Comparison with other tools

This section compares Better SSE with other server-sent events libraries for Node.

Better SSE was designed to be the easiest and most powerful library for using server-sent events, better than all other existing solutions.

Features

TL/DR

Better SSE supports all* the features that other competing libraries do and much more. It is TypeScript-first (but obviously can be used with JavaScript), very well tested, easier to scale and much more flexible than others whilst still having a simpler programming interface for both simple and complex use cases.

Feature	better-sse	sse-channel	sse	express-sse	sse-stream	sse-pubsub	nestjs @Sse	hono/streaming
Send events to individual clients	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Send events to multiple clients at once	✔	✔	❌	❌	❌	✔	❌	❌
Send/Modify individual fields	✔	✔	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Framework independent	✔	✔	✔	❌	❌	✔	❌	❌
TypeScript types	✔	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	✔	✔
EventSource polyfill support	✔	✔	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Automatic connection keep-alive	✔	✔	❌	✔	✔	✔	✔	❌
Serialize data as JSON	✔	✔	❌	✔	❌	✔	✔	❌
Sanitize newlines from data	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	❌
Ignore client-given last event ID	✔	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Event history maintenance	❌	✔	❌	❌	❌	✔	❌	❌
Modify response headers	✔	❌	❌	✔	❌	❌	✔	✔
Modify response status code	✔	❌	❌	✔	❌	❌	❌	❌

* Except event history maintenance… Coming soon!

Performance

You can run benchmarks yourself that compare Better SSE with other libraries in the benchmarks project in the examples directory.