Agora vs CometChat
Discover how Agora compares to CometChat, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as scalability, pricing, security, and their chat features.

What is Agora?
Agora offers realtime communication services through APIs, enabling developers to integrate voice, video, and live-streaming features into mobile, desktop, and web applications.

What is CometChat?
CometChat is a messaging platform designed for integration into various applications, offering text, voice, and video chat capabilities. It supports extensive customization through SDKs and UI kits.
Compare Agora and CometChat
Let’s compare Agora and CometChat, 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. | Agora 10,000 users supported per chat room. | CometChat Up 100k concurrent connections can be supported. The use of certain features, such as delivery receipts, read receipts, and typing indicators, may impact these limits. For example, groups with all features enabled can accommodate up to 300 members. |
Connections | Number of connections that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | CometChat Up to 500k. |
Channels / rooms | Number of channels or rooms that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unlimited. | CometChat Unlimited. |
Messages | Number of messages that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | CometChat Unlimited. |
Message throughput | Number of messsages that can be published per second. | Agora Unknown. | CometChat Up to 333 messages per second. API calls for standard operations are rate limited to 20000 requests per min. |
Data integrity | |||
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Agora No | CometChat 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. | Agora No | CometChat 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. | Agora No | CometChat 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. | Agora Agora guarantees an SLA uptime of 99.95%. | CometChat 99.99% uptime guarantee. Read more |
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. | Agora Yes Agora operates a global network (SD-RTN) of over 200 data centers spread across multiple regions, including the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Asia Pacific. Read more | CometChat Yes Read more |
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. | Agora Yes | CometChat 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. | Agora Yes Agora global data centers have superior routing capabilities to ensure that the network services are not interrupted due to a single point of failure. Read more | CometChat 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. | Agora The average end-to-end global latency for Agora is 300 milliseconds. Read more | CometChat Under optimal test conditions, CometChat has a one-way latency of less than 50 ms response time. It is not mentioned what its roundtrip latency is. Read more |
Server-side batching | Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios. | Agora No | CometChat No |
Connection state recovery | Automatically re-establish failed connections and replay missed messages. | Agora Yes Agora supports reconnection and state recovery mechanisms through the Agora SDK, which automatically tries to re-establish connections if a user drops offline. | CometChat Yes CometChat supports connection state recovery, monitoring realtime connection status to its WebSocket servers. If disconnected, the SDK auto-reconnects, indicating "connecting" and "connected" states. Read more |
Ecosystem support | |||
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Agora
| CometChat WebSocket. |
Supported languages | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Agora
| CometChat CometChat supports several programming languages for effective integration with CometChat's SDKs and APIs:
|
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. | Agora
| CometChat
|
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. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes CometChat supports user presence out-of-the-box through CometChat SDKs and its UI kits. The SDKs include options for subscribing to presence updates to all users, specific roles, or friends. |
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. | Agora No | CometChat No |
Typing indicators | Show when others are typing in a chat room, enhancing realtime communication flow. | Agora Yes Agora’s Chat SDK allows you to build fully-featured messaging experiences for your users, including typing indicators. Read more | CometChat Yes |
Room reactions | Customize the chat environment with reactions and other shared room states. | Agora Yes | CometChat No |
Chat message attributes | |||
Message edits and deletes | Allow users to modify or remove messages. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes |
Message reactions & emoticons | Boost engagement by enabling users to quickly express emotions or feedback on messages. | Agora Yes Agora allows you to react with up to 20 emoji reactions in a single message during one-to-one chats and group chats. Read more | CometChat Yes |
Rich text support | Enhance messages with rich text formatting in chat. | Agora No | CometChat Yes |
Media attachments | Support for sharing images, videos, and files in chat. | Agora | CometChat Yes CometChat in-app messaging allows users to send and receive various documents and multimedia files through its SDKs and UI kits. Read more |
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. | Agora No | CometChat Yes CometChat supports in-app notifications through CometChat's push notification service. |
Role-based permissions | Control user roles and permissions to ensure proper access and moderation. | Agora | CometChat Yes |
