# PubNub vs Upstash QStash (slim)

> Upstash QStash scores 72.3 (BB) to PubNub's 68.1 (B) for sending webhooks. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pubnub-vs-upstash-qstash.md (~2,350 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pubnub-vs-upstash-qstash.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pubnub-vs-upstash-qstash
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Upstash QStash scores 72.3 (BB) on agent readiness against PubNub's 68.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. PubNub leads on maintenance & community. Both do sending webhooks.

- PubNub: B 68.1, rank #230 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pubnub.min.md
- Upstash QStash: BB 72.3, rank #109 of 950 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/upstash-qstash.min.md
- PubNub, good for Live fan-out to many connected clients with presence and history, and for an agent that manages a PubNub account through MCP. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 83 against 77. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Upstash QStash, good for Agents and serverless apps that need a delayed, retried or scheduled HTTP call without running a queue. Ahead on Reliability, 83 against 76; Agent ergonomics, 83 against 71; Transparency & trust, 81 against 64. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better.

| Category | PubNub | Upstash QStash |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 76 | 83 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 77 | 78 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 83 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 61 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 64 | 81 |

| Fact (where they differ) | PubNub | Upstash QStash |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | PubNub Inc. | Upstash |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://ps.pndsn.com` | `https://qstash.upstash.io/v2` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Licence | Proprietary service under PubNub's Terms and Conditions. The SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are source-available under the PubNub Software Development Kit Licence Agreement, which is not an OSI licence | Proprietary hosted service under Upstash's terms of service. The TypeScript and Python SDKs and the MCP server are MIT |
| Tools exposed | 17 | 10 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.github.pubnub/mcp-server` | `io.github.upstash/mcp-server` |
| Last release | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-29 |
| Terms last updated | 2023-05-05 |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-04-01 |  |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text |  |
| Popularity | 284k npm/wk | 269 stars, 816k npm/wk, 91k PyPI/wk |