Sendbird vs CometChat: Key differences and which to use in 2024
A head-to-head comparison between Sendbird and CometChat for live chat use cases. Learn about their features, pros and cons, similarities, and differences.
Adding chat to your app can improve user retention, make it easier to deliver support, and offer a new channel through which to deliver functionality. However, building reliable realtime chat functionality takes specialized infrastructure and engineering expertise.
So, before diving in, it’s important to make sure your tooling and platform choices give you the best trade-off between functionality, time to market, and ongoing maintenance costs.
Typically, there are four methods you can use to create chat functionality for your app:
Build a custom chat system: Making your own system might offer more control of the experience, but it doesn’t come for free. Architecting and coding that custom functionality could be a distraction and will add ongoing maintenance costs.
Add a ready-made chat box: A pre-existing chat widget is quick to set up but you may need to compromise on features and chat experience according to what that provider offers.
Build on top of a chat API: Like the ready-made chat box, a chat API can help you get up and running relatively quickly. However, despite more scope for customization, you’ll still need to work within the confines of features offered by the chat API provider.
Use a realtime platform as a service (PaaS): Cut your time to market and reduce your ongoing maintenance costs by building the precise chat functionality you need on top of a realtime PaaS.
In this article, we’ll be focusing on two chat APIs, namely Sendbird and CometChat. After comparing their chat features, infrastructure, and pricing, we’ll then take a look at using Ably’s realtime PaaS as an alternative way to build your chat functionality.
What is Sendbird?
Since its inception in San Mateo, California, 2013, Sendbird has been delivering chat functionality to companies such as BMW, Hinge, and Reddit. Their chat API provides backend chat functionality and, on the frontend, they offer UI kits to make it easier to build chat into your application.
Like other chat APIs, Sendbird offers many of the chat features that end users have come to expect, such as push notifications, the ability to share images and video in conversations, and content moderation to provide a safer chat experience. However, what sets Sendbird apart is the maturity of its platform. At the time of writing, Sendbird’s most recent funding round saw the company valued in excess of $1 billion. With that financial backing, Sendbird is considered one of the more stable players in the chat API space.
As well as the main chat offering, Sendbird has specialized APIs for customer support chat, video/voice calling, and embedding live video streaming with text chat into your apps and websites.
Now we’ve had an overview of Sendbird, let’s look at some of the chat API’s specific pros and cons.
Pros of Sendbird
Quick setup: As you don’t need to design or build any infrastructure or backend code, it can be quick to get up and running with Sendbird. That’s especially true if you use one of their UI kits, which help you build a frontend chat experience.
Specialized APIs: Beyond its primary chat API, Sendbird provides additional APIs tailored for specific use cases, such as support desk conversations and live video streaming.
Handles relatively large user volumes: Sendbird claims it can support over a million active users for each chat application.
Meets compliance standards: Sendbird complies with recognized industry and regulatory standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA/HITECH, and GDPR.
Feature-rich chat: As a dedicated chat product, Sendbird focuses on delivering the chat features your users are likely to expect. For example, read confirmations, user typing indicators, moderation tools, direct messaging, and options for both private and public group chats.
Cons of Sendbird
Limited global reach: While Sendbird offers a range of hosting locations, it doesn't support multi-region hosting. That can affect user experience and reliability. For instance, a user in Tokyo may face higher latency if the chat is hosted in Sendbird’s EU Central region, compared to a user in Frankfurt. It’s also worth noting that, if a particular Sendbird location faces issues, there's no way to fall back to a back-up facility.
Weak guarantees: Chat relies on messagings appearing in order. However, Sendbird doesn't guarantee that messages will arrive in the order they are sent or even at all. Depending on network conditions, a user might receive messages out of sequence, or some message might never appear.
Data governance concerns: Storing chat messages with Sendbird could pose data governance challenges, depending on the location of the chat users and of the Sendbird region you select.
Pricing reflects Sendbird’s market position: As one of the leading chat API providers, Sendbird doesn’t compete on price. It’s important to consider how Sendbird’s pricing might impact your overall budget.
