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Watch: PubNub Platform Introduction

Your Platform for Elevated Interactive Experiences

Everything you need to build real-time interactive apps, drive innovation, and deliver engaging user experiences that drive retention and growth.

Build & Manage

PubNub Core Services
Accelerate development while driving value

Optimize

PubNub Decision Intelligence

Enhance engagement through real-time optimization

AI

PubNub MCP Server

Code That Ships with a Single Command

Build Manage

PubNub Core Services
Accelerate development while driving value

Learn more

Optimize

PubNub Decision Intelligence

Enhance engagement through real-time optimization

Learn more

Scale

PubNub Global Network

Drive growth with reliable scalability

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AI

PubNub MCP Server

Code That Ships with a Single Command

Learn more

Real-time for any Industry

Highly-customizable to fuel innovation & growth

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Sports, Media, Entertainment

Transform Live Interactions

Powering real-time interactive experiences for the world’s top sports, media & entertainment platforms.

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Digital Health

Revolutionize Digital Healthcare

HIPAA-compliant, real-time technologies to enhance patient care and optimize healthcare operations.

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Gaming, Betting and Casino

Enhance Interactive iGaming

Drive engagement and retention with real-time interactivity that keeps players coming back for more.

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Gaming

Elevate Player Experiences

Deliver engaging, interactive experiences that captivate players.

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eCommerce

Optimize Customer Experiences

Interactive features foster engagement and loyalty, creating seamless, personalized shopping journeys.

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Transportation and Logistics

Power End-to-End Visibility

Ensure comprehensive real-time monitoring from dispatch to final delivery.

Frequently asked questions

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How does the PubNub platform work?

PubNub is a real-time communication platform that provides cloud-based infrastructure and APIs to instantly send and receive messages between devices, apps, or services. Built on a global ultra-low-latency data stream network, it lets developers create fast, interactive experiences without managing servers or complex back-end systems.

PubNub uses a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging pattern. Messages—like chat updates, IoT data, or collaborative edits—are published to channels and instantly received by all subscribed clients, enabling real-time communication across millions of devices and users.

PubNub offers:

  • Real-time messaging, presence detection, state sync, chat, and collaboration
  • Low-latency IoT communication between devices and the cloud
  • Live updates and real-time dashboards
  • SDKs for web, mobile, and IoT platforms
  • Cloud-native, globally distributed infrastructure for scale and reliability

PubNub handles infrastructure, message routing, and security

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How does PubNub ensure message delivery under poor network conditions or device reconnection scenarios?

PubNub ensures reliable message delivery during poor network conditions or reconnections through message persistence and timetoken-based catch-up. Message persistence ensures no data is lost even if a device is offline for an extended period. Timetoken-based catch-up enables precise resumption, minimizing the risk of duplicate or missed messages. Built-in reconnection logic in the SDKs ensure that most network issues are handled seamlessly, so end users rarely notice disruptions. Additionally, the low client complexity—thanks to PubNub abstracting much of the logic within its SDKs.

With PubNub, there's no need to manually implement complex reconnection logic or message buffering

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What’s the biggest limitation of using PubNub?

As a fully managed cloud platform, PubNub delivers global scalability and minimal operational overhead—but your app’s real-time features rely on internet connectivity and our infrastructure. While service disruptions are rare, they can impact live experiences. Our real-time network status is always available at status.pubnub.com

PubNub is purpose-built for real-time communication—not for heavy data storage or complex backend logic. That’s why we offer a wide range of eady-to-use integrations with databases, serverless platforms, auth providers, and more—so you can easily build complete, reliable, real-time applications.

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Does Pubnub offer edge network capabilities or Points of Presence (PoPs) in key regions?

Yes, PubNub has a global edge network with Points of Presence (PoPs) in key regions: North America, Asia, Europe, and South America. This ensures data is routed through the closest servers to users, minimizing latency and improving real-time performance.

