Centrifugo is a real-time messaging server designed for scalable and efficient communication. It provides WebSocket-based real-time notifications, chat applications, and live updates for web and mobile apps. The platform supports multi-channel messaging, message persistence, and integrates with back-end services through its API, enabling secure and fast message delivery.
Key Features
- Efficient real-time transports: WebSocket, HTTP-streaming, Server-Sent Events (SSE), GRPC, WebTransport
- Built-in scalability with Redis (or Redis Cluster, or Redis-compatible storage – ex. AWS Elasticache, KeyDB, DragonflyDB, etc), or Nats.
- Simple HTTP and GRPC server API to communicate with Centrifugo from the app backend
- Flexible connection authentication mechanisms: JWT and proxy-like
- Channel subscription multiplexing over a single connection
- Different types of subscriptions: client-side and server-side
- Various channel permission strategies, channel namespace concept
- Hot message history in channels, with automatic message recovery upon reconnect, cache recovery mode (deliver latest publication immediately upon subscription)
- Delta compression in channels based on Fossil algorithm
- Online channel presence information, with join/leave notifications
- A way to send RPC calls to the backend over the real-time connection
- Strict and effective client protocol wrapped by several official SDKs
- JSON and binary Protobuf message transfer, with optimized serialization
- Beautiful embedded admin web UI