What is Bird?
Bird (formerly MessageBird) is a cloud communications platform that offers SMS, voice, chat, and video capabilities. It focuses on enabling omnichannel communication for businesses, allowing them to connect with customers across various channels seamlessly.
6 alternatives to Bird to consider
We’ll now look at alternatives to Bird - competing technologies that allow you to build realtime experiences for end-users.
Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet, serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform. Our product suite places composable realtime in the hands of developers. Simple APIs, use case specific SDKs and pre-built integrations, enables the creation of a host of live experiences - including live updates, chat, collaboration, notifications and fan engagement - with no infrastructure to build.
Key Ably features and capabilities
- Ably is underpinned by a globally-distributed network of datacenters and edge acceleration points of presence.
- Ably‘s SDKs provide a consistent and idiomatic API across a variety of supported platforms.
- Connect with pre-built integrations for Webhooks, Lambdas, databases, cloud services, observability tools and stream processors.
- Build the ultimate realtime app with our feature rich suite of products - Pub/Sub and notifications, Chat, LiveObjects, LiveSync, and Spaces.
- Guaranteed message ordering and delivery.
- Global fault tolerance and a 99.999% uptime SLA.
- 6.5ms round trip message delivery latency.
- Elastic scalability to handle millions of concurrent clients.
- Consumption-based, per-minute-billing, built for scale. Ably not only enables you to make the most of your budget, but also enjoy greater flexibility, faster build times and a quicker ROI.
Vonage
Vonage API offers a comprehensive suite of communication APIs for voice, SMS, and video, catering to businesses seeking a programmable communication platform. With its powerful SMS capabilities and global reach.
Sendbird
Sendbird provides APIs and SDKs for mobile and web to integrate live chats and realtime messaging with message history, typing indicators, and push notifications features. It uses WebSocket connections and offers customizability using UI kits and backend integrations. It also supports video and audio integrations for calls.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud platform that enables developers to build real-time communications features for their applications. It provides APIs for voice, SMS, video, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.
Sinch
Sinch provides cloud-based communications solutions, including voice, messaging, and video APIs. It focuses on enabling companies to integrate communication features into their applications easily, with strong support for mobile messaging.
Plivo
Plivo is a cloud communications platform that provides APIs for voice and SMS. With a focus on reliability and performance, Plivo aims to deliver a cost-effective alternative to Twilio, especially for businesses with high-volume messaging needs.
Disclaimer: The information on the alternatives presented here was based on documentation and resources freely available online and was last updated on 10 Jul 2026. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
