TalkJS vs. Sendbird: Discover the right choice for your use case

Sendbird is a chat API that gives you the backend functionality to build chat experiences into your applications. As well as one-to-one messaging and chat groups, Sendbird gives you typical chat features such as push notifications, rich media sharing, and moderation. Using Sendbird’s API, SDKs, and UI kits, you can focus on integrating chat into your app’s user experience without having to manage the infrastructure that supports it.

As well as a general chat service, Sendbird offers specialized products for support chat, live video streaming, and calling.

• Fast time to market: Using Sendbird’s UI kits, you can get up and running  relatively quickly.

• Use case specific APIs: As well as a general chat API, Sendbird offers specialized APIs for use cases such as support desk chat and chat for live video streaming.

• Can scale to relatively large user bases: Sendbird states that it can support more than a million active users per client application.

• Compliance: Sendbird checks the box for industry and regulatory standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA/HITECH, and GDPR.

• Ready to use chat functionality: Sendbird provides chat-specific functionality, such as read receipts, typing indicators, moderation, one to one messaging, and both private and public groups,

• Single region: Although you can choose from a list of global locations to host your Sendbird chat, Sendbird is not multi-region. That impacts both user experience and reliability. If you host your chat in Sendbird’s US West region, the latency experienced by a chat user in Bengaluru will be noticeably worse than someone in California, for example. Similarly, if that Sendbird region experiences an issue, there’s no way to fall back to another region.

• Lack of guarantees: To make sense, chat often relies on messages arriving in the right order. Unfortunately, Sendbird offers no guarantees that messages will arrive in order or at all. Network conditions could mean that a user in one location receives messages in a different order to other users. It could also mean that for some people messages don’t arrive at all.

• Data governance risks: Sendbird stores your chat messages, which could introduce a data governance problem depending on which data center location you choose.

• Inflexible pricing: Sendbird offers fixed packages each with different quotas. Should you go over those quotas, for example due to a one-off event or an unexpected uptick in usage, you’ll pay expensive overage charges.

• Narrow focus: Sendbird doesn't offer integrations for data, analytics, or other tools. While its emphasis on chat can help you get started faster, that does mean you’ll need different tools for realtime functions other than chat.

TalkJS, like Sendbird, provides a backend chat API, the ability to trigger third party functionality through webhooks, and a quick way to get started using a JavaScript widget. However, unlike Sendbird, TalkJS focuses mostly on text chat through its JavaScript widget. That means that there’s no support for features such as voice and video calling. Similarly, TalkJS doesn’t offer SDKs for its backend API. 

• Quick to get started: You can drop the TalkJS widget into your web app’s frontend, or a mobile app built using React Native or Flutter, with just a few lines of code.

• Ready-made chat features: TalkJS supports public channels, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as search, native mobile notifications, file sharing, user presence, voice messages, and other common chat features.

• Some scope to integrate with existing tooling: Webhooks allow you to trigger your own custom functionality in response to a limited number of events, such as when a notification is read or a new user is created. The REST API offers some functionality, such as creating a conversation, deleting a message, and downloading the messages from a conversation.

• Some support for message guarantees: By default, TalkJS appears to make few guarantees, such as ensuring the right messages reach each user. However, it does guarantee the idempotency of messages. For example, if your code tries to send the same message twice, perhaps because the initial request appears to fail, TalkJS will prevent it from being delivered twice.

• Text chat only: Although chat users can send voice messages using TalkJS, it does not support realtime voice or video chat.

• Single region and no choice of region: TalkJS runs on Digital Ocean servers inside the European Union only. That means longer latencies for users outside Europe and reduces the TalkJS’s ability to withstand network or data center issues with its sole provider.

• Data governance risks: Both Sendbird and TalkJS store your chat data. However, unlike Sendbird, TalkJS does not comply with standards such as SOC2. Also unlike Sendbird, TalkJS stores all chat data in the EU. Depending on your use case and on where you and your users are located, that could make TalkJS unsuitable.

• Limited to chat: Also like Sendbird, TalkJS offers only chat functionality. Should you want to build other realtime functionality then you’ll need to integrate another provider.

• Pricing tailored to smaller usage: TalkJS offers two main packages, with their larger Growth package supporting only 1,250 group chat users. Anything larger requires negotiating a custom enterprise plan. 

Sendbird and TalkJS may look alike at first, but their features and infrastructure are quite different. So, let’s see how they differ and where they are alike.

