ArrowChat vs. CometChat: Discover the right choice for your use case

ArrowChat is a drop-in chat widget that offers a quick way to add chat to your web apps and also to some mobile apps. It differs from many of its competitors in that it allows you to run the PHP chat backend on your own server if you choose, or alternatively to pay for a hosted service based on WebSocket, named ArrowChat Push. 

The frontend chat functionality on offer varies, too. With the entry-level free version of ArrowChat, you can get basic private and public group chat. For a one-off fee, you can add features such as moderation, file transfer, spam protection, and video chat.

As well as giving you a choice of how to host the backend, you can choose from different levels of chat functionality on the frontend, such as adding such as file sharing and moderation to the basic chat offering, for a one-off fee.

• Free to get started: Other than paying to self-host the PHP backend, you can get started with ArrowChat for free. It’s worth noting, though, that the free version’s functionality is limited and the scalability of the self-hosted version is very limited.

• Easy installation: Integrating the chat widget into your app is a simple matter of pasting some lines of JavaScript. Likewise, setting up the PHP backend should be straightforward for most developers.

• Integrates with common PHP tools: Integrates with the user system and other aspects of tools such as Wordpress and Drupal.

• Good basic features: Could be well suited to low-traffic scenarios where users have simple demands.

• Hosted service: If you need to handle more capacity and benefit from lower latency than is available through the self-hosted option, you can upgrade to the hosted WebSocket version.

• Self-hosted version is inefficient: The self-hosted PHP version of the ArrowChat backend uses manual HTTP polling to get updates from the server, which isn't efficient. It might be suitable for chat services with low traffic - but latency and missing messages will become a problem with even moderately large user numbers (over 1,000 users).

• Limited scaling potential: Even with the hosted backend, ArrowChat Push, you’re limited to around 2,000 concurrent users.

• Lack of support: ArrowChat is developed by a solo-developer who manages multiple projects. Given the larger teams behind competing solutions, ArrowChat might lag in feature updates. Some users have also mentioned issues with support.

CometChat takes a different approach. It is a PaaS for chat, meaning that it offers an API as well as pre-built UI widgets. The benefit to that approach is that you can develop your own chat experience on the frontend, while also integrating your backend. This makes it easier to connect chatbots, move data between your app and the chat service, and create more sophisticated custom functionality.

• Easy to get started: With sample code, good documentation, SDKs, UI kits, and drop-in widgets, CometChat provides a smooth route to integrating with your application. The free plan provides access to all functionality, albeit with limited user numbers.

• Relatively flexible: By offering an API, in addition to widgets, CometChat allows you to customize the user experience to some extent. Although it’s not as flexible as building your own solution.

• Marketplace for integrations: CometChat offers extensions that enable functionality such as replying to chat messages by email, voice transcription, and end-to-end encryption.

• Limited to chat and CometChat features: A PaaS dedicated to chat can help you get up and running quickly. However, it does limit what you can build. For example, if you need strong delivery guarantees, CometChat can’t help. Similarly, if you want to build other realtime functionality, such as the ability to broadcast data to your app users, then you’ll need to consider a general purpose realtime PaaS.

• Email and community support: At the lower end of the paid packages, the only support available is via email or from volunteers in the CometChat community.

• Frontend focus: CometChat offers a richer developer experience for integrating with its frontend than with the backend. Although there is a backend REST API, there are no SDKs for common backend languages such as C# and Ruby. That could mean more manual development work if you want to integrate CometChat with other aspects of your application infrastructure, such as a large language model or your customer management system.

At first glance, ArrowChat and CometChat look quite similar. However, there are fundamental differences in how they operate technically, in how you engage with them, and in the functionality that they deliver.

The stand-out difference is that ArrowChat emphasizes its self-hosted option, with the hosted service as an optional extra. CometChat, on the other hand, is a dedicated chat API platform backed by a larger term and $17m in funding.

Let’s look at what those differences mean in practice.

Rock solid reliability is the baseline requirement of chat services. Start dropping messages or introduce too much latency and users will quickly lose trust. 

Many providers offer uptime promises and service level guarantees (SLAs). An uptime promise often comes in the form of a percentage, such as 99.999% (known as “five nines”) meaning that the service should be only for that much of the time. An SLA, on the other hand, is usually a stronger commitment. For example, in the event of service degradation, the vendor promises to fix it within a certain timeframe and/or that they’ll pay you a financial penalty if they fail to meet their uptime promise. 

So, how do ArrowChat and CometChat compare on performance and reliability?

At its most basic, a chat service needs to send messages between users. However, thanks to WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, and similar tools, end users expect a richer experience. To what extent do ArrowChat and CometChat meet those expectations?

