# Ably vs Convoy (slim)

> Ably scores 75 (BB) on agent readiness against Convoy's 62.2 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Convoy leads on reliability. Both do events webhooks send. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ably-vs-convoy.md (~1,950 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ably-vs-convoy.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ably-vs-convoy
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Ably scores 75 (BB) on agent readiness against Convoy's 62.2 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Convoy leads on reliability. Both do events webhooks send.

- Ably: BB 75, rank #53 of 629 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/ably.min.md
- Convoy: B 62.2, rank #308 of 629 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/convoy.min.md
- Ably, good for Fan-out of live messages to many connected clients, presence and resumable streams, with webhooks and queues as ways to get channel events to a backend. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 87 against 69; Security & auth, 64 against 53; Payments & pricing, 40 against 30; Maintenance & community, 85 against 80; Transparency & trust, 78 against 67. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; No incidents deducted, where Convoy loses 6 points for them.
- Convoy, good for A product that has to send signed webhooks to its customers' endpoints with retries, replay and a delivery log, or receive third-party webhooks and route them inward. Ahead on Reliability, 92 against 87.

| Category | Ably | Convoy |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 87 | 92 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 80 | 78 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 87 | 69 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 64 | 53 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 78 | 67 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Ably | Convoy |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Ably Realtime Ltd | Frain Technologies Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://main.realtime.ably.net` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP, SSE (legacy) | HTTP |
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Ably's terms of service. The SDKs and the Ably CLI on GitHub are Apache-2.0 | Elastic Licence 2.0 for the gateway (source available, not an OSI licence). The convoy.js SDK is MIT per npm. Convoy Cloud is a proprietary hosted service under Convoy's terms of use |
| Last release | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-27 |
| Terms last updated | no date given |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2023-06-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes |  |
| Popularity | 1.5M npm/wk, 407k PyPI/wk | 2.9k stars, 2.3k npm/wk, 679 PyPI/wk |