Comparison
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Looking for Agora alternatives? Red5 Cloud has you covered.
If you’ve hit limitations with Agora’s pricing that becomes expensive and unpredictable at scale, room size and concurrency limits that restrict growth, higher perceived latency or stream stability issues, and the lack of built-in presence, lobby counts, and synchronized real-time events, you might find Red5 Cloud appealing.
Here’s a detailed comparison of Red5 Cloud with built-in PubNub data integration vs Agora, including features and pricing, to help you make an informed decision!
Red5 vs Agora: What are the differences?
Red5 has recently partnered with PubNub, to seamlessly integrate a global real-time data network directly into Red5 Cloud. With PubNub, applications can support chat, reactions, presence, user state, collaborative actions, and other event-driven features that stay perfectly aligned with the video stream. This joint solution is a complete alternative to all of Agora’s features.
Developers no longer need to manage their own signaling or build real-time data pipelines from scratch. Instead, they can rely on PubNub’s worldwide edge network for predictable performance and Red5 Cloud for high-quality video that remains in sync across all clients.
| Category | Red5 Cloud + PubNub | Agora |
| Management | Full-service cloud dashboards for both PubNub (data) and Red5 (media) + CLI, REST, and real-time logs. | Provides only a minimal provisioning console. |
| Latency | < 100 ms data (PubNub) + sub‑250 ms video (Red5) | ~ 200 ms typical |
| Routing/Delivery | PubNub DSN (15+ POPs) + Red5 Stream Manager for elastic edge routing and broadcast fan-out. | Mixed UDP/TCP approach with adaptive routing; no native broadcast fan‑out. |
| Scalability & Deployment Limitations | No concurrency limits. Multicloud autoscale, global video, and edge data. | Room-size caps on free/standard tiers; cost escalates with high concurrency. |
| Presence / Lobby Accuracy | Built-in Presence API scales to millions; includes join/leave events, metadata, TTL, and accurate global lobby counts. | Not supported; presence requires external service or polling. No scalable built-in lobby count. |
Let’s compare Red5 Cloud enhanced with the PubNub integration to Agora across
Compliance and Data Governance
Red5 gives organizations control over where and how their data is stored and processed. Customers can keep data within the United States, deploy in other regions including Australia East (Sydney), Brazil East (Sao Paulo), Canada Southeast (Toronto), Mexico Central (Queretaro), US East (Ashburn), US West (San Jose), Italy Northwest (Milan), UK West (Newport), Saudi Arabia West (Jeddah), and Singapore (Singapore)”, or run Red5 Pro on their own infrastructure, including air-gapped and offline environments. Red5 also supports deployments on GovCloud platforms such as AWS GovCloud, OCI, and Azure. This flexibility provides transparency around security, access control, and governance, which is especially important for secured network systems used by government and defense agencies, where infrastructure location and access policies are non-negotiable.
Agora’s infrastructure and operations are tied to China, which raises concerns for organizations with strict security, compliance, or government-related requirements. Questions around who has access to the network, how data is governed, and potential exposure to foreign government oversight are common factors driving teams to reassess their platform choice. For public safety, government, defense, and other compliance-sensitive use cases, these concerns can be a significant barrier to adoption.
Pricing Transparency
Red5 Cloud pricing is built to eliminate cost uncertainty and lower the barrier to launching real-time streaming applications, without short-term trials or complex billing models.
Red5 Cloud offers a true Pay-As-You-Grow plan that starts at $0 and stays free on an ongoing basis for up to 50 GB of streaming and 6,000 instance hours per month. No credit card is required unless usage exceeds this threshold, allowing teams to build, test, and run real workloads with no upfront commitment.
When usage goes beyond the free tier, costs scale predictably. Customers pay $0.08 per GB and $0.69 per instance hour, and automatically return to free usage in any month where consumption drops back below 50 GB. There are no penalties, forced upgrades, or lock-ins.
For higher volumes, Red5 offers Growth and Enterprise plans with clear, all-inclusive pricing. The Growth Plan starts at $999 per month and includes 10,000 GB of streaming and 10,000 instance hours, with simple overage rates and unlimited multi-region scaling.
