EMQX is a capable MQTT broker built to move and route messages at scale, and it clusters well. Air Pipe covers the MQTT fundamentals — a real broker with QoS 0/1/2, retained, wildcards and MQTT-over-WebSocket — and adds what a broker leaves to you: the same connection runs your full pipeline on each message, with per-connection auth and multi-tenancy in the same config, from a single binary.
A real MQTT broker over raw TCP and MQTT-over-WebSocket: publish/subscribe with wildcard topics, QoS 0/1/2, retained messages and subscribe-time authorization. Anonymous / public connections are supported too — the way a broker with allow_anonymous is — but kept multi-tenant-safe.
A broker moves and routes messages; the logic that does something with them lives in services you build and run alongside it. In Air Pipe that logic is the same config as your APIs — assert on a message, transform it, write it to Postgres or MongoDB, call an upstream API, then fan it out. You're not wiring a rules engine to external services; the message processing is your backend.
MQTT for devices and a WebSocket channel API for browsers come from the same config, with presence, history-rewind and retained values. One platform serves your fleet and your app's front-end, instead of a broker for devices plus a separate realtime stack for the web.
Per-connection auth is part of the config: connections present a shared-secret token, your JWKS, or an Air Pipe-issued token — or connect fully open with no credential — and everything is scoped and bounded per org, with usage attributed per org. There's no separate auth plugin or ACL service to run.
Run the single cross-platform binary yourself, or use the managed cloud — no broker cluster, no external Redis or rules database to stand up and keep healthy. Self-hosted realtime connections aren't billed.
Broker platforms typically meter concurrent connections and message throughput. Air Pipe meters one request unit per request — a whole request, whatever ran inside it — and those units roll over for 12 months. Self-hosted, your sockets aren't billed at all.
EMQX is built to cluster to very large device counts, and out of the box Air Pipe doesn't advertise that kind of turnkey fleet-scale footprint or published SLAs. But it's a conversation, not a wall: if you need very large fleets or dedicated capacity, we scale out or provision dedicated infrastructure for you — talk to us. For most products the better fit is a broker that's already your backend, runs your logic on each message, and self-hosts as one binary — there from day one.