Ably built a genuinely well-engineered global realtime network, and teams rent access to it by the connection. 23blocks ships the same category of capability — channels, presence, WebRTC — as an open-source Realtime block you can run on our shared platform today and move onto your own AWS account when ownership matters more than convenience.
Ably's pricing and connection quotas change over time, and we're not going to cite numbers that will be stale by the time you read this. What doesn't change is the structural bet each approach makes.
| Approach | Ably | 23blocks |
|---|---|---|
| What you're adopting | A managed global network you connect to over the wire | An open-source Realtime block you deploy and run |
| Source code | Proprietary, Ably-operated | Open source, yours to read and fork |
| Where it runs | Ably's network, no alternative | Our shared platform, or your own AWS account |
| Who owns identity and tenants | You bring your own auth and stitch it to channels yourself | Auth and Companies blocks share the same user model already |
| Scope of the product | A dedicated realtime point service | One block inside a platform of 20+ open-source blocks |
| Enterprise audit path | Vendor's SOC reports and status page | Read the code your team is about to run |
| Moving off later | Rewrite against a new realtime provider | Graduate to your own AWS account, same code, no rewrite |
Realtime isn't a feature, it's a distributed system. These are the calls the block makes so your team doesn't have to make them under production load.
Public, private, and presence channels with server-side authorization checked on every single connect — not just at session start.
On reconnect, clients replay from the last acknowledged offset, so a dropped connection doesn't silently mean a dropped message.
Messages within a channel stay in order even under fan-out to thousands of subscribers — a guarantee that's easy to promise and hard to hold.
The small-but-fiddly UX signals — who's typing, what's been read — built in instead of hand-rolled per project.
Peer-to-peer video and audio with signaling handled for you, and TURN relay when two peers can't traverse each other's NAT directly.
Persisted, paginated message history for every channel, plus broadcast events and outbound webhooks to trigger the rest of your stack.
A point solution for realtime leaves these for you to answer separately. On 23blocks, the answers are already sitting on the shelf next to it.
Who is connected? The Realtime block authorizes and identifies every connection against the same Auth block that handles login everywhere else in your app — one user model, not a second identity system to sync.
Which tenant does this channel belong to? For any multi-tenant product, channels need to be scoped to an org or workspace. The Companies block already models tenants, so channel scoping is a lookup, not a new subsystem.
What triggers a notification? A sale closing, a reward unlocking, a form submitting — the events worth pushing live usually come from another block. Sales and Rewards can publish onto the same channels without a separate integration project.
A point service can't answer any of those questions — it only knows about connections. 23blocks is built so the questions come pre-answered: come for the WebSockets, leave with a platform.
Ably has spent years hardening a global message network at a scale most teams will never personally need to operate. That engineering is real, and there are situations where renting it beats owning it.
You need a global edge network today, not next quarter — Ably's presence-of-mind investment in worldwide points of presence is a genuine multi-year engineering effort you'd otherwise have to build yourself.
Realtime is your only backend need — if you have no auth, no tenants, and no other business logic to connect it to, a standalone point service is a reasonable, uncomplicated fit.
You'd rather not operate any infrastructure at all — even your own AWS account, run by us, is still more operational surface than a fully hosted network you never touch.
You're already deep into Ably's ecosystem — integrations, dashboards, and internal tooling already built around it don't get thrown away lightly, and that switching cost is worth weighing honestly.
None of that is wrong — it's a different bet on who operates the network. 23blocks is built for teams who want the same category of realtime capability but want to hold the code, the infrastructure, and the data model themselves. If that's not your priority, Ably is a solid choice.
Yes. As of July 31, 2026, the Realtime block's code is open source, same as every other block. You can read it, audit it, and run it on your own AWS account instead of a shared, metered network.
Ably operates a managed realtime network you connect to and rent by the connection. 23blocks ships the Realtime block as open-source code you can run on our shared platform or graduate to your own AWS account, and it already shares a user, auth, and tenant model with the rest of the platform instead of standing alone.
Yes. The Realtime block graduates to your own cloud account with a reversible migration and no code rewrite — the same open-source code, the same REST and WebSocket APIs, just running on infrastructure your team controls.
No. The moment you wire a channel you need to know who is connected and which tenant it belongs to. The Auth block and Companies block are already on the shelf and already share the Realtime block's user model, so channel authorization and tenant scoping are not a separate project.
Start free on the shared platform, open source underneath, with a real path to your own AWS account when you're ready.
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