Softwr

Developer Tools · head to head

Soketi vs Trino

Soketi logo

Soketi

Developer Tools

Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Full reviewWebsite
Trino logo

Trino

Technology

A distributed SQL engine that queries data where it already lives, across object storage, warehouses and operational databases.

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Each has a real cost: 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.; Trino trino stores nothing and computes no statistics of its own, so the plan it produces is only as good as the partitioning, file sizes and table statistics on the source; a Hive table of thousands of small files or a lake with no stats produces a slow query the engine cannot improve.
  • They diverge on capability: Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Trino covers Federated querying.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Soketi and Trino actually diverge.

Attributes where Soketi and Trino differ
AttributeSoketiTrino
Pricing modelOpen source, no licence feeopen-source
PlatformsLinux, macOS, WindowsWeb
CategoryDeveloper ToolsTechnology

Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), 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 Soketi

  • Pusher protocol compatibility
  • Presence and private channels
  • Horizontal scaling
  • App management backends
  • Webhooks
  • Prometheus metrics

Only in Trino

  • Federated querying
  • Connector architecture
  • Predicate and aggregation pushdown
  • Massively parallel execution
  • Fault-tolerant execution
  • Resource groups
  • Iceberg and Delta table support
  • Standard client protocols

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Soketi

  • A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot Trino
  • Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot Trino
  • A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot Trino
  • A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot Trino

Trino

  • Ad hoc analysis that spans a data lake and one or more operational databases, without building an ingestion pipeline firstnot Soketi
  • Serving a BI tool a single SQL endpoint over an estate that is actually several separate storage systemsnot Soketi
  • Querying Iceberg or Delta tables on object storage interactively, as the compute layer of a lakehousenot Soketi
  • Investigating whether a dataset is worth ingesting, by querying it in place before committing to a pipeline for itnot Soketi

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

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.

Trino

  • Trino stores nothing and computes no statistics of its own, so the plan it produces is only as good as the partitioning, file sizes and table statistics on the source; a Hive table of thousands of small files or a lake with no stats produces a slow query the engine cannot improve.
  • Federated queries pull data out of the systems they touch, so a join between a lake table and a production Postgres can put a full table scan onto an OLTP database that other applications depend on, and the person who wrote the query will not see the incident it causes.
  • Releases come roughly every one to two weeks with no community long-term support line, and deprecations arrive quickly, so you either dedicate someone to keeping current or you buy Starburst Enterprise for a supported long-term version.
  • It is memory-based and disk spilling was deprecated in favour of fault-tolerant execution, so a query exceeding cluster memory fails outright rather than degrading; enabling fault-tolerant execution requires an external exchange store on object storage and makes queries measurably slower.
  • It is a query engine and not a warehouse: there is no built-in job scheduling, no incremental materialised view maintenance and no transformation framework, so producing curated tables still needs dbt or an equivalent layer that somebody has to own.
  • The 2020 fork split the ecosystem, so documentation, connectors, Stack Overflow answers and vendor material written before then describe PrestoDB, which is now a different project with different behaviour, and following the wrong one wastes real time.

Pricing, plan by plan

Soketi

Free
  • SoketiFree
    • MIT licensed
    • Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
    • No vendor billing

Trino

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the Trino review.

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.
Soketi review

Choose Trino if

  • You need federated querying.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want connector architecture.
Trino review

Questions people ask

Is Soketi or Trino better?
Neither clearly leads. Soketi starts at Free and Trino at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Soketi or Trino?
Soketi starts at Free and Trino at Free.
Does Soketi or Trino run on more platforms?
Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows. Trino runs on Web.
Can I use Soketi for free?
Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Soketi best used for?
Soketi is most often used for a laravel application that already uses echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime provider, realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasons, a local or ci environment that needs a pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid account, a high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure bill. Of those, a laravel application that already uses echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime provider and realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasons are not what Trino is typically brought in for.
What can Soketi do that Trino cannot?
Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends. Trino covers Federated querying, Connector architecture, Predicate and aggregation pushdown, Massively parallel execution.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

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.

Trino: What is the difference between Trino and Presto?

They share an origin. The original creators left Meta and renamed their fork from PrestoSQL to Trino in December 2020; PrestoDB continues separately under the Linux Foundation. They have diverged in features, connectors and SQL behaviour, so material written for one may not apply to the other.

Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?

No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.

Trino: Does Trino replace my data warehouse?

Not on its own. It is compute without storage, scheduling or transformation. Paired with Iceberg or Delta on object storage and something like dbt for modelling it can serve as a lakehouse; used alone it is a query layer over what you already have.

Soketi: What does it cost?

Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.

Trino: Why is my federated query slow?

Usually because a connector could not push a filter or aggregation down, so Trino is pulling whole tables across the network to join them itself. The fix is usually better source-side partitioning or statistics, or ingesting that source rather than federating it.

Soketi: What are people moving to?

Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.

Trino: What happens when a query runs out of memory?

It fails. Disk spilling was deprecated in favour of fault-tolerant execution, which checkpoints to an external exchange store such as S3 and lets long queries survive memory pressure and worker loss, at the cost of noticeably slower execution.

Trino: Is there commercial support?

Yes, from Starburst, which offers Starburst Enterprise with long-term supported releases and Starburst Galaxy as a managed service. The open source project itself has no long-term support line.

Share

Related pages

More on Soketi

More on Trino

Keep looking

Other head to heads