| Price from | $29/mo | €200/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Chat APIs | 8.7 (#1) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Founded | 2016 | 2002 |
| Headquarters | London, UK | Paris, France |
| Integrations | Ably lists integrations including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Functions, Kafka, Zapier, and Terraform. | The maker lists PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and LDAP as storage backends. |
| Product | Ably Chat is a chat API and SDK platform for building realtime chat applications at scale. | ejabberd is an open-source server for XMPP messaging, MQTT, SIP, and Matrix. |
| Security | Ably states that client-to-server communication is secured by TLS by default and that optional private-key encryption uses 256-bit AES. | The maker describes TLS 1.3, modern cipher suites, SASL with SCRAM-SHA-256, and OMEMO end-to-end encryption as available on a fresh install. |
| Support | The Free package includes community and email support on a best-effort basis; Standard lists a one-day email support SLA. | Community Server includes community forums and documentation, while Business Edition and Fluux include direct ProcessOne support and LTS releases. |
