Ably vs Sendbird
Discover how Sendbird compares to Ably, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as scalability, pricing, security, and their chat features.
What is Ably?
Ably is a realtime experience platform that provides APIs and SDKs to power realtime functionality - with no realtime infrastructure to build and maintain. Our application building blocks and integrations enable developers to quickly create live experiences from live chat and data broadcast, to collaborative UXs and notifications.
What is 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.
Compare Ably and Sendbird
Let’s compare Ably and Sendbird, looking at key elements of their offering such as their scalability, pricing, security and chat feature set.
| Scalability | |||
Concurrent connections | Number of users that can be supported in a single chat. | Ably | Sendbird Up to 20K users in super groups are supported in a single chat. Overages apply if you exceed plan quota - $5 per additional concurrent connection. |
Connections | Number of connections that can be handled across the platform. | Ably | Sendbird Unlimited - depends on plan. Overages apply if you exceed plan quota - $0.05 per additional user. |
Channels / rooms | Number of channels or rooms that can be handled across the platform. | Ably | Sendbird Unlimited. |
Messages | Number of messages that can be handled across the platform. | Ably Unlimited. See pricing for details | Sendbird Unlimited. |
Message throughput | Number of messsages that can be published per second. | Ably From:
| Sendbird 5 messages per second. |
| Data integrity | |||
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
Guaranteed message ordering | Maintains the sequence of messages as they were sent. This is particularly important in apps where the chronological order of messages is essential for meaningful communication. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
| Performance & availability | |||
Uptime Guarantee | An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime. | Ably 99.999%. | Sendbird A 99.9% SLA uptime guarantee is provided on paid plans. |
Global edge network | By bringing servers (Points of Presence, or PoP) geographically closer to the devices of end users, and routing requests to the nearest PoP, global latency is reduced to a minimum. | Ably Yes All Ably customer data runs across all our 7 geographically-distributed core routing datacenters by default. Ably's network of 385 edge acceleration points-of-presence is growing day by day. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird has servers deployed across 11 worldwide regions. |
Multi-region data replication (message durability) | By replicating data across multiple regions, the risk of data loss or downtime is greatly mitigated since if data is lost or a server fails in one region, the information can be retrieved from another. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
No single point of failure or congestion | Having no single point of failure means a system is resilient and can continue to operate even if one part fails. Avoiding a single point of congestion ensures messages flow efficiently across the system and avoids bottlenecks that could lead to performance issues under load. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Ably
| Sendbird Unknown. |
Server-side batching | Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
Connection state recovery | Automatically re-establish failed connections and replay missed messages. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes Sendbird implements connection state recovery through their chat SDKs, which are designed to automatically handle reconnections and message delivery. |
| Ecosystem support | |||
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Ably
| Sendbird
|
Supported languages | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Ably
| Sendbird
:cta[Sendbird chat messaging page[(https://sendbird.com/products/chat-messaging/sdk): :ctaGithub page Sendbird blog page |
| Chat room types | |||
Multi-type chat support (group, DM, supergroups) | Enables chat experiences to be tailored to various user needs, from one-on-one to large, scalable group discussions. | Ably
| Sendbird
|
| Chat room management | |||
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes |
Occupancy | High-level metrics about the clients currently connected to a channel make it simple to show things such as connected user count, or display which channels are the most popular. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes |
Typing indicators | Show when others are typing in a chat room, enhancing realtime communication flow. | Ably Yes Ably Chat provides typing indicators to show when users are composing messages. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers text and bubble typing indicators in its SDKs and UI kits. |
Room reactions | Customize the chat environment with reactions and other shared room states. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports room-level reactions with a variety of emojis. Ephemeral reactions are not counted or aggregated. | Sendbird Yes |
| Chat message attributes | |||
Message edits and deletes | Allow users to modify or remove messages. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports soft deletion of messages and message edits. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird supports both deleting and editing messages. It offers options to delete messages individually or clear all messages in a channel and allows users to edit messages directly. |
Message reactions & emoticons | Boost engagement by enabling users to quickly express emotions or feedback on messages. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports reactions at the room level and message level. | Sendbird Yes |
Rich text support | Enhance messages with rich text formatting in chat. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
Media attachments | Support for sharing images, videos, and files in chat. | Ably Partial Links are supported. | |
| Chat application and user state | |||
In-app notifications | Notify users of important events from other chat rooms without them leaving the current chat, keeping them engaged and informed. | Ably Yes In-app notifications supported via Ably Pub/Sub. | Sendbird Yes |
Role-based permissions | Control user roles and permissions to ensure proper access and moderation. | Ably No Ably Chat doesn't current support role-based permissions, but will soon. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers role-based permissions. Users can have different roles based on their participation in chat channels. |
UI kit | Customizable UI elements for a seamless chat integration. | Ably No Ably Chat doesn't currently offer a UI kit. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers a UI kit called Sendbird UIKit. This toolkit provides pre-built components for rapidly integrating chat functionality. Read more |