Chat functionality is most useful when it integrates into your existing systems and tooling. If you can interact with the chat provider using an SDK built in your preferred language/framework, such as Swift for building apps on iOS or .NET for building backend web applications, that can accelerate your time to market and reduce maintenance costs. Similarly, pre-built integrations with authentication services, database providers, and systems such as CRMs, reduce how much custom integration work your team will need to do.

Chat is a primary channel for customer service, internal company communication, and other situations where data privacy and compliance with regulations are essential. So, how do CometChat and ArrowChat shape up when it comes to guarding your company’s and users’ security?

Comparing pricing between vendors can be tricky as different companies package their offerings differently. And what happens when something goes wrong?

Having compared their feature sets in a head to head, let’s summarise where ArrowChat and CometChat differ and where they overlap.

• ArrowChat is not a chat API: ArrowChat is first and foremost an open source project that allows you to drop a chat window into an existing application. Unless you are prepared to fork and maintain the open source project, ArrowChat offers very little in the way of customization. Most importantly, perhaps, the ArrowChat API has very limited functionality compared to CometChat, which allows you to build your own chat experience.

• ArrowChat offers a self-hosted version, CometChat does not: While the self-hosted version of ArrowChat is suitable only for low traffic chat scenarios, where reliability and low latency are not important, the self-hosted version might be useful where budgets are very tight. CometChat does not offer a self-hosted or free version for production.

• ArrowChat’s quotas are quite low, CometChat is designed for higher usage: The hosted version of ArrowChat has pricing and quotas that appear to be aimed at hobbyists, whereas CometChat’s plans are likely to scale to support more demanding chat requirements.

• Different types of company: CometChat offers professional support, backed by a funded company with multiple people. ArrowChat is a project maintained by a single developer.

• Both offerings are weak on user authentication: Neither ArrowChat nor CometChat has out of the box support for integration with third-party authentication services such as Okta, which means you’ll either need to write custom integrations or choose a different chat provider.

• Poor support for encryption: While CometChat offers integrations with third-party services to enable encryption, built-in encryption support appears to be limited. ArrowChat doesn’t support encryption.

If you have a very limited budget and equally limited requirements, ArrowChat might offer a low-cost solution. However, when comparing ArrowChat and CometChat as chat APIs, CometChat is the overwhelming winner. 

So, what makes CometChat the better solution out of the two? There are three main factors:

• As a chat API rather than only a drop-in widget, CometChat offers greater flexibility than ArrowChat when it comes to building the right chat experience for your users and also for integration with your existing systems.

• CometChat is better suited to business use cases, where encryption, the ability to scale, and the support of a multi-person company are important.

• As a fully hosted service, CometChat will continue to evolve without the need for your ops team to install new versions of the server backend as would be the case with ArrowChat.

However, both CometChat and ArrowChat have their shortcomings. Not only are there concerns around encryption and integrations with existing tooling, but it’s likely that you’ll quickly hit up against the limitations of both tools, especially when you need to build something that doesn’t fit precisely into their respective feature sets. Rather than bending a chat API or chat widget to your needs, building your own chat functionality on top of Ably’s realtime platform as a service (PaaS) gives you the reliability, elasticity, and scalability of a fully managed service with the flexibility of a homegrown solution.

Ably’s realtime PaaS combines open ended versatility with functionality created specifically for chat use cases. Here are just some of the reasons why brands including Hubspot, Webflow, and Toyota trust Ably to deliver realtime experiences worldwide:

• Globally distributed, multi-region network: Unrivalled performance, data integrity, reliability, and scaling guarantees thanks to your global network of more than 205 locations.

• <65 ms median latency: Ably’s minimal latencies enable you to deliver realtime chat experiences, without awkward delays.

• Strong guarantees: Messages are guaranteed to be delivered in order and exactly-once delivery, even in unstable network conditions.

• 99.999% uptime SLA: Our expert team keeps the Ably platform running round the clock at peak performance, allowing your ops to sleep soundly.

• Enormous scalability: Send billions of messages to millions of channels and chat users without worrying how.

We’ve built a developer experience that’s designed to accelerate your product's time-to-market. Specifically, Ably seamlessly meshes with your current tools, systems, and languages of choice. Choose from SDKs supporting languages and frameworks such as PHP, Flutter, Clojure, tvOS, and NodeJS. You’ll also find effortless integration options with cloud services, data streaming solutions, and provisioning tools to help you smooth introducing Ably into your existing tech stack.

If you’re considering building chat functionality, then Ably is especially well suited to creating immersive chat experiences. Using Ably’s realtime functionality, as well as our in-depth documentation and library of demo code, you can quickly build features including:

• Online/offline status

• Last seen indicators

• Edit/delete messages

• Threads

• Emoji reactions

• Typing indicators

• Read receipts

• Chat admin privileges

• User avatar

• Push notifications

Read how Ably can help you build realtime chat experiences into your applications with global reach, massive scalability, and a developer experience designed for productivity.