Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a managed messaging service for moving events between independent applications and services. It helps teams decouple publishers from subscribers so they can build asynchronous workflows and process events independently.

What company sizes and industries is Google Cloud Pub/Sub the best fit for?

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is used across small businesses, mid-market organizations, and enterprises, with small-business and enterprise users especially visible. Common uses include connecting services, building event-driven applications, and moving data through pipelines.

Small businesses: Use it for lightweight messaging, event triggers, and connecting applications.
Mid-market organizations: Use it to link services and support data pipelines as workloads grow.
Enterprises: Use it for messaging across microservices, streaming data, and large-scale event-driven systems.

What customer support options does Google Cloud Pub/Sub provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

The support experience comes across as adequate but not consistently a standout; evaluations lean toward the middle, with some stronger and weaker experiences. The emphasis in practical use is more on Pub/Sub’s managed messaging and reliability than on support as a clear differentiator.

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Zaar H.

Senior Staff Cloud Architect - APAC

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

5/22/2023

"High performing queue with room fine-tuning"

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

High-performant queue with global scope - no need to worry about provisioning, regions, etc. - just create topics/subscriptions and go ahead, it scales automatically. It's a backbone of event-driven applications in GCP. It's the backbone of GCP EventArc. You can natively connect Pub/Sub to trigger Cloud Run and Cloud Functions, as well as to stream directly from Pub/Sub to BigQuery. For high-volume workloads it worth looking at Pub/Sub lite as way to save money in exchange for more capacity planning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Great queue in general - simple to understand and use. They started lean and added more functionalities as it went. Pub/Sub Lite can be fiddly though - while it can save you quite a bit of money, it requires careful capacity planning and lacks many built-in integrations (BQ Streaming, Push delivery for Cloud Run/Functions). Again, Pub/Sub Lite is a potential money saver but not a drop-in replacement for regular pub/sub Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Retail

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/31/2023

"GCP Pubsub"

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Easy handling of message transmission

99.99% delivery of messages to subscribers

Good Backout plan if something happens to GCP Servers

Fast delivery

Easy to connect with Feedback and make sure subscribers received Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Nothing to explain what I did not like. Everything perfect Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Marketing and Advertising

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/12/2023

"Amazing - Message Queue that just works. with multi-regional/global scale."

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

It just works. It is incredible for this to be 'serverless' be so full of features, and not require to administer any sort of cluster. This was been critical for helping us do more with streaming data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

For massive scale data it can be expensive. We also compress our messages, so the 1KB message size minimum means - to optimize costs - we need to bundle messages. For some larger scale things, we rely on Pub/Sub Lite. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jakub V.

Software Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

Originally submitted 1/29/2021

"Changed my mind."

3/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Could access my queues everywhere as it is cloud based service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Changed my mind, going from 0 to 6. The product itself works, but that lack of documentation is disturbing. I experienced all sorts of weird behavior in Python. I solved some of them by using throttling, which wasn't described very well. And I still feel the system configuration I found in the end is very brittle. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

Use only with something else than Python and only for very simple tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

We can load balance our microservices by pushing in queues and popping them when they are ready. So it's more about scaling for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Malathi M.

Programmer Analyst Executive

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

7/9/2022

"Cloud Pub/Sub for Streaming Analytics Integration in GCP"

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Fully managed Real-time streaming messaging service

Supports asynchronous communication with millisecond latency

Publish/Subscribe between producers and consumers

Load balancing, Highly available & auto-scaling capabilities

per message parallel processing workflows with Cloud functions

Great Service integration with Dataproc, Dataflow, BigTable, BigQuery, ClouStorage

Supports event-driven applications

Supports both Pull and Push message delivery patterns Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Decoupling - the publisher doesn't have the proper acknowledgment of whether the consumers received the messages during asynchronous messaging

It is not suitable for huge volumes of data like audio, and video and doesn't support synchronous processing (e.g., Video conferencing) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

Good message pub/sub when you work with GCP services

Integrates very well

Make sure if you have Kafka or other streaming solutions already plan accordingly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

Real-time event distribution

Ingestion integration with data flow which delivers the events to databases like BigQuery, BigTable and Cloud Storage

Replicating CDC data from migrating databases.

