Ably Realtime

What do you like best about the product?

Ably offers a simple yet power and reliable infrastructure for realtime use cases, with a very well-designed and developer friendly platform. Our engineers are hard to please, but they praised Ably for the ease of use in integrating with our platform and building an implementation on top of, including several options for supported languages and frameworks! Ably have also been extremely helpful, proactive and collaborative in working with us over several years of partnership now, always friendly faces that are ready to help us out.

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly there's very little we haven't enjoyed about our work with Ably to date, perhaps the only minor gripe is that when we onboarded Ably they hadn't yet built out some of the plug-and-play application examples we could've made use of (ie a realtime chat client), but they've added a lot more since then, and with the ease of integration it didn't take us too long to roll our own - I encourage Ably to keep building more customisable off-the-shelf solutions to accelerate value for your customers!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Delivering a realtime pub-sub infrastructure for us unlocked the ability to offer real time, multi-person group chat and feed functionality within our platform that would've taken us months to roll ourselves, and reduces cost of maintaining such a solution. We are exploring the potential of further use cases for Ably that are mission-critical to our business, which is a testament to our belief in their platform and them as a vendor!

What do you like best about the product?

We were able to build a chat client as a POC really quickly within our existing native apps with realtime push functionality. Integrated very easily within our react client using the hooks that Ably provide. Great customer support during our development from knowledgeable individuals.

What do you dislike about the product?

Understanding how our current realtime workload which uses a large number of dynamic channels would translate for the Ably pricing model.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used ably realtime as a platform to provide realtime push for a feature that we built.

What do you like best about the product?

We chose Ably on our organization for their reliability. During our implementation phase, we were onboarded and guided by very smart people, which impressed on us the confidence to see that they really know what they are doing and that they are serious about their reliability promises.

What do you dislike about the product?

Scaling up our usage of Ably requires a lot of attention to the pricing model.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Delivering billions of messages per day to our client applications

What do you like best about the product?

Ably has been a key part of how we deliver real-time race data across the NASCAR Tracks App, NASCAR Mobile App, and NASCAR.com. We use ABLY every weekend for NASCAR live events at scale.

1. True Low-Latency Performance
Ably delivers fast, reliable real-time data—crucial for race fans tracking every millisecond of on-track action. Whether it’s lap-by-lap leaderboards, in-car telemetry, or live timing, Ably keeps our apps perfectly in sync.

2. Scalable
We’ve seen Ably scale effortlessly across hundreds of thousands of users on race weekends without a hiccup. It gives us confidence to deliver a consistent experience no matter the event size.

3. Developer-Friendly APIs and SDKs
The implementation experience has been excellent. Ably’s well-documented APIs and flexible SDKs make it easy to integrate into both our web and mobile stacks—including our React Native-based Tracks app. We were able to integrate ABLY in to our workflows quicker than we originally planned due to their help, and well documented systems.

4. Pub/Sub Architecture That Just Works
Ably’s channel-based publish/subscribe model maps perfectly to our needs—streaming car position updates, driver audio triggers, and leaderboard changes to fans in real time.

6. Operational Transparency
We appreciate the real-time monitoring and analytics tools Ably provides. It helps our dev and ops teams understand traffic patterns, message throughput, and potential bottlenecks with zero guesswork. The customer support we receive is top tier as they are always available and quick to respond.

What do you dislike about the product?

If we had to nitpick, it would be that Ably offers so many powerful features, it can take some upfront planning to decide which capabilities to lean into. Learning the best ways to work with socket based applications, and message delivery / sizes was tricky but Ably had great documentation to assist.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ably delivers fast, reliable real-time data—crucial for race fans tracking every millisecond of on-track action. Whether it’s lap-by-lap leaderboards, in-car telemetry, or live timing, Ably keeps our apps perfectly in sync across all of our products

What do you like best about the product?

We leverage Ably extensively in the new TouchTunes iOS and Android mobile app. Ease of integration and support, rock solid performance and elasticity, and a reasonable pricing strategy were key criteria in our selection of Ably about a year ago.
Ably support has been responsive and competent, and working with Ably has felt more like a partnership than a client-vendor engagement. The product performs well under load, and the interaction model is well designed.

What do you dislike about the product?

Newer features generally appear for web clients with months lag for iOS and Android clients.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Reliable, fast messaging from backend to one or many clients.
Future use cases will involve client initiated messaging.