Sendbird has established itself as a prominent player in the real-time customer engagement market. But is it the best choice for you? In this article, we will look at what Sendbird offers, some reasons why we think Sendbird falls short of the competition and other equally good alternatives of Sendbird.
Sendbird: A quick overview
Sendbird provides real-time messaging services, enabling businesses to integrate chat features into their applications. Sendbird's offerings include:
Messaging API
Chat SDKs (Software Development Kits)
Voice and video calling
Notifications tool
Support chat
Live streaming & broadcast
User authentication and management
Channel management
Why do businesses look for alternatives to Sendbird?
1. Extensive development time & effort
Though Sendbird offers a lot of customization to their users it is a bit complex to implement highly tailored chat interfaces, meaning developing this could require a lot of time and effort.
For instance, email and SMS notifications functionality has to be built from scratch using their webhooks, whereas other solutions like CometChat provides it as a out of the box feature, making it easier for integration.
2. Pricing limitations
SendBird’s pricing issues are considered to be a major reason for users' moving away from their platform.
The general customer sentiment is that it's highly priced against the value offered. The entry barrier is high for early stage start-ups and the costs explodes at scale forcing users to look for alternatives.
A. Their pricing is not scale friendly
Businesses face scalability challenges when it comes to their pricing model. The more your user base grows, your cost to deploy SendBird’s services would exponentially increase as well.
Here is a pricing comparison from a Hackernoon post that shows how Sendbird’s price increases after a certain scale. The author notes that, up to the 10000 MAU (Monthly Active Users) limit, Sendbird's pricing stays nearly same to that of other providers. However, there is a sharp increase when you exceed 10,000 MAU.
B. They charge a hefty overage price
Sendbird charges an additional charge of $5 for every PCC (Peak Concurrent Connections) overage.
This overage fee can add up quickly during high demand periods, making it potentially expensive and financially burdensome when scaling up to accommodate more users or concurrent connections.
C. Storage costs and strict usage limits
Sendbird levies additional fees for functionalities such as thumbnail generation, image moderation, message translation, and message search. The charges don't stop there. Sendbird also imposes usage limits on file storage and upload traffic, penalizing businesses for growing their user base and engaging more actively with the chat platform.
As user activity increases, these metered costs can quickly spiral out of control, leading to unpredictable billing and an overall sense of being "nickel and dimed" by the platform.
D. They gate keep certain features under enterprise plan which is way costlier compared to starter and pro plans
While Sendbird provides a comprehensive set of features, it reserves some essential features exclusively for its enterprise plan. In order to access these features, users would need to subscribe to the more premium and costly enterprise plan.
For instance, messaging retention is capped at six months for all plans except Enterprise. Other solutions like CometChat, doesn't have any restriction on data storage.
Similarly, the maximum group size is restricted to 100 members by default. 'Super private groups' with the ability to include thousands of members are only available in the Pro and Enterprise plans.
E. Expensive add-ons
In addition to Sendbird’s already high base pricing, users are required to purchase premium add-on packages to unlock critical functionalities needed for a complete chat experience.
Essential features like advanced moderation tools, conditional rules for managing channels, and message translation are only accessible through these costly upgrades.
For businesses in healthcare and other regulated industries, HIPAA compliance, along with a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA)—also falls within the paid add-ons.
3. UI kit limitations
While they offer pre-built UI components and layouts for chat and messaging applications, these UI kits could only provide the basic building blocks for creating chat interfaces and they do not include more advanced features and workflows commonly needed in real-world applications. This can lead developers to invest additional time and effort into implementing complex business logic themselves.
Moreover, Sendbird does not provide UI Kits for popular front end frameworks such as Flutter, Angular and Vue.
Developers using these frameworks may need to invest additional time and effort into customising their integrations, potentially slowing down development and increasing the complexity of their projects.
Top 6 alternatives to sendbird
1. CometChat
CometChat is an in-app chat and calling infrastructure platform that helps businesses to add real-time communication to their web and mobile applications.
CometChat helps you effortlessly integrate chat features into your mobile and web applications using the following methods:
Pre-built UI kits: Quickly add chat functionality with our ready-made, customizable chat UI components, saving you development time and effort. Our UI kits are compatible with all popular front-end frameworks like React, React native, Flutter, Android, etc
APIs and SDKs: They provide more flexibility and a high level of control over all the platform features. Our SDKs should be used when, you require a high degree of customization or need to build complex integration within your existing workflows and systems
No-code solutions: Take advantage of our no-code widget options for an easy and hassle-free setup, perfect for those with limited development resources.
Discover why CometChat outperforms SendBird
Compelling reasons why CometChat stands out as a superior choice compared to Sendbird
Ease of setup
CometChat's ease of setup is a standout feature, making it a developer-friendly choice for integrating real-time chat and messaging into applications.
With clear and comprehensive documentation, step-by-step tutorials, and pre-built chat components, developers can navigate the setup process effortlessly.
