About Deepstream.io
deepstream is an open-source realtime server inspired by ideas from financial trading technology. It lets clients and backend services sync data, exchange messages and make remote procedure calls at high speed and scale, and it is written in TypeScript for Node.js.
It is built on three core concepts. Records are schema-less, persistent documents that clients can edit and observe, with changes synchronized to all connected clients and backend processes in milliseconds and links between records to model relational data. Events provide publish-subscribe messaging with topic-based routing and subscription listening. RPCs offer request-response workflows with load balancing, failover and message routing handled by the server.
Security combines several authentication mechanisms with a permission language called Valve that specifies which user can do which action on which data. deepstream is licensed under MIT and hosted by you, with tutorials, a quickstart and documentation, plus community support on Stack Overflow and GitHub Discussions. It suits developers building collaborative or live-updating applications.
Key features
- Realtime synced records
- Publish-subscribe events with topic routing
- RPCs with load balancing and failover
- Pluggable authentication mechanisms
- Valve permission language
- WebSocket-based realtime transport
Good fit for
- →Collaborative apps with live data
- →Realtime dashboards and notifications
- →Request-response messaging between services
- Built with
- TypeScript
- Tags
- realtime
- websocket
- pubsub
- rpc
- data-sync
- typescript
- nodejs
- permissions
- server
Deepstream.io: questions and answers
- What is Deepstream.io used for?
- Deepstream.io is an open realtime server for syncing data, publishing events and making remote procedure calls at scale, with built-in authentication and a permission language. It is a good fit for collaborative apps with live data, realtime dashboards and notifications, and request-response messaging between services.
- Is Deepstream.io open source?
- Yes. Deepstream.io is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at deepstreamIO/deepstream.io and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Deepstream.io free?
- Yes. Deepstream.io is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Deepstream.io?
- Yes. Deepstream.io can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Deepstream.io an alternative to?
- Deepstream.io is an open-source alternative to Pusher, PubNub, Ably and Liveblocks. Other open-source alternatives to Pusher include Centrifugo and Mercure.
- Is Deepstream.io actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Deepstream.io was on 11 September 2026, and the latest release is v10.2.2, published on 11 September 2026. The project has 7.2k stars on GitHub.
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