Users want chat messages to be quick, delivered in the right order, and available around the clock. The reliability of a chat API hinges on its infrastructure. So, between Sendbird and TalkJS, which one offers the most reliable and performant chat experience?

Beyond the fundamentals of letting users exchange messages, what do you need a chat API to do? Do you want to alert chat users with native mobile notifications, for example? Or how about moderation features? Let’s look at how Sendbird and TalkJS line-up.

How a chat tool integrates with your existing tech stack is an important factor in deciding whether it’s right for your app. If it offers an API, does that API give you access to all functionality? Are there SDKs to make it easier to work with the service in your preferred language? Does it integrate with other tooling, such as databases?

With GDPR and California’s CCPA, stronger data protection has found its way into law. In some industries, such as healthcare, come with additional security and compliance requirements. How do Sendbird and TalkJS shape up?

Pricing and support are good indicators of what type of experience you’re likely to have. Inflexible pricing packages might make it easier to estimate set-up costs but harder to deal with sudden spikes in demand, for example. And a service provider’s approach to support will give you an idea of how much you can rely on them when something goes wrong.

Sendbird and TalkJS take somewhat different approaches. Sendbird is primarily a backend service that offers UI widgets should you need them. TalkJS, on the other hand, focuses on its widgets for JavaScript web, React Native, and Flutter, while offering a JavaScript SDK and REST API should you want to customize the experience.

Let’s look at where Sendbird and TalkJS are similar and then where they differ.

• Both offer a fast way to get basic chat functionality: If the chat features offered by either vendor suit your needs, then they can offer a quick way to add chat to your app. However, that speed comes at the cost of flexibility and robust infrastructure.

• Limited guarantees: Neither Sendbird nor TalkJS appears to guarantee that your users’ messages will arrive in order, the right number of times, or at all.

• Limited support for backend development: Sendbird’s API and SDKs are better suited to integrating your backend with their chat service. However, neither TalkJS nor Sendbird offers SDKs for common languages such as Ruby, Python, or NodeJS, which will result in a rougher developer experience if you work in those languages. 

• Poor support for global audiences: TalkJS suffers here particularly as it offers hosting in the EU only. Sendbird is a little better, in that you can choose from a list of data center locations. However, in both cases, your chat service lives in one data center. That means a poorer experience for end users located elsewhere in the world, thanks to longer latencies. And if there’s an issue with that one data center, neither TalkJS nor Sendbird allows you to fall back to another location.

• TalkJS does not support native mobile apps: Both Sendbird and TalkJS offer UI kits or SDKs to help you build chat into your mobile apps. If you’re working with cross-platform tools, such as React Native or Flutter, they are supported by both chat APIs. However, only Sendbird offers native SDKs for iOS and Android.

• Sendbird has better support for data compliance: With default support for encryption and compliance with schemes such as SOC2 and HIPAA, Sendbird is likely to be a better choice than TalkJS for more serious use cases.

• Sendbird supports voice and video calling: TalkJS offers text based chat only, with asynchronous voice messaging, whereas Sendbird also provides live voice and video chat.

Choosing between Sendbird and TalkJS could be difficult. It’s true that there are some distinguishing features, such as Sendbird’s Unity SDK potentially making it better suited to game development, for example. However, both options have gaps in significant areas, such as:

• Issues with reliability and responsiveness: Whether you choose Sendbird or TalkJS, your chat backend will be limited to just one data center location. That means a greater chance of your chat going offline with no fallback and an increasingly poor experience the further users are from that data center.

• Uncertainty over guarantees: Ensuring messages arrive in the right order at the right time is the number one job of a chat API. But neither Sendbird nor TalkJS appears to guarantee that messages will arrive in the right order, the right number of times, or at all.

• Lack of flexibility: Both chat services allow you to tweak the user experience but, ultimately, you’re stuck with the feature choices made by the vendor. If they haven’t built what you need, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.

• They only do chat: It might sound obvious but Sendbird and TalkJS are fundamentally limited to chat use cases. If you need to implement other realtime functionality, such as data broadcast or multiplayer collaboration, neither vendor will be able to help.

Sendbird and TalkJS both serve thousands of chat users and offer a quick way to add chat to your application. However, if you want to build chat that is tailored to your users’ needs, that offers guarantees, and that operates from multiple global locations, what are your choices?

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