Photon Cloud or Photon Server?
Photon Cloud is a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) solution. You can completely concentrate on your application client while hosting, server operations and scaling is all taken care of by Exit Games.
Photon Server is a On-Premises server application that you can run and host on machines of your choice. Fully customizable and the authoritative control gives you the freedom to configure and set up your own multiplayer game backend.
Photon Cloud is running on Photon Server.
Comparison
| Photon Cloud | Photon Server | |
|---|---|---|
| Server Administration | Zero server hassle anymore. Sit back and relax while our experts take care of running the servers. |
You gain full authority of running Photon for your applications.
You run your own servers or rent fitting ones and make sure they are available for your users. Photon's logs and performance counters provide all necessary information on performance and stability. |
| Scalability |
The Photon Cloud scales automatically to accommodate all your users. Using our SDKs your client application is built for an efficient load balancing workflow. |
Our load balancing power-up is available in source code.
It is a solid foundation to scale across multiple servers. Running the right number of servers for your customers is in your responsibility. |
| Game logic | With Photon Realtime, Photon Voice, Photon Chat and PUN you get turnkey solutions for all multiplayer game types. Each of the client SDKs available for free download contains multiple samples in source to get you started really quick in using Photons APIs for synchronous and asynchronous games and applications. | The server's logic can be fully customized in C#. Several demo applications are available in source with the free server SDKs and provide a high performance off-the-shelf framework for your application. Benefit from our protocols and abstraction of low level functionality and add any feature you might be missing. |
| Start instantly | Photon Cloud lets you register and immediately run your application. No setup needed. No server needed. | Once downloaded, start your Photon Server in less than 5 minutes. Photon is very easy to set up and runs locally as well as remote. |
| Licensing |
Choose between various subscriptions, matching your monthly active users count. |
Licenses are available as one-off purchases or subscriptions and provided as download. |
Differences Table
| Photon Cloud | Photon Server | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Features | |||
| Virtual Application | |||
| Name Server | |||
| Supported Products | |||
| Photon Realtime | |||
| PUN | |||
| Photon Chat | |||
| Photon Voice | |||
| Photon Bolt | |||
| Authentication Providers | |||
| Custom | |||
| You can implement your own. | |||
| Oculus | You can implement your own. | ||
| Steam | You can implement your own. | ||
| Xbox | You can implement your own. | ||
| PlayStation | You can implement your own. | ||
| Integrations | |||
| PlayFab | |||
| Default values | |||
| max EmptyRoomTTL | 300000 | 60000 | |