Potential for steep overage charges: Similarly, Sendbird sells its services using set pricing packages. If you exceed the limits of your chosen package, perhaps due to unforeseen spikes in usage, you could end up paying charges that are out of proportion with the uptick in usage.
Limited scope: While it can be useful that Sendbird specializes in chat, it does mean it lacks in other areas. For example, there are no integrations with analytics, data storage, and similar tools. That also makes it harder to develop bespoke realtime functionality beyond your chat experience, such as data feeds, quizzes, polls, and so on.
What is CometChat?
Similar to Sendbird, CometCchat offers a chat API and some frontend tooling to make it easier to integrate chat experiences into your web and mobile applications. Founded in Mumbai in 2009, and now headquartered in Denver, Colorado, CometChat serves customers including healthcare products company Haleon.
As we’ll see later, the functionality that CometChat delivers is broadly the same as that of Sendbird. Perhaps where the two companies differ most, though, is in the investment behind their offerings. Although investment dollars tell only part of the story, CometChat has raised just $17.4 million in funding. That is reflected in lower staffing numbers, with 73 team members at the time of writing. It’s not clear what the lower investment means for CometChat’s infrastructure but we do know that the company offers fewer datacenter locations compared to Sendbird, for example.
So, let’s look at some of what you should look at when evaluating CometChat.
Pros of CometChat
Quick to get started: CometChat offers sample code, comprehensive documentation, SDKs, UI kits, and ready-made widgets, making the integration process straightforward. The free tier gives you full access to chat features, but with a cap on user count.
Customizability: While CometChat provides widgets for ease, its API also allows for a degree of customization, though not as much as a bespoke solution.
Extension marketplace: CometChat provides a number of extensions to add functionality such as the ability for users to reply to chat messages through email, voice transcription, and end-to-end encryption.
Cons of CometChat
Limited global reach: Just like Sendbird, one of CometChat’s main shortcomings is that the service hosts your chat functionality in a single region. Although you can select the region you want to use, there’s no opportunity to distribute the load across multiple regions and, as a result, both latency and reliability suffer.
Focused on chat: CometChat mainly offers chat features. If you invest time into integrating it, you're primarily getting chat capabilities. For a broader set of realtime features, you’ll need a general purpose realtime PaaS.
Limited support options: Lower-tier paid packages come with email and community-based support only, relying on CometChat community volunteers for assistance.
Frontend-centric: CometChat's SDKs are primarily designed for frontend integration, which can make it hard to integrate CometChat with your backend.
Sendbird vs CometChat: Feature comparison
Making the choice between Sendbird and CometChat comes down to which of the two best matches your needs (if either does). The difference between the two is, perhaps, one of emphasis. For example, while Sendbird offers SDKs for native iOS and Android development, CometChat instead prefers cross-platform mobile frameworks, such as React Native and Flutter.
So, let’s do a side-by-side comparison of both offerings to see which might align the best with your needs or, instead, whether you need to look elsewhere.
Performance, reliability, scalability, and messaging guarantees
Reliability is crucial for chat platforms. If there's any delay or messages go missing, users can get frustrated. Many services provide uptime metrics, often as percentages like 99.999% (referred to as "five nines"). This indicates the expected online time. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) typically go a step further, setting out response or resolution times if issues arise and, often, offering compensation for downtime beyond agreed levels.
How do Sendbird and CometChat compare when it comes to delivering a reliable chat experience?
Feature/capability | Sendbird | CometChat |
Uptime guarantee | 99.99% (up to almost an hour’s downtime per year) | 99.99% (up to almost an hour’s downtime per year) |
Latency | Unknown | Under test conditions, the CometChat team achieved a response time of less than 50 ms. It’s not clear what CometChat’s response times would be across the open internet for globally distributed end users. |
Scalability | Sendbird claims it can scale to 1 million concurrent connections per client app. A public chat channel can sustain up to 100K users. Private chat channels are limited to 20k users. | Under test conditions, the CometChat team achieved 1 million+ concurrent users. |
Infrastructure | CometChat appears to have regions in EU, US, Australia, and India | |
Multi-region | No. You must choose one region and then all your chat activity will take place there. | No. You must choose one region and then all your chat activity will take place there. |
Guaranteed message ordering | Unknown | Unknown |
Guaranteed message delivery (exactly-once) | Unknown | Unknown |
Automatic reconnections with continuity | Sendbird Chat SDKs automatically reconnect after brief disconnects. However, it's not clear if SendBird replays missed messages following a disconnection. |
Chat features
With the prominence of WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, and similar tools, chat users have come to expect richer chat functionality. So, how do Sendbird and CometChat compare when it comes to chat features?