UI kit | Customizable UI elements for a seamless chat integration. | Agora Yes Agora provides open-source chat UI kits on GitHub for iOS, Android, and Web, which you can clone and run. Read more | CometChat Yes CometChat supports UI kits for:
|
Storage and history | |||
Synchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, before the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes Moderation is done through Microsoft Azure, and is not enabled by default. To get access, you need either a Pro or Enterprise plan. | CometChat Yes |
Asynchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, after the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes |
Manual moderation via dashboards | Tools for moderators to detect harmful messages and manage them effectively. | Agora Yes Agora's console allows moderators to manually view the report items and address the messages and message senders according to their content policy. Read more | CometChat Yes CometChat lets human experts handle complex moderation cases. It allows users to set rules that flag borderline content for human review. |
Ban users | Remove problematic users from the chat to maintain a healthy environment. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes |
Dev tools | |||
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Agora Yes | CometChat 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. | Agora Agora provides pay-as-you-go pricing based on the number of participant minutes, messages per month, and MAUs for chat. Read more | CometChat CometChat pricing is based on the number of MAUs. Overages apply for additional MAU's and peak concurrent connection - over set quota. CometChat pricing page |
Pricing illustration | An example price based on 5 live streaming chat events and 50K attendees. | Agora $2349,
| CometChat $24,419 Base price - $669 Overages per additional concurrent user over 1250 - $23,750 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. | Agora Yes Agora's free plan offers 10k minutes/month. | CometChat Yes Free for up to 100 users. |
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Agora
| CometChat
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. | Agora Yes Agora's message channels use the pub/sub model, allowing you to publish messages to a channel or subscribe to receive them without pre-creating the channel. Read more | CometChat No |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Agora No | CometChat Yes CometChat offers collaboration capabilities with tools like polls, whiteboards, and collaborative documents. |
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. | Agora No | CometChat 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. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes |
Asset tracking | State-of-the-art asset tracking across last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. | Agora Yes Agora provides rich media messages that support GPS locations, allowing you to track assets. | CometChat No |
Integrations & interoperability | |||
AI models | Allows you to integrate AI models, like GPT, into your app. | Agora Yes Agora provides integration with OpenAI models AI for its conversational AI SDK developed in partnership with OpenAI. Read more | CometChat |
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. | Agora No | CometChat No |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Agora No | CometChat No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Agora Yes Agora analytics integrates with Datadog to provide monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services. Read more | CometChat No |
Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Agora No Agora uses token-based authentication for user authentication, rather than API keys. Users authenticate through Access Tokens, which are generated using the app's credentials. Read more | CometChat Yes |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Agora Yes | CometChat Yes CometChat implements rules for permissions and user control. It features role-based permissions that allow you to manage user actions. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Agora Yes Agora implements E2EE for its messages through its signaling SDK, which has a built-in AES 256 GCM encryption algorithm. Read more | CometChat Yes CometChat implements end-to-end encryption using Virgil E3Kit. |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Agora
| CometChat CometChat is compliant with four security standards:
|
Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Agora and CometChat. The content was last updated on 16 May 2025 for Agora and on 1 May 2025 for CometChat. 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.
Alternatives to Agora and CometChat
While both Agora and CometChat are worth considering as options for realtime experiences, they aren’t without their limitations. We suggest evaluating them against the following alternatives to make sure you find the right solution for your needs.
Alternatives to Agora

Sendbird offers APIs and SDKs for live chat, realtime messaging, push notifications, and calls with WebSocket connections, UI kits, and backend integrations.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Twilio is a platform that provides developers with a suite of communication tools for building messaging infrastructure in their applications.
Alternatives to CometChat
Twilio is a platform that provides developers with a suite of communication tools for building messaging infrastructure in their applications.
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Discover how Agora and CometChat stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Agora and CometChat on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
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