Agora’s pricing model is complex and difficult to evaluate upfront. While the platform advertises a monthly free tier of up to 10,000 minutes, those minutes are deducted sequentially across multiple product categories rather than applied holistically to a single workload.
In practice, usage is consumed first by audio-related services, followed by recording, proxy, and other auxiliary functions, before any video usage is counted. This means customers can exhaust the free tier without covering core video streaming needs, and video minutes are often billed at higher rates once the free allowance is depleted.
Agora also applies different pricing tiers based on resolution and feature set, with higher costs for HD and Full HD video, additional charges for recording, transcoding, and advanced capabilities, and separate pricing for newer features such as AI-related services.
For applications with growing concurrency, multiple feature requirements, or complex real-time workflows, pricing clarity often only emerges after usage is already live, increasing the risk of unexpected spend and making long-term cost planning more challenging. Learn more from our recent whitepaper.
Video Feature Comparison
| Feature | Red5 Cloud | Agora |
| Real‑Time Latency Streaming | < 250 ms | ≈ 350–500 ms |
| Quality | 4K and flexible | SDK video source: Up to 1080p @ 60fps. Custom video source: Up to 4K |
| Deployments | Flexible PaaS of licensing models Runs as SaaS or on customer tenant, Multiregion, Wavelength, Outpost, Gov Cloud, etc. | Fixed regions |
| Audience Size | Unlimited (regularly tests 100k plus with each release) | One million users |
| ABR Support | Multi-level with server-side transcoding or simulcast | Real-time transcoding and multiple bitrate layers |
| Mixing (server side compositing) | Flexible layouts and extensive API, (unlimited number videos) | Live mixing via Server Gateway; also composite recording (not real-time) |
| Instant Stream Switching /Zapping | Yes | No |
| Metadata | Support for KLV, JSON, frame accurate syncing across multiple videos | Text only (web socket, separate from video) |
| Ingest Protocols | WHIP, Zixi, RTSP, RTMP, SRT, Enhanced RTMP, MPEG-TS | WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, SRT |
| Delivery Protocols | HLS, SRT, RTP, and RTSP | RTMP, HLS, RTP, and RTSP |
| Real-time Transcoding | Yes | Yes |
| Interstitial and Ad insertion | Yes | No |
| DRM support | Yes | No |
| SDKs | Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Unity, Unreal Engine, and more | Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Electron, Flutter, React Native, Unity, Unreal Engine |
| Ingest scalability | Unlimited | 10 (with transcoding), 50 (without) |
| Restream to Social | Yes | Yes |
| Shared Architecture | No | Yes |
| Video streaming | Yes | Yes |
| Audio streaming | Yes | Yes |
| One-to-one meeting | Yes | Yes |
| One-to-many broadcast | Yes | Yes |
| Large-scale events | Yes | Yes |
| Recording | Yes | Yes |
| Video-on-demand | Yes | No |
| Screen Sharing | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual Background | Yes | Yes |
| Noise Suppression | Yes | Yes |
| Transcriptions | Yes | Yes |
| Reactions & Custom Events | Yes | Yes |
| Real-Time Speech to Text | Yes | Yes |
In‑App Messaging Feature Comparison
Red5 Cloud is now powered by PubNub, bringing a global real-time data network directly into the platform. With PubNub, applications can support chat, reactions, presence, user state, collaborative actions, and other event-driven features that stay perfectly aligned with the video stream. Developers no longer need to manage their own signaling or build real-time data pipelines from scratch. Instead, they can rely on PubNub’s worldwide edge network for predictable performance and Red5 Cloud for high-quality video that remains in sync across all clients.
