Media
Realtime review
Score: 6/10Powerful SFU and TURN building blocks. Assembly required.
The breakdown explains the score. It is not an average. How to read these.
Last updated
Realtime, formerly Calls, provides WebRTC infrastructure on Cloudflare’s network. It includes a selective forwarding unit for audio and video, a TURN service for NAT traversal, and RealtimeKit as the higher-level SDK.
The TURN service is the best part. It is globally anycast, reasonably priced, and useful in almost any WebRTC system. The SFU is capable but low-level. You orchestrate tracks, sessions, and signaling yourself, and you still need to understand WebRTC to use it well.
The documentation was rewritten in September 2026 and is much better for it. There is now a working video-room quickstart, step-by-step recipes for publishing, subscribing, and DataChannels, and guides for embedded devices, cloud gaming, and AI audio. Error codes, limits, and negotiation ordering are now documented properly. Every example is still marked experimental, and the gap between the SFU and RealtimeKit is filled with recipes rather than a library. If your team knows WebRTC, the pricing is attractive and the path is now clear. If not, start with RealtimeKit.
Score history
- 5 to 6SFU docs rewrite added recipes, a working quickstart, and real troubleshooting.
- 5/10Initial rating.
Status page incidents
Published under Realtime SFU, Realtime TURN Service, RealtimeKit, plus incidents whose title names it.
- Last 18 months
- 23
- 3 from the title
- Major or critical
- 4
- Median time open
- 1.8 h
- Since May 2025
- 26
Counts what Cloudflare published, not what broke: time open is how long the status entry stayed open, and nothing before May 2025 is tracked at all. Incidents Cloudflare tagged against nothing but named in the title are counted too. The caveats in full.