CometChat vs Twilio Conversations: Discover the right choice for your use case

CometChat is a dedicated chat software as a service (SaaS) provider that offers an API to enable you to add chat functionality to your own applications. It takes care of direct messaging, chat groups, moderation, and so on, while also providing UI kits and widgets to help you integrate the chat service into your app.

The focus of CometChat is on helping you create your own chat experience, whether that’s text-based chat or voice and video calling. As we’ll see shortly, that’s somewhat different from Twilio Conversations.

• Short time to market: CometChat provides SDKs, documentation, sample code, and UI components, as well as taking care of everything on the backend. 

• Free to experiment: The free tier lets you access all chat features, but you’re limited to non-production workloads thanks to tight quotas.

• Customization options: If the widgets and UI kits aren’t a good fit, you can use the CometChat API to build something more customized to your needs. However, it won't offer the same flexibility as a custom solution.

• Extensions marketplace: CometChat offers extensions that add extra chat features, some of which are offered by default by other providers.

• Chat-centric: CometChat is tightly focused on chat, whether that’s text or voice and video. However, if you're looking to build other types of realtime functionality, such as live-streaming stock or sports data to your users, you'd need to turn to a general-purpose realtime PaaS.

• Support tiers: At the lower end of CometChat’s paid packages, support is by email only, although they do promise community support, too. 

• Frontend focus: The SDKs provided by CometChat lean more towards frontend integration, rather than integrating with backend languages and frameworks, such as .NET. 

Twilio Conversations takes a different approach to CometChat. While CometChat is designed for building general-purpose chat experiences directly in your web and mobile applications, Twilio Conversations is geared towards making it easier to manage customer support and engagement conversations taking place in WhatsApp, by SMS, in Google Business Messages, and in Facebook Messenger 

So, while you can integrate chat into your web and mobile apps using Twilio Conversations, its main focus is on providing a unified interface for multi-channel conversations.

• Omnichannel: Twilio Conversations provides one API to manage conversations taking place in multiple locations, including popular messaging services such as WhatsApp. Each participant in a conversation could be joining via a different channel. For example, a customer service agent could be using web chat on their work computer, while the customer uses Facebook Messenger on their mobile device.

• Quick to get started: With SDKs for both mobile and web, along with UI kits and pre-built apps for Android and iOS, getting started with Twilio Conversations can be straightforward and quick

• Good developer experience: Twilio is known for the quality of its developer documentation, SDKs, and other conveniences to make working with the API smoother.

• Compliance options: Conversations held over SMS and chat can be HIPAA compliant, while features such as opt-out management and conversation expiry make it easier to comply with data protection laws.

• Focused on customer support and engagement: Twilio Conversations is tailored specifically to customer support and engagement chat. If you also need chat for other use cases, such as enabling app users to chat with each other, Twilio Conversations might not be the right choice for you.

• Works best as part of Twilio Flex: Twilio Conversations is a standalone product but to get the most out of the product you might need to use Twilio Flex, Twilio’s customer engagement platform and contact center platform.

• Not multi-region: By default, Twilio Conversations hosts your chat backend in its US1 region. You can change this, but Twilio suggests picking a region near your main app infrastructure. This could impact chat performance for users who are far from your selected Twilio region. Additionally, if your chosen Twilio region faces outages, there's no automatic switchover to a backup region.

Choosing between CometChat and Twilio Conversations depends on what problem you’re looking to solve. CometChat is a general-purpose chat API that gives you the tools to build a chat experience into your existing web and mobile apps. 

Twilio Conversations, on the other hand, focuses on customer support and engagement use cases. Crucially, it allows you to unify communication across multiple platforms and present your customer-facing teams with a single, ongoing conversation view. That way, a customer could switch between Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, for example, without disrupting the flow of the conversation or causing confusion for your support teams.

That means the choice is driven, largely, by your use case. But let’s take a closer look at what both tools offer.

