Sendbird vs CometChat: Key differences and which to use in 2024

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Delivering your users’ chat messages reliably and in realtime requires sophisticated infrastructure. With Ably, you can build a reliable chat experience tailored to your needs, that operates at a global scale, with the following features: 

• Online/offline status

• Last seen indicators

• Edit/delete messages

• Threads

• Emoji reactions

• Typing indicators

• Read receipts

• Chat admin privileges

• User avatar

• Push notifications

Read more about our chat offering and how to get started in our reference guide.

But Ably is about more than chat alone. You can build and operate a rich variety of realtime functionality, such as multiplayer collaboration, data broadcast, and IoT device communication with our realtime platform. Let’s look at what sets 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.