| Storage and history | |||
Synchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, before the message is broadcast to participants. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports synchronous moderation using Hive AI. You can also integrate with a third-party moderation provider. | Sendbird Yes |
Asynchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, after the message is broadcast to participants. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports asynchronous moderation using Hive AI. You can also integrate with a third-party moderation provider. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers rule-based automated moderation to detect and manage harmful content. Its Advanced Moderation combines AI rules with human review. |
Manual moderation via dashboards | Tools for moderators to detect harmful messages and manage them effectively. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports manual moderation through Hive Dashboard. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers a moderation dashboard for manual oversight, allowing moderators to identify and handle harmful content within chat channels by banning users, removing messages, and configuring moderation settings. |
Ban users | Remove problematic users from the chat to maintain a healthy environment. | Ably Partial Ably Chat doesn't support banning users outright, but you can approximate user banning by revoking user access tokens. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers a feature to ban users from chat channels, which can be applied to both group and open channels, allowing moderators to restrict specific users' participation. |
| Dev tools | |||
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes |
| Pricing | |||
Pricing model | The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient. | Ably Ably offers a per-minute, consumption-based pricing model. This gives granular control over your costs, eliminating the need to pay for peak users or connections. | Sendbird Sendbird pricing is based on the number of MAUs. Overages apply for additional MAU's and peak concurrent connections over the set quota. Sendbird pricing page |
Pricing illustration | An example price based on 5 live streaming chat events and 50K attendees. | Ably $1029.95 Cost of messages = $1026.95 Cost of connection minutes = $2.00 Cost of channels = $1 Explore the pricing estimator tool | Sendbird $25,549.00
Note: Assumes same users attend each event, to keep MAU at minimum. |
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes The free plan allows a maximum of 100 MAUs and 10 peak concurrent connections. |
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Ably The free and paid plans are:
| Sendbird
Overages:
|
| Support for additional realtime features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Ably Yes Ably provides robust pub/sub messaging capabilities over serverless WebSockets. | Sendbird No |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Ably Yes The Spaces SDK provides an opinionated set of abstractions for collaborative environments including live cursors, avatar stacks and component locking. Learn more | Sendbird Yes |
Database sync capabilities | Database sync capabilities enable realtime updates between your database and UI, ensuring the UI reflects changes in the database instantly, with data consistency, and without the need for polling. | Ably Yes Ably provides a self-hostable and managed database connector to stream updates over our serverless WebSocket platform. Ably also provides the Models SDK for seamless connector interactions. Learn more | Sendbird No |
Notifications | Send notifications directly to users screens, from chat responses to news alerts, or game updates, whether or not an application is open and running. | Ably Yes Support for Android and iOS push notifications. Improved web push for browsers currently in progress. | Sendbird Yes |
Asset tracking | State-of-the-art asset tracking across last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
AI models | Allows you to integrate AI models, like GPT, into your app. | Ably Yes Ably Chat supports the integration of AI models for automatic sync moderation. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird integrates AI chatbots into apps and websites. It supports the following AI models:
|
Serverless functions | Enables integration with third-party cloud providers by facilitating the execution of custom code against messages to perform business logic like on-the-fly translation. | Ably
| Sendbird No |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Ably Egress:
Ingress:
The Database Connector is designed for any database in the SQL-family, but at the moment only supports Postgres. Please contact us if you want support in other databases. | Sendbird Yes Sendbird offers streaming integrations natively using webhooks through its Sendbird Live feature. Read more |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Ably Yes | Sendbird No Sendbird does not provide integrated observability services, such as detailed realtime monitoring. It only offers a status monitoring system where users can track uptime, service incidents, and some historical data. |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes Sendbird supports API key authentication for: |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Ably Yes | Sendbird Yes |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Ably Yes Ably offers SSL/TLS encryption and 256-bit AES encryption using private keys. Message payloads can only be decrypted by other clients that share your secret key. Learn more about Ably's encryption | Sendbird No Sendbird does not currently offer E2EE for its messaging services. It provide TLS encryption for data in transit and AES256 encryption for files stored on its servers. |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Ably
Ably also offers EU and US-only data storage. | Sendbird Sendbird maintains compliance with four key standards and regulations:
|
Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Ably and Sendbird. The content was last updated on 30 Apr 2025 for Ably and on 1 May 2025 for Sendbird. 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.
Hear from companies gaining their realtime advantage with AblyThe core infrastructure for delivering live sports data to our customers is Ably. We sleep easier at night knowing it can be relied on for consistent low latency and message integrity at scale.”
Gary Williams
IT Infrastructure Team Lead
Ably immediately solved our issues around the user experience and scale. It supports our customers’ stringent expectations as well as future product development.”
Max Freiert
Product Group Lead
Ably copes easily with big loads. We don’t have to worry about stability, even when we get huge traffic spikes.”
Johan Bengtsson
CTO
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