An unreliable chat platform will quickly lose the trust of your users. Similarly, if the chat platform you choose can’t scale with you as your app grows, then you might find yourself urgently looking for a replacement later down the line.

Both CometChat and Twilio Conversations are backed by significant infrastructure and experienced teams. But how do they match up when it comes to performance, reliability, and scaling?

Richer chat features can boost user engagement. As we’ve seen, though, CometChat and Twilio Conversations set out to solve somewhat different problems. Does that impact the features that they offer?

Once you’re sure that a chat API offers the functionality you need, the next step is to consider how well it will integrate with your existing tooling and infrastructure. That means looking at whether there are SDKs for your preferred language or framework, as well as integrations with databases, auth systems, and similar tools that you rely on.

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 Twilio Conversations shape up?

Evaluating the pricing and support of chat API providers can be challenging due to differing package structures. Features offered without limits by one vendor might be metered by another, for example. Additionally, the quality and type of support can differ between companies.

Ultimately, whether you choose CometChat or Twilio Conversations depends on your use case:

• Custom chat inside your app: CometChat

• Unify customer conversations from multiple platforms: Twilio Conversations

Before you make a decision between the two, let’s recap how the two products differ and where they are similar.

• Where chat takes place: The main difference is where the chat takes place. CometChat is all about building your own chat functionality, whereas Twilio Conversations enables people to join a conversation using SMS, WhatsApp, and more.

• CometChat offers public chat groups: As it is designed more for customer support and similar conversations, Twilio Conversations does not offer public chat groups, whereas CometChat does.

• CometChat offers cross-platform mobile SDKs: Twilio Conversations offers native iOS and Android SDKs, whereas CometChat also supports Flutter and React Native.

• Twilio Conversations is not a standalone solution: You could build chat functionality into your app using one of CometChat’s widgets and not need any other tooling for your chat functionality. While Twilio Conversations offers UI kits and sample code, you’ll need to build your own frontend (and possibly backend) code to integrate the service into your user experience.

• Single region: Like many chat APIs, both CometChat and Twilio Conversations host your chat functionality in a single cloud region. That means a reduced experience for users further away from that data center and it increases the risk of downtime as there’s no fallback.

• Good compliance: Both solutions offer good compliance with security standards, but depending on your needs that might come at an extra cost with Twilio.

Whether you’re looking to build a dedicated chat in your app or to collate conversations from multiple channels, there is an alternative. Rather than compromise your needs according to what either CometChat or Twilio Conversations can offer, you could instead build your own chat functionality on top of Ably.

Whatever your use case, creating and maintaining a reliably and engaging chat experience takes robust global infrastructure. With Ably, you can build precisely the chat experience that suits your needs and that delivers a smooth experience to end users no matter where they are in the world. That’s thanks to features such as:

• Online/offline status

• Last seen indicators

• Edit/delete messages

• Threads

• Emoji reactions

• Typing indicators

• Read receipts

• Chat admin privileges

• User avatar

• Push notifications

You can read more about our building chat using Ably in our reference guide.

And once you’re working with Ably, you have the tools and infrastructure to build any realtime experience. That could be multiplayer collaboration to bring remote workers together, data broadcast for a sports app, or connecting remote IoT devices. Here are some of the things that set Ably’s realtime PaaS apart:

• Global network reach: Scale globally thanks to more than 205 edge locations.

• <65 ms latency: Create seamless experiences with quick response times.

• Resilient delivery: Ably guarantees that messages arrive in order and on time.

• 99.999% uptime: Ably’s dedicated team works 24/7, so you can have peace of mind even during high-demand periods.

• Elastic scaling: From thousands to billions of messages, Ably meets your application’s demands seamlessly.

• A great developer experience: with SDKs targeting more than 25 languages and frameworks, integrations with common tooling, and industry leading documentation, Ably’s developer experience gives you the tools to become productive quickly.

Discover how Ably empowers you to integrate global, scalable, and efficient realtime chat experiences in your apps, with a developer experience built by developers just like you.