Real-time doesn't always mean WebSockets. Picking the right tool changes everything. In this article we'll cover when polling is actually the right answer, why SSE is the most underrated real-time technology on the web, when WebSockets are genuinely worth the complexity, how to handle reconnections properly, lessons from building real-time features at scale and a clear decision framework so you stop defaulting to WebSockets out of habit. Every time a developer hears "real-time", the next word out of their mouth is usually "WebSockets." I get it. WebSockets feel like the serious, production-grade choice. Polling feels naive. SSE feels like something you read about once and forgot. So the default becomes WebSockets and teams end up maintaining infrastructure complexity they didn't need for a problem that SSE would have solved in 30 lines. I've built real-time features on platforms handling more than 10 million active users. Subscription verification flows, live event score updates, notification systems.…