A document-collaboration toolkit and a realtime messaging platform overlap less than their landing pages suggest.
Liveblocks builds collaborative documents: CRDT storage, Yjs, comments, notifications, and text-editor plugins, organized around rooms. Foony moves messages: channels, presence, history, and chat. The overlap is presence and broadcast, and the right choice follows from which of the two products you are actually building.
When Foony fits
Fan-out beyond a document. Liveblocks caps simultaneous connections per room at 10 on Free, 20 on Pro, 50 on Team, and 100 on Enterprise. Foony channels take an app’s whole connection allowance, 150,000 on the largest plan.
Broadcast that is a product, not a side channel. Liveblocks broadcast events are fire-and-forget with no history, replay, or documented delivery guarantees. Foony orders, stores, and backfills.
One meter instead of six: Liveblocks drains a monthly credit pool across collaboration minutes, comments, storage updates, stored GB, notifications, and file GB, and background tabs bill by default. It is also on its third billing model in three years.
Beyond JavaScript: Liveblocks SDKs are JS and React, with a Node-only server SDK. Foony ships JS, Go, REST, and the Pusher protocol.
EU data residency without an Enterprise contract. Liveblocks region-locking is Enterprise-only.
When Liveblocks fits
You are building document collaboration. CRDT storage, Yjs, multiplayer undo/redo, and version history out of the box beat anything you would assemble on raw pub/sub.
Comments and notifications as products: threads, mentions, an inbox, and email, Slack, and Teams delivery, included on every plan.
Best-in-class React DX with prebuilt components and editor plugins for Tiptap, BlockNote, and Lexical.
Mostly solo sessions: collaboration minutes only accrue with two or more people in a room, so single-user sessions cost nothing.
Fit
Foony
Liveblocks
Core object
A channel, any number of subscribers
A room, 10 to 100 connections by plan
Broadcast events
Effectively exactly once (idempotent publish, client dedup)
Ephemeral, discarded if the recipient is offline, no replay
History
Per-prefix channel rules, up to 30 days
Documents persist, broadcast events don’t. Version history 24 h to 90 days by plan
CRDT documents
Not a feature. Database Sync covers live query results
The product: Storage, Yjs, editors
SDKs
JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, REST, plus any Pusher client
JavaScript and React, Node server SDK, REST for the rest
Pricing
Foony
Liveblocks
Model
Per message, in and out
$30/month Pro base plus six metered usage types against a credit pool