What is Stream?
Stream (formerly GetStream) is a platform for building scalable, realtime chat and activity feed applications. It provides APIs and SDKs to easily integrate messaging, video calls, and social feeds into apps.
5 alternatives to Stream to consider
We’ll now look at alternatives to Stream - competing technologies that allow you to build realtime experiences for end-users.
Ably
Ably is realtime infrastructure for AI, chat and live apps. It’s trusted by 7k+ companies and powers more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform. We run the delivery layer, so ordering, reconnects and failover are handled for you. Simple APIs and use case specific SDKs mean there’s no infrastructure to build or maintain.
Key Ably features and capabilities
- Performance: 6.5ms message delivery latency within a region, and a 37ms global median round trip.
- Integrity: Each publisher’s messages arrive in order at every subscriber. Clients that reconnect within two minutes resume automatically, and History covers longer gaps.
- Reliability: Designed for 99.999999% message survivability, with each acknowledged message stored in multiple physical locations.
- Availability: 7+ years without a global outage. Regional incidents are routed around automatically across 12 regions and 750+ edge locations. 99.999% uptime SLA on Business and Enterprise.
- One platform, six products: Pub/Sub, AI Transport, Chat, Spaces, LiveObjects and LiveSync share the same guarantees.
- Integrations and SDKs: Pre-built integrations for Kafka, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and Datadog, and SDKs for 20+ languages.
- Pricing: Priced by monthly active users, with every product in every package. Free for up to 500 MAUs; Pro from $29 a month, billed annually.
Sendbird
Sendbird provides APIs and SDKs for mobile and web to integrate live chats and realtime messaging with message history, typing indicators, and push notifications features. It uses WebSocket connections and offers customizability using UI kits and backend integrations. It also supports video and audio integrations for calls.
PubNub
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect. It can serve as the foundation for online chat, live events, geolocation, remote IoT control, and realtime updates.
Pusher
Pusher is a managed pub/sub messaging service that provides hosted APIs and SDKs for adding realtime features to web and mobile applications. Pusher’s offers two products:
- Channels: WebSocket pub/sub messaging
- Beams: Programmatic push notifications for mobile and web
CometChat
CometChat is a messaging platform designed for integration into various applications, offering text, voice, and video chat capabilities. It supports extensive customization through SDKs and UI kits.
Disclaimer: The information on the alternatives presented here was based on documentation and resources freely available online and was last updated on 5 Nov 2026. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- Up to 500 monthly active users (MAUs)
- Every Ably product and protocol
- No credit card required
