[louwhopley]

I would suggest checking out PowerSync (https://www.powersync.com/) for this.

I've built various React apps (and iOS apps before that) in the past on a bunch of stacks.

My experience with the following tools were as follows:

- Pusher: love the tool, but required lots of layers on top of it to be used for keeping DB's in sync. It does make sockets trivially easy to get going and use.

- MeteorJS: lots of cool "realtime magic", but hard to break out (it's too opinionated and constrained). We ended up breaking out and running ExpressJS + React + Pusher and ditching MeteorJS.

- Firebase: used it for two projects. Platform lock-in, like weird Firebase-specific nuances to workaround and solve for, felt like quite a lot. You basically have to park your experience with other stacks and databases and become an expert in Firebase. A big one here was around access policies for the data in the database → limiting what data a user can access.

My current stack is now mostly Cloudflare and keeping real-time requirements in the product design to a minimum, to reduce the overhead.

[bruchim]

Thanks, super helpful. re Cloudflare, are you using them to reduce latency? what about a centralized database?