Migrate from Ably to NoLag

Ably is a mature realtime platform with rich delivery semantics. NoLag shares the same pub/sub foundation and presence model, so moving across is mostly a matter of renaming a few concepts. This guide maps Ably onto NoLag and shows the same flow in both.

Why teams move

NoLag keeps the realtime transport you rely on and adds:

• Blueprint SDKs for chat, notifications, dashboards, tracking, and more.
• A coordination layer for AI agents: dispatch, share state, observe, and approve, on the same platform as your app features.
• One place for human-facing and agent-facing realtime.

Concept map

Before: Ably

import * as Ably from 'ably'

const ably = new Ably.Realtime('API_KEY')
const channel = ably.channels.get('chat')

channel.subscribe('message', (msg) => {
  console.log('Received:', msg.data)
})

channel.publish('message', { text: 'Hello!' })

After: NoLag

import { NoLag } from '@nolag/js-sdk'

const client = NoLag('your_access_token')
await client.connect()

const room = client.setApp('chat').setRoom('general')
room.subscribe('message')

room.on('message', (data) => {
  console.log('Received:', data)
})

room.emit('message', { text: 'Hello!' })

Presence and history

Ably presence maps to NoLag presence, tracked per room with join and leave events and a live member list. If you use Ably history to fetch missed messages, NoLag covers that with message logging and replay, so a client that reconnects can catch up.

Delivery guarantees

Ably is known for its delivery semantics. NoLag offers quality-of-service levels 0, 1, and 2 (at most once, at least once, exactly once) so you choose the guarantee per message rather than paying for the strongest everywhere.

Next steps

• Start with the 5-minute quick start.
• Read the deeper NoLag vs Ably comparison.
• Explore the high-level SDKs if you would rather not rebuild chat or dashboards by hand.