What is PulseBeam?

Open-Source WebRTC platform built for Engineers

TL;DR: Features

Full native WebRTC control without the upfront investment, maintenance, and ongoing complexity.

⚡ Peer-to-peer first avoid giving your data to the middlemen
🔒 End-to-end encrypted media and data
🪄 Automatic reconnection + edge-case handling
🔌 Free signaling servers & protocol. Self-host or use our cloud
🚀 Production-ready SDK own less than 100 lines of code
🛠️ Actively maintained OSS stack (no abandoned projects)
🌐 Global STUN/TURN network free STUN, usage-based TURN

💡 What WebRTC Infrastructure Problem?

WebRTC is powerful! Building and maintaining the required infrastructure is complex, time-consuming, and expensive.

Challenge	In-House Approach	PulseBeam Solution
Signaling servers	Build custom protocol + manage scaling	Prebuilt secure protocol + free hosted servers
STUN/TURN setup	Deploy and manage global servers	Global network (STUN free, TURN pay-as-you-go)
Security audits	Time-consuming	E2E encryption + auth controls built-in
Edge-case handling	Manual testing for reconnections/NAT issues	Automatic recovery in SDK

Hidden Costs of In-House WebRTC

Debugging: Connections happen in clients, debugging requires deep knowledge, patience, and building in visibility.
Maintenance: Protocol updates, server scaling, security patches
TURN costs: Requires multiple regions for low-latency, leading to overprovisioning
Developer time: Months spent debugging edge cases instead of building features

1. 🔒 Security Built In

While WebRTC mandates encryption of data and media between peers, “Signaling mechanisms aren’t defined by WebRTC standards, so it’s up to you to make signaling secure. If an attacker manages to hijack signaling, they can stop sessions, redirect connections, and record, alter, or inject content.” — Sam Dutton, Google Chrome Developer Advocate

Security is a top priority at PulseBeam. The highlights:

End-to-end encryption: All media and data transfers are secure
Token-based access with authorization: Your policies define which peers can connect within your app.
Mandatory HTTPS: Encryption for all signaling traffic
Time-bound sessions: Issue time-limited (TTL) tokens to users, minimize exposure from leaked credentials ensuring secure access to your app.
TURN relay immunity: Our servers can’t decrypt your data, even when relaying data
Key rotation: We’ll remind you to rotate credentials

Applications are only as secure as their weakest link, WebRTC’s encryption does not help if your signaling layer is vulnerable. We designed PulseBeam to be secure by default.

2. 💣 Cut out the Middleman

At a fundamental level. Many CPaaS force traffic to flow through their SFU infrastructure. Which brings with it:

🔓 Reduced Data Privacy: a man in the middle on all data transfer which normally decrypts your stream
💰 Cost: you are paying their data ingress and egress
🐌 Latency forced hops through their infrastructure can increase latency significantly depending on your peer location

Non-ideal in many cases. PulseBeam enables direct peer to peer data flow.

3. ⌨️ Developer-Centric Control

We expose media streams to give you the tools to build freely. Our philosophy is you own your data. You control your media.

Hook into media streams to provide:

Real-time captions
Pattern recognition
Classification
Accessories on face landmark
Gesture recognition
Many more!

We want you to have access to the raw streams and media. So we expose the underlying media tracks and browser APIs in our SDKs.

Access Raw Media Streams:

// Hook into local stream
const s = await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({ video: true });
peer.setLocalStream(s);

// Hook into remote stream
peer.onsession = (session) => {
  session.ontrack = ({ streams }) => console.log("New media stream:", streams);
}

For browser clients, if your user has the compute, you can use AI Edge models built-into the browser.

5. 📫 Signaling

Is Signaling hard?

For production applications to survive, signaling takes some serious consideration. Daniel Petersson, a Google Duo Engineer has a great talk about building scalable signaling for a WebRTC production service.

PulseBeam was designed for production applications at scale and to operate for your clients on unreliable networks for fast connections and reconnections.

Other open-source signaling?

“Selecting the wrong signaling framework [is a common WebRTC mistake]. PeerJS is a great signaling solution from years ago, [but it’s inactive], and I wouldn’t use it.” - Tsahi Levent-Levi, WebRTC Expert (Watch his Conference Talk).

Other open-source options, like simple-peer, are similarly inactive. Normally 1-4+ Years between updates.

PulseBeam is actively developed, with regular updates, security patches, full-time team, and dedicated engineering support.

Feature	PeerJS	PulseBeam
JS Client	✅	✅
Open Source Self-Host Signaling Server	✅	✅
Free Cloud-Hosted Signaling Server	✅	✅
Last Update	2023	Weekly Commits
Commit History	PeerJS	PulseBeam
Maintenance	❌ Inactive	✅ Actively maintained
Security	❌ Insecure	✅ End-to-end encryption + BYO auth
Scalability	❌ Limited	✅ Built for production
Security Fixes	`¯\_(ツ)_/¯` Dependency Bot	Critical Patches <24hr
STUN	Public STUN only	Unlimited Free STUN
TURN	None provided	Usage-based TURN

📊 Why Developers Choose PulseBeam

You value:

Speed: Ship WebRTC apps in hours, not months.
Control: Open-source stack with optional managed infrastructure.
Cost Efficiency: No upfront investment; no pay by the minute; scale TURN usage as needed.

Ideal For:

When communications is not your core:

Startups avoiding infrastructure debt
Engineers prioritizing security/encryption
Teams building real-time audio/video/data apps

👋 Join the PulseBeam Community

While PulseBeam is still early days, we’re creating a community of developers building the future of real-time communication. Whether you’re creating a video chat app, a live collaboration tool, or a multiplayer game, PulseBeam has your back.

We’re here to keep you productive for the long haul. Join our Discord if you need help, want to chat, or are thinking of a new feature. We’re here to help - and to make PulseBeam even better.