Both speak the Pusher protocol Laravel broadcasting uses, so this choice is purely run-it-yourself against hosted.
Laravel Reverb is the first-party, MIT-licensed WebSocket server for Laravel broadcasting, and it speaks the same Pusher protocol Foony does. Echo, broadcast(), and routes/channels.php work identically on both. What differs is everything around the protocol: who runs the server, what happens on deploys, and what the ceilings are.
When Foony fits
Nothing to operate. Reverb in production means ulimits, the ext-uv extension past roughly 1,000 connections, nginx tuning, Supervisor, a dedicated Redis once you scale horizontally, and a load balancer. Foony is an environment variable change.
Deploys don’t disconnect everyone. Restarting Reverb gracefully terminates every connection. Foony connections live outside your deploy cycle.
Ceilings move: Reverb documents about 28,000 connections per box before you scale horizontally, and its default message cap is 10 KB. Foony plans reach 150,000 connections and 1 MB messages.
A path beyond the protocol: Foony’s native SDKs add history, guaranteed ordering, and exactly once semantics that the Pusher protocol itself cannot express.
When Laravel Reverb fits
Free, first party, and in the box: for a Laravel app with modest concurrency, Reverb with Forge or Laravel Cloud is genuinely easy.
Data residency: frames never leave your infrastructure.
Laravel Pulse gives built-in monitoring, and Laravel Cloud offers managed Reverb if you want hosted-but-first-party.
The same protocol, different platforms
Foony
Laravel Reverb
Laravel Echo and broadcasting
Works unchanged
Works unchanged
Run by
Foony
You (or Laravel Cloud)
Deploy behavior
Connections unaffected by your deploys
reverb:restart terminates all connections
Message size
64 KB free, up to 1 MB on paid plans
10 KB default, configurable
Connections per node
Not your problem, plans to 150k
~1,000 without ext-uv, ~28k per box, then horizontal scaling with Redis
History and guarantees
Available via the native SDKs beside the Pusher layer
Not part of the protocol
Cost
Foony
Laravel Reverb
Software
Free tier, then plans from $19/month
Free (MIT)
What you pay for
Messages
Servers, Redis, load balancer, and the time to run them
Competitor numbers last checked July 2026. If something has drifted, tell us and we will fix it.
Moving over
Switching in either direction is environment variables, which keeps this comparison honest: try Foony without touching code, and leave the same way if it doesn’t fit. Moving to Foony from Reverb: