Colyseus vs Metaplay
Colyseus
colyseus.io
Metaplay
metaplay.ioSide by side
| Figure | Colyseus | Metaplay |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $15/mo | €195/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 17 |
| Spec score · Game Leaderboard Software | 9.3 (#3) | 9.0 (#4) |
| Spec score · Game Matchmaking Software | 9.3 (#3) | 9.0 (#6) |
| Spec score · Game Backend Services | 9.3 (#3) | 9.0 (#5) |
| Company headquarters | LinkedIn lists the headquarters as Sapiranga, Brazil. | Metaplay Oy lists Urho Kekkosen katu 7B, Helsinki, Finland as its address. |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists Colyseus Multiplayer Framework as a self-owned company with one employee. | LinkedIn lists 11-50 employees. |
| Documentation depth | Documentation includes getting-started guides for many engines, API references, deployment and scalability sections, recipes, FAQs and migration guides. | Documentation includes getting-started paths, tutorials, release notes, sample games, architecture guides and operational security material. |
| Founded | LinkedIn lists 2016 as the founding year. | LinkedIn lists Metaplay as founded in 2019. |
| Self-hosting | Colyseus runs as a standard Node.js application and can be deployed on cloud providers or bare metal. | Customers can host Metaplay themselves, including on their own cloud or on-premises infrastructure. |
| Support | The Open Source plan includes community support, while Colyseus Cloud includes support by email. | The pricing page offers community Discord support, weekday engineer support tiers, and a critical incident add-on with 24/7 availability and a one-hour response SLA. |
| What it does | Colyseus is an open-source Node.js framework for authoritative multiplayer game servers with real-time synchronization and matchmaking. | Metaplay is a backend platform for building, operating and scaling live-service games. |
Plans
Metaplay
- Community supportFree
- Community SupportFree
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Starter€195 a month
- Starter€195 a month
- Pre-launch€995 a month
- Pre-Launch€995 a month
- Standard support€1,500 a month
- Standard Support€1,500 a month
In their own words
Colyseus
Colyseus is an open-source Node.js framework for building real-time multiplayer games, with built-in matchmaking and state synchronization. Its authoritative server design has clients send inputs while the server decides game outcomes. Developers define game state on the server, and Colyseus synchronizes it to clients without manual serialization. The framework creates rooms and matches players automatically; rooms can be distributed across processes or machines. The site says this can scale from 10 to 10,000+ concurrent users. SDKs or integrations are listed for JavaScript, Unity, Godot, GameMaker, Defold, Haxe, C, and Construct 3. The MIT-licensed framework is free for commercial games and can be self-hosted as a standard Node.js application on cloud services or bare metal. Colyseus Cloud provides deployment, scaling, and monitoring across 32 global locations. Its Cloud plan starts at $15/mo and includes email support, while the free Open Source plan includes community support. Cloud has no free tier or automatic scaling; heavier workloads require upgrading deployment resources through the dashboard.
Metaplay
Metaplay is a backend platform for building and operating live-service games. It uses a server-authoritative C# game server with a Unity client library and shared client-server logic. Its LiveOps dashboard includes player segmentation, A/B testing, over-the-air configuration updates, events, economy management, and player support tools. The SDK also includes guilds, social features, leaderboards, leagues, and asynchronous matchmaking; synchronous matchmaking is in active development. Hosting choices include managed Metaplay Cloud, customer AWS infrastructure, another Kubernetes cluster, or on-premises deployment. The platform supports Unity games on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and WebGL, with Unity 2020.3 LTS and later. The free plan provides the full SDK and a local server for local development. Starter costs €195 a month. Managed Metaplay Cloud supports single-region deployments; multi-region deployments are supported on self-hosted infrastructure.