Rivet review
A flexible actor platform for multiplayer rooms, but broader than dedicated game-server orchestration.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Sep 2026
Rivet is an open-source platform for building stateful realtime applications with durable Actors. Those Actors can represent users, rooms, matches, or sessions, retain persisted state, communicate over WebSockets, process asynchronous queues, run scheduled tasks, and sleep when idle. Its documented multiplayer and game-room patterns make it a fit for developers building actor-based game rooms, while its broader scope also covers agent orchestration, realtime applications, and per-tenant databases.
The plan structure supports an incremental path from experimentation to production. Free costs $0 per month and is intended for prototyping and small projects, with community support. Hobby costs $20 per month and adds usage-based compute and email support for scaling applications. Team costs $200 per month and includes usage-based compute plus Slack and email support for growing teams and businesses. Enterprise Edition On-Prem runs in a customer's VPC, customer environments, or regulated networks, with air-gapped and sovereign-cloud deployment options, priority support, and an SLA.
Rivet's strongest fit is for teams that want stateful room logic, independent Actor placement, regional routing, operational inspection, and managed container deployment through Rivet Compute. It connects with frameworks and infrastructure including React, Next.js, Svelte, Hono, Express, Elysia, tRPC, AWS, Kubernetes, GCP, Cloudflare, Vercel, Railway, Postgres, and FoundationDB. Web, Linux, API, and self-hosted options broaden deployment choices. Teams seeking a narrowly focused dedicated-server orchestration product or a built-in matchmaking service should consider a more specialized alternative.
Rivet pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Durable Actors retain state for users, rooms, matches, and sessions
- Regional placement, WebSockets, queues, timers, and realtime events
- Managed, self-hosted, BYOC, VPC, and air-gapped deployment options
- Where it doesn't
- Broader realtime infrastructure focus than dedicated game-server orchestration
- Usage-based compute applies to Hobby and Team plans
- Community support on Free; priority SLA support requires Enterprise Edition On-Prem
Rivet fact sheet, pricing and score →
Advertiser disclosure: iTechGuides is reader-supported. Vendors can pay for top positions in our rankings and for a place on other products' pages, and we may earn a commission when you click some links. Bought places stand at the number bought; this page and our disclosure say so. Paying vendors may get a fuller, more detailed review from our editors, and that review can change their score. How we rank.
Last updated · How we research and update