feature Set and Implementation Complexity

Pusher offers basic pub/sub messaging infrastructure with channels, presence detection, and event triggering. That sounds complete until you realize it requires developers to build all UI components and collaboration workflows from scratch.

For example, if you want to add commenting to your app with Pusher you'll need to build the comment UI, handle threading, manage user mentions, create notification systems, and handle comment persistence. This could mean the development and maintenance of thousands of lines of custom frontend code for features that users expect to work smoothly.

Here's what you get with each approach:

With Pusher, you're building a collaboration suite on top of their messaging infrastructure.

Velt provides ready-made components for realtime presence, contextual comments, video huddles, screen recording, live cursors, and notifications that integrate with 10 lines of code. Our customization options let you style everything to match your brand without rebuilding core functionality.

The implementation complexity difference is stark. With Pusher, you're signing up for a major development project. With Velt, you're adding proven collaboration features to your existing app. We've detailed customizing commenting SDKs if you want to see the level of control you maintain.

Scalability and Infrastructure Limitations

Pusher’s architecture can create latency issues at scale as your user base grows. Developer feedback consistently mentions connection limits and expensive message-based pricing that can spike unexpectedly with usage.

The bigger issue is that Pusher requires developers to handle message persistence, history, and conflict resolution manually. When multiple users are editing the same document or commenting simultaneously, you need strong conflict resolution. That's not something you want to build from scratch.

Their pricing model charges per message, which can get expensive quickly in collaborative scenarios. Every cursor movement, comment, or presence update counts as a message. Scale that across hundreds of concurrent users, and costs add up fast.

Velt offers scalable WebSocket infrastructure with 200M comments and 2TB storage in base plans. We handle automatic reconnection, offline queuing, and built-in conflict resolution through CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types).

Our infrastructure is designed for collaboration workloads. We understand that collaborative apps generate high-frequency, low-latency events that need reliable delivery and conflict resolution. The realtime collaboration SDK space shows how different approaches handle scale, and purpose-built solutions consistently outperform generic messaging services.

We've compared our approach to other collaboration-focused solutions in our Velt vs Liveblocks analysis if you want to see how we stack up against other purpose-built collaboration tools.

Developer Experience and Support

Pusher offers API documentation and basic support, but the development burden falls entirely on your team. When you're building complex collaborative workflows on top of their messaging infrastructure, troubleshooting becomes your responsibility.

Community discussions reveal common issues with concurrent connections and outdated documentation. When your collaborative features break, you're debugging both your custom code and the underlying messaging layer.

The support model reflects their infrastructure-first approach. You get email support for their APIs, but the collaboration features you build on top are your problem to solve.

Velt provides dedicated Slack channels, engineer pairing sessions, detailed documentation, and pre-built examples for rapid implementation across React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte frameworks.

Our support model recognizes that collaboration features are complex. When you're implementing comments, presence, or video calls, having direct access to the engineers who built these features makes a huge difference. We've seen teams like Trumpet increase engagement by using our collaboration features with dedicated support.

The developer experience difference comes down to ownership. With Pusher, you own the entire collaboration layer built on their messaging infrastructure. With Velt, we own the collaboration features while you own the integration and customization.

FAQ

How long does it take to implement Velt compared to building collaboration features with Pusher?

Velt can be integrated in days with just 10 lines of code, while building similar collaboration features on Pusher's infrastructure typically takes months of custom development work.

What's the main difference between Velt and Pusher's approach to collaboration?

Pusher provides messaging infrastructure that requires you to build all UI components and collaboration workflows from scratch, while Velt offers complete frontend components and backend APIs in one solution with 25+ pre-built collaboration features.

Can I customize Velt's collaboration components to match my brand?

Yes, Velt provides full customization options including template variables, custom data, conditional display, and custom behavior while maintaining the core functionality of each component.

When should I choose Velt over building on Pusher's infrastructure?

Choose Velt if you want to ship collaboration features quickly without spending months building commenting systems, live cursors, and video calls from scratch, especially if you're a product-led SaaS company focused on your core product rather than collaboration infrastructure.

What kind of support do I get with Velt versus Pusher?

Velt provides dedicated Slack channels, engineer pairing sessions, and detailed documentation across multiple frameworks, while Pusher offers email support for their APIs but leaves you to troubleshoot the collaboration features you build on top.

Final thoughts on choosing between collaboration tools and messaging infrastructure

The decision between Velt and Pusher really comes down to whether you want to build collaboration features or just use them. Pusher gives you the foundation to create something custom, but Velt gives you the finished features your users already expect. If you're looking for the best realtime collaboration SDK that actually includes the collaboration part, Velt handles the heavy lifting so you can focus on what makes your product unique. Your team can ship collaborative features this week instead of spending months building them from scratch.