Why does the Laravel community seem to prefer pusher over PubNub for real time notifications?

There are countless tools available. None of us has time to try them all. Usually, it comes down to what we have and haven't tried. I've never used PubNub. Haven't needed to. Pusher was a joy to work with the first time around, so I personally haven't bothered searching for alternatives.

How technologies get adopted by different communities is always an interesting question. As @JeffeyWay says, there are lots of real-time technologies to choose from.

I work at Pusher and am presently answering this from from the PHP UK conference (I'm here as an attendee). So, it could be that Pusher has had more involvement in certain parts of the community that has resulted in a wider influence. We've been involved in PHP events previously (e.g. sponsored the chill out room and hackathon with Twilio at PHP UK 2013), have built a number of our demos in PHP and always list PHP as a key language our documentation.

We've had friends and customers use Laravel for a long time so maybe that's proliferated into the community?

This sort of surprises me as I thought PubNub is a more robust product when I visited both their websites.

I'd be interested to know why you think this. A bit off topic, so please ping me via phil@pusher.com.

It can't really be price as I think they are pretty similiar

The base prices are definitely similar but differ on "devices per day" verses "simultaneous connections". Pusher don't offer addons and all Pusher plans come with all features. PubNub do offer paid addons.

PubNub even has generous offers for student, open source and entrepreneurs

The evangelism programme is an interesting one. We've certainly given out plenty of vouchers for free plans, upgraded people for free, given discounts, have helped open source initiatives and will certainly help anybody that has used Pusher to build something if we can - or just in general. That's just part of being nice and paying it forward so we haven't actively promoted it. Maybe we should.

Or is Pusher API a much better joy to work with?

Our API does differ in that we offer an additional event abstraction.

PubNub:

var pubnub = PUBNUB.init({
    subscribe_key : 'demo'
})
 
pubnub.subscribe({                                      
    channel : "hello_world",
    message : function(msg){
    }
})

Pusher:

var pusher = new Pusher(KEY);
var channel = pusher.subscribe('messages');
channel.bind('new_message', function(msg) {
});

I personally think that both Pusher and PubNub are great products and there's a big enough market for both of us. Having developed in PHP for years I'm pleased that developers are finding our service useful.

Thanks @leggetter!

I'd be interested to know why you think this. A bit off topic, so please ping me via phil@pusher.com.

I think at first glance they seem to do better marketing to me when I first land on their site or google about real time notification, at least that what my first impression is. However after checking out pusher more deeply, I'm impressed by the amount and quality of tutorials you guys have written too!

I think it's great that both Pusher and Pubnub are offering great services for us to use. Thank you.