Sure. The only thing SocketIO really has going for it is built-in support for falling back to long polling (for browsers that don't support websockets). That said, if you're using socketIO in production, you'll have to deal with memory leaks that aren't your fault (eg. even if you stick to boilerplate code). If you just want something quick and easy for a hackathon or personal project that you never want to scale, go for it. Otherwise be prepared for a rewrite, or increased hardware costs.