Let’s compare how Red5 Cloud, powered by the PubNub integration, compares to Agora’s features.
| Feature | Red5 Cloud + PubNub | Agora |
| Direct & Group Chat | Yes | Yes |
| Presence Detection | Yes | Yes |
| Typing Indicators | Yes | Yes |
| Delivery & Read Receipts | Yes | Yes |
| Text & Image Support | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-Device Sync | Yes | Yes |
| Unread Message Counts | Yes | Partially |
| Message Reactions | Yes | Partially |
| Slash Commands | Yes | No |
| Threads & Replies | Yes | Partially |
| File Attachments | Yes | Yes |
| Rich Media / URL Previews | Partially | No |
| Push Notifications | Yes | Yes |
| Offline Messaging & Sync | Yes | Yes |
| Alerts & Notifications | Yes | No |
| Profanity Filtering | Yes | Yes |
| Chatbot Integration | Yes | Partially |
| Language Translation | Yes | Yes |
| Sentiment Analysis | Yes | No |
| Text-to-Speech | Yes | No |
| Geo/Location Tracking | Yes | Partially |
| IoT Device Control | Yes | No |
| Multiuser Spaces | Yes | Yes |
| Live Lobby Count | Yes | No |
| Data/Event Streaming | Yes | No |
| Event-Based Triggers & Functions | Yes | No |
| Access Control & Roles | Yes | Yes |
| GDPR Compliance | Yes | Yes |
| HIPAA Compliance | Yes | Yes |
| SOC 2 Type II | Yes | Yes |
| ISO 27001 | Yes | Yes |
| Global Infrastructure | 15+ POPs (AWS global, cloud-agnostic) | Yes |
| Uptime SLA | 99.999% | 99.9% |
| Low Latency | <100ms | <150ms |
| Massive Scalability | Planet-scale proven to support millions of concurrent users with elastic autoscaling | 1MCCU/room (sharded) |
| Real-Time Decision Intelligence & Analytics | Yes | No |
| GenAI Moderation & Summaries | Yes | Partially |
| AI Code Generation with MCP | Yes | No |
Customer Support
| Category | Red5 Cloud | Agora |
| Support model | Support included with platform plans | Separate paid support plans with annual agreements, billed annually. |
| Paid support plans & pricing | Included in plan pricing | Standard: $1,200/month (billed annually $14,400/year) Premium: $2,900/month (billed $34,800/year) Enterprise: $4,900/month (billed $58,800/year) |
| Documentation | Included for all customers | Included for all customers |
| Tickets / Email support | Included for all customers | Included for all customers |
| Developer community | Slack community | Discord community |
| Private Slack channel | Included for Growth and Enterprise | Only on Premium (billed $34,800/year) and Enterprise plans (billed $58,800/year) |
| Phone support | Included with Enterprise plan | Emergency phone access only on Enterprise (billed $58,800/year) |
| Hands-on DevOps Assist | Included with Enterprise plan | Available only on Enterprise support plan (billed $58,800/year) |
| Architecture & deployment guidance | Included with Enterprise plan | Available only on Enterprise support plan (billed $58,800/year) |
| Guaranteed response time | Available for Enterprise customers and tailored to customer requirements on a per-contract basis | P1 response time (critical): Standard: 4 business hours, Premium: 3 hours (24/7), Enterprise: 2 hours (24/7) P2 response time (major): Standard: 12 business hours, Premium: 6 business hours, Enterprise: 4 business hours. P3 response time (minor): Standard: 16 business hours, Premium: 9 business hours, Enterprise: 6 business hours. Guaranteed response times are not covered for questions about developer preview and beta products. |
| SLA guarantees | Available for Enterprise customers and tailored to customer requirements on a per-contract basis | Agora offers SLA-style guarantees for availability and support response times, including P1, P2, and P3 targets on paid support. Final SLA terms, such as uptime and credits, are defined in the commercial agreement and vary by contract. |
| Named support personnel | Available for Enterprise customers | Named CS, SA Engineer, and TAM only on Enterprise (billed $58,800/year) |
| Live developer training | Included via Enterprise and custom plans | Only on Enterprise support plan (billed $58,800/year) |
| Go-live health checks | Included with Enterprise plan | Only on Premium (charged $34,800/year) and Enterprise plans (billed $58,800/year) |
| Analytics and monitoring support | Included as part of platform capabilities | Gated behind Analytics tiers for Premium (billed $34,800/year) and Enterprise plans (billed $58,800/year) |
Try Red5 Cloud with the PubNub Integration
Sign up for Red5 Cloud, visit our documentation, or watch this Youtube tutorial to get started. If you have any questions or want to discuss your use case first, reach out to our team.