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PubNub vs Upbound Crossplane comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

PubNub
Ranking in AWS Marketplace
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Upbound Crossplane
Ranking in AWS Marketplace
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the AWS Marketplace category, the mindshare of PubNub is 0.2%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Upbound Crossplane is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AWS Marketplace Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Upbound Crossplane0.3%
PubNub0.2%
Other99.5%
AWS Marketplace
 

Featured Reviews

Kirtishil Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Frontend Developer at Globant
Real-time chat has boosted one-to-one messaging and user engagement in my mobile projects
The best features PubNub offers, in my opinion, are one-to-one chat, as I mentioned in my review, and the great SDK documentation which allows for easy integration that does not take much time. Setting up channels, message listeners, tracking user status to determine whether users are online or offline, and ensuring reliable message delivery are all great features. I find myself relying on all three of those features the most because the presence tracking is great, the delivery speed is superb compared to other SDKs, and the user status updates immediately pop up, which is significant. The integration is very easy, so any new developers can easily understand the integration process thanks to the clear documentation. PubNub has positively impacted my organization as I have received numerous reviews and feedback stating that the chat works much faster and cleaner, and everyone appreciates it, saying it feels powerful. After implementing PubNub, I noticed positive outcomes such as client feedback acknowledging that they enjoyed the chat features and found them much faster than in other applications, which I believe is very positive feedback for any organization.
Diego Paradeda - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Philips
Automated infrastructure deployment has reduced our backend release time from days to hours
I found an issue with features that was difficult for me when we needed to retrieve some tags or IDs of a resource that we deployed using Upbound Crossplane, for example, the RDS. We encountered a problem where we needed to use the ID of the RDS in another document that we have, making it difficult to return this information using Upbound Crossplane deployment. I believe Upbound Crossplane could be improved by possibly having a feature that can return tags, IDs, or resources that were deployed inside AWS, such as needing to return the ID of the VPC that we create when using Upbound Crossplane. I think the current state of Upbound Crossplane is already good enough.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"PubNub has positively impacted my organization by reducing implementation time and developers' work, making it very easy to implement and enabling fast development that has reduced the developers' time by 40-50%."
"If we had implemented all of this on our own, we would have had to hire at least 50 more employees for that, so we are very happy with PubNub and we have saved a lot of time."
"PubNub saves development time because we do not have to create a complete chat backend and frontend from scratch, enabling a plug-and-play approach that saves time, effort, and money for the company."
"PubNub has positively impacted my organization as I have received numerous reviews and feedback stating that the chat works much faster and cleaner, and everyone appreciates it, saying it feels powerful."
"PubNub's push notification and chat features stand out because of ease of use and very easy integration within our application."
"The speed and efficiency of PubNub, which helps transfer data in real-time with very low latency, received positive feedback from our customers."
"We went from having a 28-member troubleshooting team down to four to five members of the platform engineering team."
"The best features Upbound Crossplane offers are infrastructure as Kubernetes APIs and self-service infrastructure, where developers can provision resources without cloud credentials, and its strong multi-cloud support that makes it useful in managing AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single control plane with valuable GitOps integration."
"When I provisioned PostgreSQL and S3 buckets through Crossplane, I noticed improvements in deployment speed, reliability, and team collaboration."
"Upbound Crossplane has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to reduce our deployment time from three days to three hours for the entire back-end and entire infrastructure."
"The time required to complete an environment setup was reduced from about one or two weeks to forty to fifty minutes."
"Upbound Crossplane has impacted our organization positively as it has been a transformative experience because the main thing about transformation is how we were able to make our lives easier as engineers."
"Upbound Crossplane impacts my organization positively because, from our perspective, we need to rely on fewer resources."
"Before choosing Upbound Crossplane, I evaluated various options, but I only found Upbound Crossplane to be the best choice."
 

Cons

"Regarding customer support from PubNub, around six years ago, we did not receive good support."
"I believe PubNub can improve in terms of pricing transparency, as I previously mentioned, since that is the only thing I think should be improved because for smaller projects or startups, estimating scaling costs can be challenging."
"I gave PubNub a rating of nine out of ten because of the many features discussed, but I deducted one point because the cost increases with scale."
"The reliability of PubNub is really good, but occasionally we face issues where users complain about messages or push notifications not being delivered within a short period of time, as it occasionally takes longer, which could be due to outages."
"Since PubNub is a paid library, it may not be useful for everyone."
"Most of the time there are some instances at the load peak hours or sometimes payload is missed by the application or SDK at the SDK level."
"Upbound Crossplane can be improved if they can add more AI agentic workflows."
"However, one area of improvement is the learning curve, as Upbound Crossplane concepts such as providers, compositions, and claims can be difficult for beginners."
"The documentation needs to be updated regarding the needed improvements for Upbound Crossplane. There is very little documentation online, and there are no tutorials for Upbound Crossplane."
"I found an issue with features that was difficult for me when we needed to retrieve some tags or IDs of a resource that we deployed using Upbound Crossplane, for example, the RDS."
"Upbound Crossplane was not stable in my experience."
"Regarding Upbound Crossplane, I see room for enhancement in synchronizing the state file of Crossplane with Terraform, as 90% of organizations have generally implemented Terraform and have their own specific, environment-specific Terraform state files."
"Regarding Upbound Crossplane's capabilities, I feel the governance and security is something which is lacking."
"One area where Upbound Crossplane can be improved is with API rate limiting."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
38%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
30%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubNub?
The setup cost is very low. Regarding pricing, when the data scales, the pricing increases gradually, but PubNub does not charge much in the initial phase.
What needs improvement with PubNub?
The subscription and the SDK part can be improved. If the client is offline and the application is killed, and the user comes back again, sometimes the subscription to the channel is missed, so tha...
What is your primary use case for PubNub?
We are mostly using PubNub for payload sending and for live chat. We are a mobile-based application with an admin side, so it's a live chat application. Whenever a user comes online or offline or s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Upbound Crossplane?
I find the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Upbound Crossplane very suitable for research and development.
What needs improvement with Upbound Crossplane?
One area where Upbound Crossplane can be improved is with API rate limiting. For instance, if we frequently send some data to a specific API to poll the latest status of machines, it can result in ...
What is your primary use case for Upbound Crossplane?
Upbound Crossplane connects the cloud APIs on cloud providers like GCP, AWS, and Azure. We need to maintain the network resources and the VM containers, and the VM instance that Upbound Crossplane ...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about PubNub vs. Upbound Crossplane and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.