On average, PubNub delivers messages in under 100 milliseconds worldwide, thanks to its optimized infrastructure and intelligent routing.

PubNub also offers a 99.999% uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement), meaning it's built for high availability and reliability, even under heavy load or across distributed geographies


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What software architecture pattern does PubNub use?

PubNub utilizes a Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) messaging model to deliver real-time communication across devices, eliminating the need for users to manage infrastructure. Publishers send messages to named channels (topics), and all subscribed clients receive them instantly. This decouples senders from receivers, enabling scalable, low-latency messaging with no need to handle servers, sockets, or scaling logic.


PubNub’s architectural foundation is a highly optimized, globally distributed Publish/Subscribe system designed for real-time messaging at planetary scale. It abstracts away the complexity of scaling, securing, and managing real-time infrastructure, allowing developers to focus purely on building applications that react instantly to data. By combining a robust Pub/Sub backbone with layers like user access control, message persistence (history), presence tracking (state detection), and edge functions (serverless), PubNub enables a broad range of real-time use cases (chat, live dashboards, multiplayer games, streaming & location tracking) with minimal development and operational overhead.


Channel-Based, Real-Time Pub/Sub Architecture

PubNub structures communication around string-based channels, enabling granular or broad message targeting. Channels can represent chat rooms, IoT devices, user sessions, or system events, allowing millions of concurrent streams without conflict.


Clients subscribed to a channel receive published messages within ~100 milliseconds (ultra-low latency), thanks to PubNub’s globally distributed edge network, which minimizes delay by routing through the nearest data center(PoP).

Unlike request/response systems, PubNub’s Pub/Sub model is asynchronous — messages are pushed to subscribers in real time, enabling use cases like chat, live dashboards, multiplayer games, and location tracking.

The decoupled architecture supports massive scalability: publishers don’t track subscribers, and channel topologies are dynamic. Edge-based stateless routing supports ephemeral messaging, while TLS and PubNub Access Manager (PAM) provide encryption and fine-grained, token-based access control.


Beyond core messaging, PubNub offers presence detection, message persistence, and PubNub Functions — a serverless layer injecting logic (e.g., filtering, enrichment, validation) directly into message streams without extra backend infrastructure.

This architecture powers real-world applications such as live support chat, IoT telemetry, collaborative editing, and real-time asset tracking.

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Does PubNub support JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication and authorization workflows?

Yes, PubNub has JSON Web Tokens support in multiple areas:

PubNub Functions JWT Module

PubNub Functions includes a built-in JWT SDK library for generating and verifying JSON Web Tokens1. The jsonwebtoken module is available with the following require statement:

The JWT module provides three main methods:

  • decode to extract and return the payload and optionally the header from a token without verifying its signature or authenticity
  • verify to check the validity of a given token against a secret key, ensuring it hasn't been altered and meets expected conditions
  • sign to create and sign a new JWT with the provided payload and secret key

Access Manager JWT Integration

PubNub's Access Manager (PAM) supports JWT for authentication and authorization2. When using JWT, PubNub validates the token to ensure it matches the required permissions for channels, groups, and resources. This allows fine-grained access control without storing session states on the server.

Recent Functions Updates

PubNub has recently added new built-in libraries to support JWT (along with UUID and JSONPath Plus) in Functions v2


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Is message latency the same on the free tier as in paid plans?

PubNub's infrastructure provides consistent performance across all account types. With 15+ global Points of Presence and automatic scaling, latency stays under 100ms and uptime meets a 99.999% SLA1.

The platform uses a globally distributed edge network with multiple PoPs for ultra-low latency and regional failover—no custom infrastructure needed2. This infrastructure delivers enterprise-grade SLAs, multitenant isolation, and built-in observability so you can track latency, delivery, and usage in real time.

The latency performance is determined by PubNub's global network infrastructure rather than account tier, as the same edge network and Points of Presence serve all users.

Contact sales

Start building real-time experiences today. Try PubNub for free or contact sales to get started.