Disclaimer: both the author of the article and the OP for this post (me) work for Ably.<p>The post compares two cloud pubsub services: Azure Web PubSub and Ably in terms of ease of development, creating a collaborative multi-user pixelart drawing app with both services.<p>Conclusions:
Both Azure Web PubSub and Ably offer a similar pubsub feature set, but the Ably API was easier to use (although comes with the disclaimer that the author has used Ably more in the past).<p>Being able to publish named events and subscribe to them (client-side) without the need of handling them via an upstream server and custom event handlers was an advantage, while a potential downside is the use of a third party library increases the download size of the app.