Technology · head to head
etcd vs Soketi
etcd
Technology
A distributed key-value store using Raft consensus, built for cluster coordination rather than application data.
- From
- On request
- Free plan
- No
Soketi
Developer Tools
Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record
- From
- Free
- Free plan
- Yes
The short version
- Only Soketi has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
- Each has a real cost: etcd it is sized for coordination data, not application data: the default backend quota is 2 GB and 8 GB is the documented recommended maximum, and exceeding it puts the cluster into a NOSPACE alarm where it accepts no writes until an operator compacts, defragments and clears the alarm by hand.; Soketi maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- They diverge on capability: etcd covers Raft consensus, Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which etcd and Soketi actually diverge.
Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in etcd
- Raft consensus
- Linearizable reads
- Transactions
- Leases
- Watches
- MVCC revision history
- Role-based access control
- Snapshot backup and restore
Only in Soketi
- Pusher protocol compatibility
- Presence and private channels
- Horizontal scaling
- App management backends
- Webhooks
- Prometheus metrics
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
etcd
- Storing Kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doingnot Soketi
- Leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactionsnot Soketi
- Service discovery and dynamic configuration where readers need to be notified of changes rather than poll for themnot Soketi
- Coordinating failover in a clustered database, as Patroni does for PostgreSQLnot Soketi
Soketi
- A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot etcd
- Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot etcd
- A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot etcd
- A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot etcd
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
etcd
- It is sized for coordination data, not application data: the default backend quota is 2 GB and 8 GB is the documented recommended maximum, and exceeding it puts the cluster into a NOSPACE alarm where it accepts no writes until an operator compacts, defragments and clears the alarm by hand.
- Every write is replicated and fsynced before acknowledgement, so cluster performance is bounded by the slowest disk in it; a member on network-attached storage with high fsync latency causes leader elections and cluster-wide latency spikes that look like network problems and are not.
- Adding members increases availability but reduces write throughput, because each write must reach a larger quorum; you run three or five members for fault tolerance, and increasing capacity means faster hardware rather than more nodes.
- There is no sharding and no multi-tenancy, so isolating workloads means running separate clusters, each with its own quorum, certificates, backup schedule and upgrade path, and that operational multiplication is often unexpected.
- Running it yourself is a real job: periodic compaction and defragmentation, snapshot backups you have actually rehearsed restoring, and rotation of both peer and client TLS certificates, none of which happens automatically outside a managed Kubernetes service.
- Losing quorum is not self-healing; recovering a cluster that has lost a majority means restoring from a snapshot and accepting that everything written since that snapshot is gone, which makes backup frequency a data-loss budget decision rather than a routine setting.
Soketi
- Maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- Dependency drift on Node and uWebSockets.js will eventually force you to fork or migrate, and that cost is unbudgeted at the point you adopt it.
- There is no commercial support to buy, so a production incident at three in the morning is entirely your problem with no escalation path.
- Scaling beyond a single node needs Redis and careful configuration, and getting presence channels correct across nodes is a genuine source of subtle bugs.
- It implements the Pusher protocol rather than tracking it, so any protocol feature Pusher adds later will not appear, and the compatibility guarantee slowly decays.
Pricing, plan by plan
etcd
On requestNo published plan breakdown. See the etcd review.
Soketi
Free- SoketiFree
- MIT licensed
- Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
- No vendor billing
Which should you pick?
Choose Soketi if
- You need pusher protocol compatibility.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, macOS, Windows.
- You also want presence and private channels.
Questions people ask
- Is etcd or Soketi better?
- Neither clearly leads. etcd starts at On request and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, etcd or Soketi?
- Soketi has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for etcd and Free for Soketi.
- Does etcd or Soketi run on more platforms?
- etcd runs on Web. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.
- Can I use Soketi for free?
- Yes. Soketi has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. etcd starts at On request.
- What is etcd best used for?
- etcd is most often used for storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing, leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions, service discovery and dynamic configuration where readers need to be notified of changes rather than poll for them, coordinating failover in a clustered database, as patroni does for postgresql. Of those, storing kubernetes cluster state, which is what the overwhelming majority of etcd deployments are doing and leader election and distributed locking in a home-grown scheduler or control plane, using leases and transactions are not what Soketi is typically brought in for.
- What can etcd do that Soketi cannot?
- etcd covers Raft consensus, Linearizable reads, Transactions, Leases. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
etcd: Can I use etcd as an application database?
No. It is designed for metadata and coordination, with a recommended maximum store size of around 8 GB, no sharding and a write path deliberately optimised for durability rather than throughput. Application data belongs in a database built for it.
Soketi: Is Soketi still maintained?
Barely. The maintainer has stated that available time is very limited and releases have been sparse; treat it as community-maintained.
etcd: How many members should a cluster have?
Three for most cases, five where you need to survive two simultaneous failures. Always an odd number, because an even-sized cluster gains no additional fault tolerance while making quorum harder to reach.
Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?
No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.
etcd: What happens when the store fills up?
The cluster raises a NOSPACE alarm and stops accepting writes, becoming effectively read-only. Recovery requires compacting old revisions, defragmenting each member and then explicitly disarming the alarm, all done by an operator.
Soketi: What does it cost?
Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.
etcd: Why is my etcd cluster slow or unstable?
Almost always disk latency. Because every write is fsynced before acknowledgement, slow or shared storage causes heartbeat timeouts, leader elections and cascading latency. Local SSDs with low fsync latency are effectively a requirement.
Soketi: What are people moving to?
Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.
etcd: How does it compare with Consul or ZooKeeper?
All three provide consensus-backed coordination. etcd has the simplest data model and the Kubernetes ecosystem behind it; Consul bundles service discovery, health checking and a service mesh; ZooKeeper is older, JVM-based and still common under Kafka and Hadoop-era systems.
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