When building real-time communication features for your application, choosing the right SDK provider is crucial. Zegocloud, a relatively small player in the communication API space, offers basic video, voice, and chat SDKs. However, many developers quickly discover that their offerings are still in early developmental stages, lacking the maturity and robustness that modern applications require.
Limited chat functionality: While Zegocloud provides chat alongside its video SDK, the chat functionality is minimal and lacks essential features that many users expect.
Complex documentation: Zegocloud’s documentation is often disorganized and overly complex, making the development process more challenging than necessary.
Outdated UI kits: The UI components provided by Zegocloud are basic and dated, falling short of user experience standards. Developers are often forced to create custom themes from scratch, which defeats the purpose of using a pre-built solution.
Lack of security compliance: Zegocloud lacks critical security certifications like HIPAA and SOC2, raising concerns about data privacy and security. For organizations handling sensitive data, this can pose significant risks to business reputation and user trust.
In this article, we'll explore mature communication API providers that offer enterprise-grade security with proper compliance certifications, well-documented, developer-friendly SDKs, professional UI components that actually enhance user experience, and proven track records in handling large-scale deployments.
Deep dive on Zegocloud's key limitations
1. Scalability issues for large applications
ZEGOCLOUD faces significant challenges in handling scale due to its limited enterprise capabilities. The platform struggles with large-scale deployments, particularly for applications that need to manage thousands of concurrent users without compromising video/audio quality or latency.
The absence of a robust global edge network and a modest 99.99% uptime guarantee (compared to the industry standard of 99.999%) means users can experience more frequent downtime.
This becomes particularly problematic for global platforms with fluctuating traffic or rapidly growing user bases, where consistent performance and reliability are crucial. The four-nines SLA indicates potential system interruptions, making it less suitable for businesses requiring enterprise-grade reliability and performance.
2. Limited content moderation features
ZEGOCLOUD's moderation capabilities are notably basic and come with significant operational limitations. Their built-in moderation system requires customers to contact the support team for enablement, as there's no self-service option in the dashboard. This process creates a frustrating back-and-forth scenario, as any modifications to moderation conditions must go through their team, preventing instant changes when needed.
The default moderation system primarily relies on a simple blocklist approach, categorizing keywords into predefined groups like politics, terrorism, prohibition, erotic content, abuse, advertisements, privacy, and advertising law violations. While customization of these lists is possible, it again requires Zegocloud's intervention, removing customer autonomy.
Blocklist-based moderation approach is fundamentally flawed as users can easily circumvent it by using misspellings or slang variations, reducing its effectiveness.
A more advanced solution would ideally use AI to moderate messages, images, and videos based on contextual intent, combined with customizable rules that allow automated moderation actions.
3. Pricing issues
ZEGOCLOUD utilizes a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where businesses are charged based on the specific features they use, such as video calls, voice calls, live streaming, content moderation, and more.
While this model offers flexibility, it can quickly become expensive for applications with high traffic or intensive usage.
4. Absence of a global server coverage
ZEGOCLOUD’s limited global infrastructure creates challenges for international operations. The platform lacks an extensive network of Points of Presence (PoPs), leading to higher latency, inconsistent video quality, and frequent connection drops in various regions. This limited server coverage makes it difficult to support a global audience, especially during peak times or when scaling across regions, as the absence of a robust edge network hampers low-latency, reliable real-time communication.
Top six alternatives to Zegocloud
1. CometChat
CometChat is a versatile communication platform that provides powerful APIs and SDKs to seamlessly integrate real-time messaging, voice, and video chat features into mobile and web applications. More than just a chat API provider, CometChat understands the critical role communication plays in diverse industries such as telehealth, e-commerce, social networking, and dating. With customizable chat components, CometChat offers a complete communication solution that fits perfectly into any application.
Here’s what makes CometChat stand out:
01.
Premium UI kits
CometChat offers high-quality UI kits that make adding chat functionality to apps quick and easy. These UI kits are built to provide a modern, intuitive experience, with ready-to-use components and design elements that match the quality of popular platforms like WhatsApp and Slack. They are compatible with major frameworks like React, React Native, Flutter, and Android.
02.
Unified communication hub
Instead of juggling multiple communication tools, CometChat integrates chat, voice, and video capabilities into one unified platform, streamlining the user experience and reducing the need for separate communication systems.
03.
Advanced moderation tools
CometChat provides a comprehensive suite of moderation tools designed to protect communities. These include message pre-approval, real-time monitoring, image filtering, spam and profanity detection, and customizable user management controls, giving you full control over your communication environment.
04.
AI-powered features
CometChat leverages artificial intelligence to enhance user interactions. Features like conversation starters, smart replies, conversation summarizers, and a personalized conversational coach help make interactions more engaging and efficient.
05.
Comprehensive notification system
The platform includes built-in push notification support across Android, iOS, and Web. You can send various types of notifications, including text, in-app, SMS, and email, to keep users engaged and informed.
