When comparing Backand vs Ably, the Slant community recommends Ably for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform realtime Backend as a Service (BaaS) tools?” Ably is ranked 1st while Backand is ranked 4th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Possibility to get a free forever account
If you sign up before the official pricing is announced, you can get a "free-forever" account. It's limited to 500 connections and 10GB data transfer per moth though.
Pro Ably’s client library SDKs provided cross-platform support for all visitor devices and browsers regardless of whether they have modern support for WebSockets.
Pro Provides 24/7 support
Pro Offers latency based routing
This ensures users anywhere in the world connect to the closest datacenter or edge acceleration PoP available to them.
Pro Also includes mobile native push notification support
For Apple Push Notification Service and (Google) Firebase Cloud Messaging
Pro Internet-native pub/sub system
Cons
Con No official pricing announced
On their pricing page in their official website, it's said that Backand will announce their pricing by fall 2015 but as of December 2015 it has not been announced yet.