Data streaming from IoT devices for Smart Auto manufacturing & other industries

Load balance the events messages reliably

Due to asynchronous messaging, high scalable and availability - performance is achieved with millisecond latency Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Education Management

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

4/12/2022

"Pub/Sub , possibly the best asynchronous communication tool on Cloud."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Pub/Sub has all kinds of features and compatibility options, a Data guy would want in their toolset. We primarily use Pub/Sub to publish Avro message which are later published to GCS and Big Query. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Probably the only downside of using Pub/Sub we faced was no support for schema evolution. A schema once fed into a Pub/Sub topic cannot be changed, which might hamper the overall workflow in cases of new changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Matthew W.

Software Developer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/24/2019

"Easy to use scaleable messaging service"

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

That it's easy to set up between apps I run in any region. My team can use it to send small messages that trigger things to happen, or to send large chunks of data around our global system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

The price is a bit high per byte sent, which forces us to make sacrifices in terms of how many different apps we can send the data to and how much we can send. For example, monitoring metrics is a use case where we had to cut back on how many messages we sent to a microservice dedicated to collect the metrics via PubSub. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

Embrace it for moving data between microservices, but be mindful of how much data you're sending through it to avoid sticker shock. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're creating and maintaining a big data pipeline. We can develop one microservice at a time and if one goes offline to be upgraded or experiences a bug, the data backs up in PubSub and we can drain the data from PubSub into the microservice once it's running again. It helps our system be very reliable. We also fork the data, for example, sending some to a monitoring system to collect metrics or to a beta feature in the pipeline that may or may not stick around. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sandra O.

Sandra Manager General

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

3/24/2019

Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.

"More secure messaging and modern analysis."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Asynchronous communication provides an incredible advantage in reading messages, this greatly facilitates the display in the tray without the need to reload the platform, the relations between publisher and subscriber allows the connection of the API of the platform in a secure manner. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

The distribution of notifications of events is somewhat excessive due to its synchronization with the platform and its database with the API, the loading of messages in the tray has a slight delay. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

Its integration is very simple besides the data process is in the cloud. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

We improve the transmission of data from several processes or devices in which it accelerates the process of sending and receiving data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Janaka B.

Software Engineer

Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

Originally submitted 11/3/2018

"Simple and Highly Scalable Publisher/Subscriber Solution, On-demand!"

5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

The generous pricing model where there's a 10GB/month free quota for message payload sizing, and there's no other fees unless a message retention policy is configured or a subscription snapshot is created.

Push-based subscriptions make it quite easy to consume messages in an event-based pattern.

Google Cloud Functions natively support Pub/Sub as an event source, making it an ideal communication option for GCP-based serverless/FaaS computing systems for low-cost, event-driven, pay-per-execution compute provisioning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

The API is somewhat confusing, as subscriptions can be manipulated at topic-level as well as globally (project-level) where the latter could lead to confusions.

Payloads need to be base-64 encoded before publishing (and decoded after retrieval) even if they are known to contain ASCII-compatible textual data.

Can sometimes lead to unexpected charges, as Pub/Sub will automatically keep on retrying messages continuously, even if failures are due to permanent code-level issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

Push-based subscriptions seem to have some capacity limitations at load, hence evaluate your expected load before deciding on the subscription type.

Newer subscriptions would only receive newly published messages, so if you need to maintain a historical account of all processed messages make sure you create the respective subscriptions before the first go-alive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

Clients use it as a means of integration between their own e-commerce systems, and our own cloud AS2/EDI solution service offering.

Pub/Sub offers both push- and pull-based subscriptions which makes it ideal for a wide range of integration scenarios; additionally any un-acked messages are retained/retried for up to 7 days, minimizing the risk of data loss for our enterprise integration and B2B solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alexander M.

Senior Programmer

Program Development

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/28/2019

Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.

"Communication, frequency and external links for integration management."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

Very broad platform where you think of all available services, provides greater synchronization in the messaging of messages, connections to services and data systems installed inside and outside the platform, is easy to manage and integrate thanks to the keys that each platform has, you only activate the option and you will have it available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Google Cloud Pub/Sub?

It is unfavorable the moments in which the platform is updated since sometimes the integrations fail since the configuration or the accesses change, as well as the transfers of files and messages. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Pub/Sub:

It is free and easy to learn how to manage this platform and it is also adaptable to any development system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Google Cloud Pub/Sub solving and how is that benefiting you?

Distributes and improves the balance of work in the projects developed under the integrations of this platform, the consultations become more fluid thanks to the instances and more extensive monitoring of them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.