06.
Developer-centric experience
CometChat's plug-and-play UI kits and SDKs are designed for easy integration, significantly reducing development time. Detailed documentation, step-by-step guides, code samples, and tutorials ensure a smooth implementation process. Additionally, CometChat’s powerful dashboard lets developers monitor chat activity and app performance in real-time.
07.
Top-notch support
CometChat provides excellent customer support through multiple channels, including email, chat, Slack, and community forums, ensuring developers have access to the help they need, whenever they need it.
When comparing CometChat toZEGOCLOUD, several factors highlight why CometChat may be a more suitable choice for businesses focusing on chat functionalities:
CometChat excels with AI-Powered moderation to detect and address inappropriate content like hate speech and bullying, scalability and ease of use to simplify workflows and comprehensive features like text and image analysis, profile monitoring.
CometChat is a technically advanced solution that provides a robust feature set, including chat, voice, and video capabilities, along with moderation tools and rich media messaging. It offers exceptional value, allowing businesses to access a comprehensive solution at a fraction of the cost, making CometChat the ideal choice for those seeking high performance and affordability.
CometChat provides comprehensive notification support by integrating push, email, and SMS notifications through providers like Firebase, APN, SendGrid, and Twilio, allowing you to manage all channels from a single platform. With CometChat, you can customise notification settings for private and group chats to align with user preferences, schedule notifications based on user behavior for personalized interactions, and use templates to quickly generate consistent and clear alerts for specific events, streamlining your communication process and saving time.
CometChat includes chatbot capabilities that can be easily integrated into your communication workflows. This allows businesses to automate interactions, provide instant customer support, and even deliver personalised experiences at scale. ZEGOCLOUD lacks this feature natively, meaning businesses would need to build or integrate their own chatbot solutions, adding to development time and complexity.
CometChat is designed for enterprise needs with HIPAA compliance, a global edge network for low latency, advanced analytics for actionable insights, and a 99.999% uptime SLA guarantee with no overage charges, ensuring reliability and cost predictability.
2. Sendbird
Sendbird is another real-time communication platform that empowers businesses to integrate in-app chat, voice and video calls, AI chatbots, and omnichannel messaging into their applications. While it offers a robust core platform, its pricing model and recent shifts in focus toward AI and omnichannel messaging raise concerns about the long-term viability of its core chat product.
The platform's pricing model, based on Peak Concurrent Connections (PCC), can become costly, especially during periods of high usage. Additionally, strict usage caps can disrupt service if exceeded, impacting user experience. Essential features like message retention and large group chats are often locked behind the Enterprise plan, limiting flexibility for smaller businesses.
While Sendbird provides UI kits to simplify the development of chat interfaces, these kits lack advanced features and customization options, requiring developers to invest significant effort in building complex chat experiences. Moreover, the absence of UI kits for popular frameworks like Flutter, Angular, and Vue can further hinder development and customization.
3. TalkJS
TalkJS is a user-friendly messaging API that simplifies the integration of chat features into websites and mobile apps. It offers a customizable chat interface that can be easily embedded, enabling smooth communication between users. This makes it a suitable solution for various use cases, including online marketplaces, customer support, social platforms, and community forums.
However, TalkJS is primarily focused on text-based messaging and lacks built-in voice and video calling capabilities. Businesses requiring a comprehensive communication solution with integrated voice and video features may need to explore alternative platforms that offer these functionalities.
4. Agora
Agora is a powerful Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service (RTE PaaS) that enables developers to seamlessly integrate real-time audio, video, and chat functionalities into their applications. Founded in 2014, Agora provides a robust suite of tools and APIs to facilitate the creation of interactive experiences across various industries, including education, gaming, telehealth, and e-commerce. While Agora's core strength lies in its audio and video capabilities, its chat functionality offers a solid foundation for real-time text-based communication.
5. Ably
Ably is a versatile real-time data platform that empowers developers to build interactive applications by providing APIs and tools for efficient data exchange. Launched in 2012, Ably facilitates instant messaging, making it suitable for chat, collaborative editing, and live notifications.
While Ably excels in handling high-volume message traffic and cross-platform integration, it has limitations such as unreliable message delivery and potential message ordering issues. These factors may impact the reliability and consistency of real-time communication in certain applications.
6. Stream
Stream is a comprehensive platform that initially gained recognition for its Activity Feeds API. More recently, Stream has expanded its offerings to include real-time chat capabilities through its StreamChat API. This API enables developers to easily integrate chat functionalities into their applications, providing features such as messaging, user management, message moderation, channel management, file sharing, and push notifications.
However, StreamChat primarily relies on chat SDKs for integration, with limited UI kits that provide a basic visual framework but may lack the necessary business logic integration for complex chat scenarios. Additionally, StreamChat does not natively support SMS and email notifications, requiring extra development effort to implement these features.
Aarathy Sundaresan
Content Marketer , CometChat