[jrichardshaw]

Pulsars aren't 100% ruled out, but I think they're considered reasonably unlikely. The problem is mostly the apparent brightness. If you place almost any known pulsar (which are all in our galaxy) at the in the host galaxy of a localised FRB which(only a fraction of FRB's do we have measured distances for, but they're all quite far away), if would be far too dim.

The only exception to this is the Crab pulsar, which is observed to occasionally have "giant pulses" which are 1000s of times brighter than a typical pulse. If you put the a somewhat brighter version of the Crab pulsar in an FRB host galaxy at the low end of the known distances, you might just about be able to see it.