ANangersock·Sep 17, 2015
If possible, consider leaving socket.io.
If you can, check out https://github.com/websockets/ws .
In Node v4.1.0websockets
ws
JavaScript2015–2024
websockets / ws
ws
Simple to use, blazing fast and thoroughly tested WebSocket client and server for Node.js
12Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
22.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Simple to use, blazing fast and thoroughly tested WebSocket client and server for Node.js
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:02:26 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year13 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-07-15 17:19:42 UTC to 2024-11-23 06:00:16 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI use [ws](https://github.com/websockets/ws). I've never had any trouble with it, and it benchmarks well. Of course, there's no fallback there; just websockets.
I haven't seen a websocket+fallback lib that seems like it will work well. Requiring sticky sessions and disallowing using node's cluster module is the norm, and neither of those are appealing. We've rolled our own polling fallback, which is also used to cleanly handle missed messages during a websocket reconnect.
In Socket.IO P2PSockJS is definitely a reasonable choice as a base. At Pusher we use a fork of SockJS for HTTP fallback but we actually use em-websocket [1] (ruby) for our WebSocket API. Given the opportunity we'd probably move away from SockJS to something much simpler because we only want the HTTP fallback part and it only handles < 8% of our connections.
If you _only_ want WebSocket connections with no HTTP fallback then Faye WebSocket [2] may be an option. But any production application is going to require fallback for older browsers and pesky proxies/firewalls.
Faye [3] is solid (obviously used Faye WebSocket), has implementations in Node and Ruby, but is a PubSub solution. I'd kinda argue that any real-time app needs at least PubSub functionality anyway.
The ws Node module [4] is apparently "The fastest RFC-6455 WebSocket implementation for Node.js
Read the rest
" and receives contributions from 3rd-Eden who is also behind Primus [5]. But it's also WebSocket with no fallback.
I haven't used Primus, but I really like the idea of offering a layer above the underlying connection engine. I've seen contributions to Socket.IO dip in the past (prior to CloudUp being acquired by Automattic), but Socket.IO is used by so many apps that somebody is always likely to maintain it for the foreseeable future. I'm generally in favour of adding abstractions around layers like this (connectivity, DBs, Message Queues, Hosted Services etc.). However, in this case you're then adding a dependency on Primus. Isn't software fun!
[1] https://github.com/igrigorik/em-websocket
[2] https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-node
[3] http://faye.jcoglan.com/
[4] https://github.com/websockets/ws
[5] https://github.com/primus/primus
We use ws(https://github.com/websockets/ws) in prod. Clean, fast, and simple. Plus it supports browsify using native implementation but wraps it to fit the server side api.
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