Building bridges: announcing AnyCable for Laravel
github.com/anycable/anycable-laravel
Hey Laravel Community! 🌟
We’re thrilled to introduce AnyCable for Laravel—a production-proven real-time server now available in preview. Think of it as a friendly handshake from the Rails ecosystem, returning the love after Inertia.js made its way from Laravel to Rails. Let’s keep building bridges!
AnyCable brings 7+ years of Rails-scale reliability to Laravel, designed to complement the tools you already love and act as a natural add-on for Laravel apps, not a foreign component. In other words, it’s a new Laravel Broadcasting backend in addition to Reverb, Pusher, and others. Your backend real-time logic (events, etc.) stays the same. Your client-side logic (Echo) can remain the same.
Our first Laravel-aware release includes the broadcast adapter library and limited Pusher protocol support (for now)—just enough to get started with AnyCable.
We plan to bring better Reverb compatibility and port AnyCable-specific features in future releases. But first, we’d love to hear from the community!
Ask questions, raise concerns, request features—your feedback will help shape what comes next.
I know that the first question is going to be “why”. Why use AnyCable when we have Reverb, Pusher, Soketi, and so on? So, let me try to answer it right away.
1. Reliability and Developer Experience for Real-Time Features
AnyCable is built to make WebSockets truly reliable—going far beyond basic connectivity. With features like reliable streams and resumable sessions, AnyCable ensures your users never miss a message, even if their connection drops for a moment, whether they’re riding the subway or just dealing with everyday WiFi hiccups. As a result, your users get a smooth and dependable real-time experience.
Other key reliability features include:
At-least-once delivery: Delivery of messages is guaranteed, and when the client-side handles potential duplicates, we achieve exactly-once.
Automatic state restoration: Upon reconnection, clients automatically catch up on missed messages and resume their session without re-authentication or re-subscribing to channels.
Fallback transports: Beyond WebSockets, AnyCable supports Server-Sent Events and long-polling, so your real-time features work everywhere.
2. Scalability and Performance
AnyCable is written in Go, giving your Laravel app a high-performance WebSocket server that takes the load off your core PHP processes. This unlocks greater scalability for real-time workloads, letting your main app focus on business logic while AnyCable handles thousands of concurrent connections with low latency.
Effortless horizontal scaling: Seamlessly scale with Redis or NATS or use embedded NATS for clustering—no extra infrastructure headaches.
Optimized resource usage: Go’s efficiency means less RAM and CPU per connection, making it cost-effective as your app grows.
Observability and tooling: The AnyCable ecosystem includes everything from Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring to a k6 plugin for load testing, so you can confidently operate and scale your real-time features.
Importantly, we haven't benchmarked AnyCable against Reverb or Soketi yet. Stay tuned!
3. Open Source and Always Will Be
AnyCable is open source and here to stay—feel free to screenshot that for posterity. The core is free, and always will be. For teams with massive scale, there’s a commercial version with extra features, but you only pay if you need it. There’s also a free managed offering (plus.anycable.io) that already supports Laravel!
Built by Evil Martians, a team focused on developer tools, AnyCable is designed to fit naturally into your Laravel workflow. For example, you can launch the server locally with a single Artisan command:
php artisan anycable:server
No manual installs or downloads—just Laravel simplicity.
In short: AnyCable brings production-grade reliability, performance, and developer experience to Laravel’s real-time features, while being open and flexible for teams of any size.