The Most Popular Agora Alternatives: A Detailed Analysis and Comparative Review

If you've found Agora limiting or are exploring other chat solutions, this blog will help you make the right choice. We’ll explore the drawbacks of Agora and introduce six powerful alternatives that can enhance your real-time chat experience.

Agora is a Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service (RTE PaaS) specializing in integrating audio, video calling, live streaming, and chat functionalities within applications. Established in 2014, Agora equips developers with tools to create real-time communication solutions across various industries, including education, gaming, telehealth, and e-commerce.

While Agora offers a chat product, it tends to be less recognized than its audio and video capabilities. This highlights the platform's strength in multimedia communication, even as it broadens its features to include chat functionalities. In addition to its standard offerings, Agora provides several key features designed to enhance the overall user experience:

Furthermore, Agora offers a range of extensions—add-ons designed to enhance user experiences during calls. These extensions enrich functionalities by integrating custom user interfaces or adding media capabilities, allowing developers to tailor their applications to specific needs.

To support developers, Agora provides three integration options:

1. Pricing Complexity

Agora operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on usage metrics, such as the number of minutes for audio and video streaming. This structure can lead to unpredictable costs, particularly for applications with fluctuating user activity. For businesses with high user engagement, expenses can escalate rapidly. Additionally, features like cloud recording and analytics come with extra charges, requiring users to carefully estimate their usage to avoid unexpected bills. This complexity can be a significant deterrent for startups and small businesses looking for straightforward budgeting options

2. Learning Curve and Technical Complexity

While Agora provides extensive documentation, developers may still encounter challenges during the integration process. The SDKs require a solid understanding of real-time communication protocols, which may necessitate a considerable time investment, especially for those unfamiliar with such technologies. Furthermore, Agora has a smaller community of developers compared to more widely adopted platforms, resulting in fewer third-party resources, tutorials, and community-driven support, making troubleshooting more challenging .

3. Feature Gaps Compared to Competitors

Although Agora excels in basic real-time communication, it may lack certain advanced features found in competitors, such as integrated chat systems or detailed analytics dashboards. This means users might need to implement additional solutions or integrate with other platforms to fill these gaps, complicating development and increasing overall project scope .

4. Latency and Performance Issues

Despite Agora's emphasis on low latency, performance can vary depending on user location and network conditions. Users in areas with less robust internet infrastructure may experience delays, impacting the quality of real-time interactions, especially in applications like gaming or live broadcasting, where timing is crucial. Additionally, Agora’s performance is heavily dependent on the quality of the user’s internet connection. Fluctuating bandwidth and network congestion can lead to degraded audio and video quality, negatively affecting user experience .

5. Scalability Challenges

Although Agora claims to handle scalability well, businesses expecting significant growth or high traffic spikes may face challenges. Some users have reported performance bottlenecks during peak usage periods, necessitating careful planning and testing before scaling their applications .

1. CometChat

CometChat is a comprehensive platform designed to deliver seamless real-time communication through text, voice, and video functionalities. Its mission is to empower businesses to create meaningful in-app interactions via continuous innovation and cutting-edge research. Beyond core chat and calling features, CometChat enhances user engagement by supporting diverse messaging formats, effectively transforming your chat application into a powerful tool for driving business operations and encouraging user interaction.

CometChat's Distinct Offerings Compared to Agora

When comparing CometChat to Agora, several factors highlight why CometChat may be a more suitable choice for businesses focusing on chat functionalities:

In summary, CometChat stands out with its comprehensive chat features, advanced analytics, simplified integration process, and exceptional support, making it a superior choice for businesses seeking to enhance their real-time communication capabilities compared to Agora.

2. PubNub

PubNub is a cloud-based platform that offers developers the infrastructure needed to build, manage, and scale real-time applications. Its primary service revolves around a powerful real-time publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging API.

In this pub/sub model, messages are sent to specific "channels" or "topics," which subscribers can then access based on their interest in those channels. This architecture supports scalability and flexibility, allowing publishers (those sending messages) and subscribers (those receiving messages) to operate independently. Real-time updates, such as chat messages or live game scores, are delivered to users instantly and at scale.

While the pub/sub model supports the creation of real-time messaging systems, it often requires extensive custom development to build chat features and a user interface from scratch. Businesses may face time-consuming and complex processes when implementing these chat functionalities.

3. Sendbird

Sendbird is a comprehensive real-time communication infrastructure that enables businesses to integrate in-app chat, calling, AI chatbots, and omnichannel messaging workflows seamlessly. Sendbird provides a robust platform for scalable communication, along with premium add-ons like content moderation and agent support chat modules.

However, recent shifts in Sendbird’s focus towards AI chatbots and omnichannel messaging raise concerns about its continued investment and support for its core chat product. Moreover, Sendbird’s pricing model can be challenging for businesses to scale affordably. They charge $5 for every Peak Concurrent Connection (PCC), making it expensive to scale during periods of high usage.

Strict usage caps are also imposed, and when limits on monthly active users and PCCs are exceeded, it can lead to disruptions in service until outstanding bills are paid. Additionally, key features like message retention and large group chat capabilities are locked behind the Enterprise plan, which can hinder growth for smaller businesses.

While Sendbird’s UI kits offer basic building blocks for chat interfaces, they lack advanced features, meaning developers must invest additional time implementing complex business logic. The lack of UI kits for popular front-end frameworks like Flutter, Angular, and Vue also adds complexity, leading to longer development times when customizing the user interface.

4. Ably

Ably is a real-time data delivery platform that provides messaging services and APIs to enable real-time communication and data synchronization within applications. Ably’s platform supports the delivery of data at high speed and reliability, making it suitable for various use cases, from collaborative tools to live updates in apps.

However, one significant drawback of using Ably is the risk of vendor lock-in. Once Ably’s services are deeply integrated into an application, migrating to another platform can become a complex and costly process, as it may involve rewriting significant portions of the codebase.

5. TalkJs

TalkJS is a messaging API designed to simplify the integration of chat functionality into websites and mobile apps without the need for building from the ground up. It offers a highly customizable chat interface that can be seamlessly embedded into your platform, enabling smooth communication between users within the app or website. TalkJS is versatile and ideal for various use cases, including online marketplaces, customer support, social platforms, and community forums, enhancing user engagement and interaction across different platforms.

However,  TalkJS specializes in text-based messaging and lacks voice and video calling features. For businesses looking for comprehensive communication solutions that include in-app voice and video calls, it's advisable to explore vendors offering these integrated functionalities.

6. Stream

Originally known for its Activity Feeds API, Stream has expanded its offerings to include real-time chat through its StreamChat API. This API allows developers to seamlessly integrate chat features into applications. StreamChat provides a variety of functionalities, including a Messaging API, Chat SDKs, user management, message moderation, channel management, file sharing, and push notifications.

Despite these features, StreamChat primarily relies on its SDKs for integration, supported by basic UI kits that offer limited business logic. While these UI kits provide the foundational elements needed for a chat interface, they may not offer the flexibility required to integrate specific business processes. Additionally, StreamChat does not natively support SMS and email notifications, requiring custom development, which could increase both development time and complexity for businesses aiming to enhance their messaging capabilities.

Aarathy Sundaresan

Content Marketer , CometChat

Aarathy is a B2B SaaS Content Marketer at CometChat, excited about the convergence of technology and writing. Aarathy is eager to explore and harness the power of tech-driven storytelling to create compelling narratives that captivate readers. Outside of her professional pursuits, she enjoys the art of dance, finding joy and personal fulfillment.