Feature | Sendbird | CometChat |
1-to-1 chat | Yes | Yes |
Group chat | Yes | Yes |
Public and private group chat | Yes | Yes |
Chat UI components | Yes (iOS, Android, React, React Native) | Yes (Flutter, Angular, React, React Native, Vue.js, Swift) |
Push notifications | Yes | Yes |
Message history (persisted data) | Yes (6 months by default, longer available at additional charge) | Yes (6 months by default, with older archives available on request) |
Rewind/load previous messages | Yes | Yes |
User presence | Yes | Yes |
Advanced chat features | - Typing indicators - Message delivery receipts & read receipts - Reactions - User and channel mentions - Unread message count - Scheduled and offline messages - Channel list - Message and user moderation (e.g. profanity filter, mute user) - Multimedia support (audio, video, photos) | - Typing indicators - Message delivery receipts & read receipts - Reactions - User and channel mentions - Unread message count - User and friend lists - Message and user moderation (sentiment analysis, malware scanner, user blocking, moderator roles, etc) - Multimedia support (audio, video, photos) - Thumbnail generation |
Supported languages, integrations, and protocols
When evaluating a chat tool for your app, you need to check how well it will work with your existing tech stack. Does its API cover all its features? Are there SDKs for your go-to programming language? And how well does it connect with other systems, especially databases?
Feature | Sendbird | CometChat |
SDKs | Sendbird Chat offers client SDKs for: - iOS - Android (Kotlin) - JavaScript - Unreal - Unity - .NET - Flutter | CometChat offers SDKs for: - JavaScript - Android - iOS - React Native - Ionic/Cordova - Flutter |
UI widgets | Sendbird Chat offers UI kits/widgets for: - iOS - Android - React - React Native | CometChat offers drop-in UI kits/widgets for: - iOS - Android - React Native - Web - Ionic/Cordova |
3rd party integrations | Sendbird doesn't provide pre-built integrations. However, it gives you two interfaces to make your own: - A Chatbot API that lets chatbots join conversations. - Webhooks to initiate third-party actions based on chat platform events. | CometChat’s extensions marketplace offers integrations with third-party services such as Intercom. However, there aren’t integrations for databases, data streaming services, or serverless platforms. |
Protocols | Sendbird connects chat clients via WebSocket. If WebSocket is not available, it shifts to HTTP polling. For setup and other admin tasks, Sendbird uses HTTP. | CometChat uses WebSocket to connect chat clients with the CometChat backend. It isn’t clear if CometChat falls back to other protocols where WebSocket is unavailable. |
Security and compliance
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 Sendbird and CometChat shape up?
Feature | Sendbird | CometChat |
Encryption | In-transit: SSL/TLS At rest: AES 256 encryption | In-transit: SSL/TLS At rest: AES 256 encryption |
Authentication | Access tokens and ephemeral session tokens JWTs available on request | Auth tokens |
Configurable chat roles & permissions | Yes | Yes |
Compliance | ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 | ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 |
Pricing and support
Once you’re happy that a provider’s chat features and infrastructure meet your needs, the next step is to make sure that their pricing meets your expectations and that they can deliver support when you need it.
In this section, we'll look at how Sendbird and CometChat measure up.
