If you want true realtime in PHP, you need an event loop version of PHP like ReactPHP. Else you must have Node.js and socket.io running in tandem, in which case those will be doing the heavy lifting of the realtime part of the app (which isn't a bad thing). At the end of the day, all laravel event broadcasting is doing is making an event available in a cache store like Redis. It's still up to a separate technology (again, like Node) to read from and push that data through a web socket to the browser.