The most capable self-hosted realtime server against a managed platform: what Centrifugo gives you free, and what stays on your plate.
Centrifugo is the strongest open source server in this space: presence, history with recovery, five transports, and official SDKs across major languages, Apache-2.0 licensed. If you are set on self-hosting, it is probably the right choice. This comparison is about whether you should be.
When Foony fits
Nobody on your team runs Redis for this. Centrifugo scales through a Redis, NATS, or Postgres engine you provision, monitor, and upgrade, alongside the server nodes themselves.
The paywall items come included: per-user rate limiting, token revocation, user blocking, and analytics are Centrifugo PRO features with contact-sales pricing for corporate customers only. Foony’s equivalent controls are just part of the platform.
Delivery semantics without tuning: Centrifugo is at-most-once by default, recovery is opt-in per namespace and bounded by a history window its docs call a hot cache, and clients must tolerate duplicates on recovery. Foony deduplicates and backfills by default.
A hosted product exists at all: Centrifugo has no official managed offering, so adopting it means operating it.
When Centrifugo fits
Free at any scale, Apache-2.0, with an official benchmark of a million connections. At big scale your servers beat any per-message bill.
Transport breadth: WebSocket, HTTP streaming, SSE, GRPC, and WebTransport, plus delta compression.
Official SDKs for Python, Flutter, Swift, Java, and Go clients.
Everything stays in your infrastructure, with JWT or proxy auth against your own backend.
Features
Foony
Centrifugo
Delivery
Effectively exactly once (idempotent publish, client dedup), on by default
At most once by default, opt-in recovery within the history window, duplicates possible
History
Per-prefix channel rules, up to 30 days
Sliding window per namespace, a hot cache by its own docs, app DB stays authoritative
Presence
Built in, with automatic re-entry on reconnect
Built in, with join and leave events
Rate limiting and revocation
Included
PRO features, contact sales
Message size
64 KB free, up to 1 MB on paid plans
64 KB default WebSocket cap, configurable
Operations
Foony
Centrifugo
Runtime
Managed
Go binary fleet plus Redis, NATS, or Postgres engine, run by you
Cost model
Free tier, then per-message plans from $19/month
Free software, your servers and ops time, PRO license unpriced publicly
Managed option
It is one
None official
Competitor numbers last checked July 2026. If something has drifted, tell us and we will fix it.
Try it on the free tier
9M messages a month, presence, history, and the Pusher-compatible API are all on the free plan. No card required.