Feature | Sendbird | CometChat |
Free plan | Free developer plan that offers: - 100 monthly active users - 10 peak concurrent connections - Unlimited number of messages - Access to “Pro” plan features - Community support | Free plan suitable for proofs of concept: - 25 monthly active users - Access to “Pro” plan features |
Pricing model | Pricing depends on number of monthly active users. Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plans offer different levels of functionality, each of which charges differently for the number of active users. For example, at the time of writing, the Starter plan is $399 per month for 5,000 MAU, whereas the Pro plan is $599 for 5,000 MAU. | Pricing depends on number of monthly active users. Essentials, Pro, and Custom plans offer different levels of functionality, each of which charges differently for the number of active users. For example, at the time of writing, the Essentials plan is $379 per month for up to 10,000 MAU, whereas the Pro plan is $799 for up to 10,000 MAU. |
Support offering | Sendbird offers best effort support with the option to buy annual support plans at an additional cost. Sendbird does not offer an uptime SLA without an add-on support plan. | CometChat offers email and community support for Essentials and Pro plans, with hands-on implementation assistance available to Custom plan customers. |
Sendbird vs CometChat: which platform has the best chat API?
Choosing between Sendbird and CometChat could be difficult because they are so similar. They’re both chat APIs with roughly similar features, pricing options, and developer experience. But there are differences.
Differences between Sendbird and CometChat
Gaming support: Sendbird offers SDKs for gaming frameworks such as Unity, whereas CometChat does not.
Integrations: Neither Sendbird nor CometChat has an especially rich integrations ecosystem - but CometChat does have an extensions marketplace. For enterprise-level operations, such as data export and analysis, you’ll need to create your own integrations using the vendor’s API in both the case of Sendbird and CometChat.
Financial backing: At the time of writing, Sendbird has raised $219.64M over 8 rounds, while CometChat has raised roughly 7.6% of that at a total of $16.68M.
Similarities between Sendbird and CometChat
Limited to chat: Both Sendbird and CometChat focus on chat features. That’s fine if you're sure your future requirements will match their development plans. But if you expect you’ll need something unique or realtime functionality beyond chat, you might want to explore a realtime PaaS option.
Lack of global reach: Despite offering a choice of data center locations, neither Sendbird nor CometChat allows you to run your chat backend across multiple regions. That’s bad for the reliability and responsiveness of your chat service.
SDK coverage: Both offer extensive SDKs, albeit with a different emphasis between the two, allowing easy integration across various platforms.
Compliance: Both adhere to industry standards and prioritize data security, suitable for businesses focused on regulatory compliance. However, it’s worth considering whether their data center locations comply with the data protection regulations in the locations where your chat users live.
Transparency: Neither provider offers much information about their network, so you might need to experiment with both products to work out which is faster and more reliable for your users.
In summary, Sendbird and CometChat offer a good range of chat features but they struggle to back it up with infrastructure that guarantees uptime, message delivery, and an overall smooth end user experience.
Instead of using a chat API, one alternative is to build precisely the chat features you need on top of a realtime PaaS.
Build realtime chat with Ably
Ably is a realtime experience platform used by HubSpot, I7Live, SportsBet, InvitePeople and more to power their fully-featured and reliable chat.
Ably's network
Our globally-distributed, multi-region infrastructure offers unrivalled guarantees around performance, data integrity, reliability, and scalability:
<50 ms median latency
Guaranteed message ordering and (exactly-once) delivery, even in unreliable network conditions
Redundancy at regional and global levels, with a 99.999% uptime SLA
Dynamic elasticity, with the ability to send billions of messages to millions of channels and chat users
Ably Chat
Our new product, Ably Chat, is designed to deliver a great chat experience for use cases from livestreams and in-game communication to customer support and social interactions in SaaS products.
It comes with purpose-built APIs for quickly building out chat features, including realtime messaging, online status and presence tracking, typing indicators, and room-level reactions.
Built on Ably's core platform, Ably Chat streamlines the complexities of realtime chat architecture, providing a powerful and flexible solution for a wide range of use cases. Here’s how it benefits you:
Composable realtime: Unlike chat-specific products or building your own solution from scratch, Ably offers the best of both worlds - full flexibility to build what you want, and quickly.
Dependable by design: We’ve built a realtime experience platform engineered for predictable latencies, ensuring uninterrupted service, capacity and availability across regional and global levels, even at extreme scale.
Cost optimizations: Our flexible pricing model—offering customizations like hourly billing, usage-based pricing, and volume discounts—is tailored for operations at scale. And soon, upcoming features like batching and aggregation will help keep costs low.
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.