Pylon vs. Colyseus

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Summary

• Choose Colyseus if your game is the whole product, you’re already deep in Node, and you don’t need an app database / auth / file storage backing it.
• Choose Pylon if your game is one feature in a larger app, you want game state + app data + auth in one binary, or you don’t want to operate a Node server.

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Architecture

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Game-loop primitives

• Run a fixed-rate tick loop server-side (Colyseus: setSimulationInterval(ms), Pylon: tick_rate_hz in ShardConfig)
• Maintain authoritative state on the server
• Broadcast snapshot deltas to subscribed clients
• Accept inputs from clients (Colyseus: onMessage handlers; Pylon: apply_input_json)
• Support reconnection
• Have built-in matchmakers

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Where Colyseus is better

• More mature — longer production history, more integrations, more examples for specific game genres.
• Schema encoding — Colyseus’s @type schema decorators produce compact binary deltas. Pylon’s shard payloads are simpler JSON today; Colyseus is usually more bandwidth-efficient at scale.
• Game engine SDKs — Unity SDK support and codegen tooling. Pylon’s realtime client today is JS + Swift; for Unity you’d use Pylon’s WebSocket protocol manually.
• Game-specific primitives — rooms, matchmaking, state-sync patterns, and per-client state views are mature.
• Larger community — more tutorials and answers for game-dev specific problems.

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Where Pylon is better

• Backend in one binary — Colyseus is “your game state”. You need Postgres or another DB for player profiles, leaderboards, cosmetic inventory, and a separate auth system. Pylon ships all of that in the same process.
• Live queries for UI — Pylon’s sync engine + useQuery lets you build the lobby UI, friend list, leaderboard, etc. with server-authoritative reactive data. Colyseus rooms can broadcast state, but they’re not designed for “show me all my friends online” queries.
• Auth + sessions — magic codes, OAuth, RBAC, all in the binary. Colyseus has middleware hooks but you build the auth flow.
• Single deployment unit — one Rust binary on a VPS. Colyseus needs Node + your DB + your auth service + your storage.
• Performance ceiling — Rust runs faster than Node for tick loops with non-trivial physics. For pure state-broadcast games (where the bottleneck is the network), they’re comparable.
• AOI built-in — Pylon’s area_of_interest is part of Shard. Colyseus supports per-client filtering through StateView patterns, but spatial AOI is not the same high-level primitive.

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Self-host shape

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Use case fit

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Migrating from Colyseus

// Colyseus
class GameRoom extends Room<State> {
  onCreate() { this.setSimulationInterval(dt => this.update(dt), 1000 / 20); }
  onMessage("move", (client, data) => { /* ... */ });
  update(dt) { /* tick logic */ }
}

// Pylon
struct GameState { /* ... */ }
impl SimState for GameState {
    fn tick(&mut self, dt: f32) { /* tick logic */ }
    fn apply_input(&mut self, client_id: &str, input: &str) { /* ... */ }
    fn snapshot(&self) -> serde_json::Value { /* ... */ }
}
let shard = Shard::new("match_42", GameState::default(), ShardConfig { tick_rate_hz: 20, ..Default::default() });

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Pylon tradeoffs

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Both / and