When to Use Edge

Edge Is a Good Fit#

Use Edge when you need hosted realtime channels for application features, without building and operating the WebSocket layer yourself.

Edge is a good fit for:

• Sending in-app notifications to signed-in users.
• Building chat, comments, activity feeds, dashboards, or collaborative updates.
• Delivering private user events such as private:${userId}.
• Adding presence to show who is online in a room, document, or workspace.
• Publishing backend or permitted client events to subscribed users.
• Reconnecting clients automatically.
• Recovering missed events with persisted replay.

Your application continues to own users, permissions, business rules, and permanent data. Edge carries events between your backend and connected clients.

Why Use Edge#

Edge is for the product layer.

It is not a queue, MQTT broker, workflow engine, stream processor, or application database.

What You Avoid Building#

A basic WebSocket endpoint is straightforward. A hosted realtime product also needs:

• Connection lifecycle and heartbeat handling.
• Reconnection, token renewal, and subscription restoration.
• Authorization for every channel and publish operation.
• Cross-server event delivery as the service scales horizontally.
• Presence state across multiple servers.
• Backpressure, rate limits, connection limits, and graceful draining.
• Replay cursors and duplicate-tolerant delivery.
• Browser, mobile, and backend SDK behavior across platforms.
• Metrics and diagnostics for the application using it.
• Predictable capacity based primarily on concurrent connections.
• EU data governance for event delivery, account data, operational logs, and product analytics.

Edge provides these capabilities as one service so you can focus on the application you are building. It is a great choice whether you are shipping independently or as part of a team.