When a Collaboration Layer Becomes a Platform
Liveblocks started with a focused pitch: give product teams a turnkey SDK for adding real-time collaborative features – think live cursors, presence indicators, and multiplayer document editing – without building the infrastructure from scratch. That positioning made sense when “add collaboration to your app” was a weekend side project engineers dreaded. Now that collaborative UX has become a baseline expectation in SaaS products, Liveblocks has quietly grown that pitch into something bigger, and Ably is starting to feel the pressure from an unexpected direction.
Ably has spent years building a developer-trusted realtime messaging infrastructure business. Its pub/sub channels, presence APIs, and data streaming tools sit underneath dozens of production applications. But Liveblocks is not competing with Ably on infrastructure. It is competing on outcomes – and that is a harder fight to win on a feature-by-feature basis when the challenger is telling developers they do not need to wire up the low-level pieces at all.
What Liveblocks Actually Sells
The SDK covers the full collaboration stack: conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) for syncing state, room-based presence, threaded comments, notifications, and now AI-native features that allow apps to inject collaborative AI interactions directly into shared documents. That is not a narrow feature set. It is closer to what you might get after six months of stitching together Ably or Pusher for messaging, Yjs for CRDTs, and a custom comment layer on top. Liveblocks bundles all of it and charges on usage, which gives early-stage teams a clean starting point with no architecture decisions to make upfront.
The developer experience angle is doing a lot of work here. Liveblocks publishes prebuilt UI components – ready-to-drop-in cursors, avatars, comment threads – that integrate with React out of the box. For a startup trying to ship a collaborative feature before a product demo, that matters more than raw throughput guarantees. Ably, by contrast, is a more powerful tool for teams that know exactly what they need and have the engineering bandwidth to build on top of primitives. The gap between those two audiences is where Liveblocks is gaining ground.
The Developer Audience Split
There are two distinct types of developers shopping in this space. The first group – call them infrastructure buyers – wants control. They want to decide how messages are routed, how presence state is managed, and how the system scales under load. That group gravitates toward Ably, and Ably serves them well. The second group wants to skip straight to the working feature. They will trade flexibility for speed, and they would rather pay a vendor to manage the hard parts than spend engineering cycles on reliability work that does not move the product forward.
Liveblocks is built entirely for the second group. The tradeoff is real: applications with highly custom data models or unusual scaling patterns will hit the walls of an abstracted SDK faster than they would hit the limits of a raw infrastructure provider. But for the vast majority of B2B SaaS teams adding collaboration to a product that already has other complexity to manage – auth, billing, integrations – the abstraction is a feature, not a liability.
The market dynamic running underneath this is that SaaS buyers now expect Google Docs-style collaboration in productivity tools, project management software, and even developer tools themselves. That expectation is no longer a differentiator for the products that have it; it is a deficiency for products that do not. When a feature category stops being optional, the tooling that makes it cheapest and fastest to ship gains outsized leverage over teams with limited time.
This mirrors what happened in the developer email space, where Resend’s developer-focused email API pulled startups away from heavier platforms by focusing on the integration experience rather than raw feature parity. The pattern is consistent: a newer tool targets developer experience, wins early adopters, and gradually normalizes a higher level of abstraction as the default.
Ably’s Structural Advantage
Ably is not standing still. Its product has expanded into data pipelines, integrations with other cloud services, and a managed Kafka offering for teams that need durable message history at scale. These moves push Ably upmarket and away from the startup segment where Liveblocks is most active. That is a reasonable strategic response – protect the higher-margin, more defensible enterprise segment while a focused challenger eats the faster-moving startup base. Whether it works depends on how quickly those startup users grow and whether they re-evaluate their tooling choices when scale forces harder infrastructure decisions.
Ably also has reliability and global edge infrastructure that Liveblocks does not yet match in public positioning. For applications where a dropped message or a latency spike has serious consequences – live trading dashboards, collaborative audio, multiplayer gaming – Ably’s architecture is the more defensible choice. Liveblocks is not trying to serve those use cases, at least not yet.
Where the Overlap Gets Uncomfortable
The tension is sharpest in the mid-market: SaaS companies past the prototype stage but not yet running enterprise infrastructure teams. These companies are sophisticated enough to evaluate both tools seriously, but still time-constrained enough that a one-SDK solution is genuinely attractive. Liveblocks’ pricing model – which includes a generous free tier and usage-based scaling – is designed specifically to land in that segment and grow with it. A company that starts with Liveblocks at ten engineers rarely stops to re-platform when it reaches fifty, unless something breaks.
Liveblocks raised a Series A in 2023, giving it the runway to deepen its component library, expand framework support beyond React, and build out the AI collaboration features that now appear in its marketing prominently. The AI angle is worth watching specifically because it is not just a feature addition – it is a new wedge for developer acquisition. Any team building an AI-native app with collaborative editing is now a potential Liveblocks customer before they have even thought about realtime infrastructure.
Ably built its reputation on doing one hard thing extremely well. Liveblocks is betting that doing many collaboration-specific things well enough – and wrapping them in a developer experience that removes decision fatigue – is the more durable position for the next wave of SaaS builders. The question is not whether Liveblocks can take Ably’s existing customers. It is whether the developers who would have chosen Ably three years ago are choosing Liveblocks today without Ably ever entering the conversation.