Our UI kits and components are not only visually appealing but also highly customizable. Developers can easily adapt these UI elements to match their application's design and branding, resulting in a consistent and polished user interface.
One of the main reasons why we chose CometChat is because chat is crucial to our platform, so it had to work well and fulfil the needs of the users. The support was instrumental in why we chose CometChat. CometChat's fully-featured SDK, UI Kits, and robust documentation compared well with competitors. From the initial deployment to the release of our platform, we didn't see that level of support with any other chat solution"
Nathan Heber
Founder & CEO, Boatyard
Scalable pricing
In addition to the MAU based pricing model, we also provide a more scale friendly option based on Daily Chat Users (DCUs).
DCU pricing is a consumption based pricing model where you only pay for the chat and calling usage.
It is cost-effective for businesses who have a large user base but only a portion of them actively use chat on a daily basis. With this model, you pay for the users who are actively engaged in chat, which can lead to cost savings compared to MAU-based models.
Implementation & customer support
CometChat offers multiple channels for customer support including email, live calls, daily solutioning hours, and a comprehensive Help Center with guides, tutorials, and FAQs. Our solution engineers have a deep understanding of chat use cases and its implementation, making them capable of tackling a wide range of customer queries and integration issues.
We also provide one-on-one support to help customers integrate CometChat into their specific projects effectively. This involves offering advice, addressing potential challenges, and providing solutions to ensure a seamless integration process.
A notable differentiator of our support is the policy of not charging extra, meaning our support is free of cost. This user-centric stance allows customers to access CometChat's proactive assistance without incurring additional costs, making it an economical choice for businesses keen on effective budget management.
In contrast, Sendbird charges for premium support, potentially adding an extra financial burden for users. Furthermore, it's worth noting that CometChat offers support 24x5, providing assistance around the clock, while Sendbird's support is limited to 8x5, aligning with CometChat's mission to deliver value and support to users without hidden fees.
Depth of solutioning
CometChat comes equipped with a rich set of out-of-the-box features, making it a versatile choice for businesses across industries - be it healthcare, education, social platforms, or others.
What makes CometChat truly distinct is its high level of customization and thoughtfully built chat components that solve specific problems faced by a wide range of industries.
For example, a marketplace business can use our moderation and data masking feature to prevent platform leakage.
A telehealth business can benefit from our world-class HIPAA compliant chat api and security standards to protect user data, and best-in-class webhooks that trigger automated responses based on patient behaviour.
CometChat has already built it and that was the piece that we were trying to solve for. The CometChat UI kit has features that we didn't even think about building such as support for emojis, stickers, suggested answers, and all of that. So if we were to build it, I know how complex it is like suggested answers, depending on the role, very complex pieces, but CometChat already has it.
Mahesh Kumar J
CTO, GradRight
In contrast to Sendbird which offers more raw infrastructure that requires customers to invest more time and effort in configuring them, CometChat focuses on providing comprehensive solutions with pre-built UI components that lets their users get their chat applications up and running faster, resulting in quicker time-to-market and reduced development costs.
Migration Options
CometChat places a strong emphasis on providing a seamless migration experience for users, making it straightforward and hassle-free to switch from Sendbird to CometChat.
We offer dedicated Import APIs that enable you to migrate your existing chat data and messages from Sendbird to CometChat effortlessly.
Import APIs facilitate the transfer of your chat history, user profiles, conversations, and other essential data, ensuring that nothing is left behind. CometChat's white-glove migration support means that you receive personalised assistance and guidance throughout the migration process. Our dedicated support team helps you plan, execute, and verify the migration, addressing any questions or concerns you may have along the way.
CometChat has secured several notable wins over Sendbird, including - Entole, Talkiverse, Launchpad 6, Yes Madam, Medsnow, Starlight.
Additional reading
Direct Comparison of Sendbird and CometChat
| Features | Sendbird | CometChat |
|---|---|---|
UI kits
| Has UI Kit - but is limited. For a feature-rich chat experience, you will still have to use the SDKs. UI Kits are very primitive and difficult to customize due to their rigid setup.
| CometChat prioritizes time-to-market with ready to go, modular and flexible UI Kits for all popular front end frameworks.
CometChat eliminates the need for custom design for chat as it provides a best-in-class chat UI out of the box with our UI Kits
and Vue.
|
Core chat features
| Sendbird offers chat, in-app calling, and video calling as separate products. To use both chat and in-app calling, you will need to purchase each service individually.
| Cometchat offers chat, in-app calling, and video calling as a unified product. You gain access to all three features without needing to pay separately for each.
|
Development effort
| Relatively tough with their UI kits - but offers well documented SDKs.
Building the chat UI from scratch can be time-consuming unless you leverage third-party libraries.
Integrating Sendbird with specific frameworks like Flutter, Vue, or Angular might require additional effort due to framework-specific considerations.
| Offers the fastest development due to their pre-built UI Kits that mimic popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. These kits include interactive features such as forms, calendars, and cards, and they also allow the integration of any custom message through their SDKs.
