Keep Django for what it is great at, and weigh running an ASGI fleet against a managed realtime layer beside it.
Django Channels adds WebSockets to Django through consumers and a Redis channel layer, run on an ASGI server fleet you operate. It keeps everything inside your Django project. The tradeoffs live in the channel layer’s delivery model and in everything the browser side has to build itself.
When Foony fits
Delivery beyond at-most-once. The channel layer spec requires messages be dropped rather than ever delivered twice, group sends "silently drop" when a channel is over its default capacity of 100, and 99.99% is the stated best-effort target. Foony deduplicates and backfills instead.
A real client. Channels ships none: the official tutorial uses a raw WebSocket whose close handler logs an error, and reconnection is your code. Foony’s SDK reconnects, re-attaches, and replays.
Presence and history exist. On Channels both are third-party or DIY.
No ASGI fleet: Daphne processes, supervisors, nginx WebSocket proxying, and Redis scaling stay off your plate, while Django keeps serving HTTP exactly as before.
When Django Channels fits
Consumers run inside Django: sessions, auth middleware, and the ORM are right there with no token endpoint or second system.
Free and BSD-licensed, maintained under the Django Software Foundation.
Strict data residency, everything stays on your servers.
Features
Foony
Django Channels
Delivery
Effectively exactly once (idempotent publish, client dedup)
At most once by spec, groups drop silently over capacity (default 100 per channel)
Client
SDK with reconnect, resume, and queued publishes
Raw WebSocket, reconnection is your code
Presence
Built in, with automatic re-entry on reconnect
Third party or DIY
History
Per-prefix channel rules, up to 30 days
None, messages expire from Redis in 60 seconds
Operations
Foony
Django Channels
Runtime
Managed service, Django keeps serving HTTP
Daphne/ASGI fleet plus production Redis, supervised and proxied by you
Cost model
Free tier, then per-message plans from $19/month
Servers, Redis, and ops time
Auth
Your Django view mints channel-scoped tokens
Django sessions via ASGI middleware
Competitor numbers last checked July 2026. If something has drifted, tell us and we will fix it.
Moving over
Django usually stays the publisher: views and Celery tasks that group_send today publish over Foony’s REST API instead, and a small view mints tokens with each user’s channel grants. Browsers swap the raw WebSocket for the SDK, which is where the reconnect and catch-up code stops being yours to maintain.
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.