Best way to use Laravel with Flutter as a real-time database

[modern nest]

I'm new to Laravel and websockets in general. I'd like to use it for the backend of my Flutter application and need real-time data.

The first thing I saw was Pusher, however 1) I don't like the idea of being tied into a paid service and 2) Pusher's package for Flutter doesn't seem to support Flutter Desktop which I need (as well as Mobile and Web.

So what's the best way of doing this? I see Laravel Echo, Socket.io, Beyond Code's Laravel Websockets, etc, and it's all very confusing and I don't know where to start.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

[vague saddle]

Echo is a client-side (browser) package and uses the Pusher API, that's basically just a bit of JS to communicate with Pusher.
Then there's Soketi, Socket.io, Beyond Code's Laravel Websockets, those are all websocket servers. They all implement the server-side API from pusher. So, they're all compatible with Laravel Echo. And there's Pusher themselves, that's the server-side, but paid.
So if you're going with one of those options you'd still need a client that's compatible with the Pusher API, so the Pusher package for Flutter can probably connect to all of these. Echo wouldn't come into the picture here, as that's just a JavaScript client

[modern nest]

Thanks, that helps clear some things up for me.

The Pusher client package for Flutter doesn't seem to support Desktop though. https://github.com/pusher/pusher-channels-flutter

So how would I connect my Flutter Desktop client to my Laravel websocket server?

[modern nest]

Do I just connect to them like any other websockets, it's not Laravel/Pusher specific?

Using a websocket package like this? https://pub.dev/packages/web_socket_channel