Moving beyond mere communication, Cometchat leverages chat as an operational hub,instead of just a communication hub.
|
Custom messages
| Sendbird does not offer custom messages as a feature and if you want to deliver any non standard messages inside chat, it will require significant development effort.
| CometChat offers the ability to create custom interactive messages within our UI kits and SDK. These messages enable you to embed various elements directly into the chat interface, such as forms, product cards, payment links, and calendar schedulers.
|
Moderation
| Sendbird offers basic image moderation, regex moderation, and profanity filters. It supports human moderation with moderation queues and assignment features, and it integrates with moderation webhooks and custom moderation services (not directly provided by Sendbird). Additionally, it also offers channel-based moderation views.
However, Sendbird does not include the advanced AI-powered moderation capabilities that CometChat provides.
| CometChat stands out with its:
Advanced AI-Powered Moderation: Effectively identifies and addresses a wide range of inappropriate content, including hate speech, bullying, and harassment.
Scalability and Ease of Use: Simplifies moderation workflows and scales seamlessly to accommodate growing user bases.
Comprehensive Feature Set: Encompasses all aspects of chat moderation, including text and image analysis, user profile monitoring, and real-time intervention.
|
Notifications
| Offers basic push notification functionalities but Sendbird offers it as a separate product module.
| Built-in push notification functionality integrated with the chat service.
|
Analytics and insights
| Sendbird provides only usage analytics. It does not provide any insights on chat adoption.
| CometChat offers comprehensive data tracking and analysis by including conversation and engagement analytics, user-level data tracking, and AI-powered insights. Businesses can use advanced insights tools to analyze messaging adoption, correlate messaging with user activity, and personalize user experiences.
Data can also be exported via APIs for deeper business analysis.
|
Pricing
| Sendbird offers distinct pricing plans for its chat and in-app calling services. This means that if you require both services, you'll need to purchase separate plans, potentially resulting in dual costs and significant overage fees.
| CometChat distinguishes itself by consolidating chat, voice, and video calling into a unified product, available under a single payment. Additionally, CometChat provides a variety of plans including both free and subscription-based options.
|
AI features
| Sendbird provides a tailored AI chatbot solution for creating customized GPTs on both websites and mobile applications.
| CometChat offers a comprehensive AI solution that includes user insights, funnel analysis, and entity insights. It also features conversational tools such as starters, smart replies, summarization, and coaching capabilities, along with moderation tools, all integrated into a single product.
|
2. Ably
Ably is a real-time data delivery platform and messaging service that provides a range of APIs and developer tools to enable real-time communication and data synchronisation in applications.
Relying on Ably's infrastructure can create a degree of vendor lock-in. Migrating away from Ably or transitioning to an alternative service may require substantial effort and adjustments to the application's codebase since it is deeply integrated with your core.
Depending on the nature of the data being transmitted through Ably, developers may need to implement additional security measures to ensure data privacy and compliance with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
Additional reading
3. Twilio
Twilio, a CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) provider, offers a versatile suite of communication services that empower developers to integrate real-time communication features seamlessly into their applications. .
A repeating problem with Twilio's real-time communications is their latency issues, particularly when users are spread across diverse geographic locations. It's worth noting that ensuring stringent data privacy and security compliance falls within the purview of the application developer, adding an extra layer of responsibility.
4. Agora
Agora, Inc. is a company renowned for its cloud-based real-time communication platform, which serves as its primary offering. At the heart of their service is a Software Development Kit (SDK) that empowers developers to seamlessly integrate audio, video, and interactive live streaming capabilities into their applications.
Their video chat SDK is designed with a "Mobile-First" approach, making it particularly well-suited for both iOS and Android platforms, ensuring compatibility with a wide array of mobile devices and operating system versions.
However, it is essential to consider some potential drawbacks, notably Agora’s React SDK for video calls is still in its beta stage. This means that its features are not fully complete and developers may encounter limitations while implementing it. Additionally, integrating real-time communication features can be complex, requiring developers to invest time in learning and implementing the SDK.
5. PubNub
PubNub specialises in real-time communication, allowing developers to build applications that can deliver messages, notifications, and data updates instantly to users or devices.
PubNub uses a publish-subscribe (pub/sub) messaging model, where data is published to specific channels and subscribers receive updates from those channels in real-time. This decouples senders and receivers, making it efficient for broadcasting messages to multiple subscribers.
Additional reading
6. StreamChat
StreamChat provides SDKs and client libraries for various programming languages and platforms, including JavaScript, Python, iOS, Android, and more. These SDKs streamline the integration of chat and messaging capabilities into applications.
StreamChat is versatile and can be used in various applications, including social networking apps, customer support chat, in-app messaging for on-demand services, and more. However, they are currently testing and refining audio and video calling features as they are in the beta phase of development.
Additonal reading
Aarathy Sundaresan
Content Marketer , CometChat
