Messaging SDK & chat API for mobile apps & websites
4.4/5 (24 reviews)SendBird is a customizable messaging SDK and chat API that enables businesses to offer in-app messaging for their mobile, web, and consumer applications. The platform provides the client SDK, the necessary front-end UI, and backend system for seamless communication among users, from one-on-one messaging and group chat, to massive-scale channels. Our chat solution serves a diverse number of industries and use-cases from eCommerce, on-demand, banking, OTA, and enterprise messaging to online communities, live video streaming, gaming, and dating.
SendBird includes an auto partitioning feature which automatically splits or merges chat rooms based on the audience size in order to maintain a steady level of engagement. Smart throttling helps the audience follow conversations by controlling the speed of messages that are displayed. Users can setup custom dictionaries to automatically prevent spam messages and filter profanity. Moderation tools help monitor and moderate chat rooms, as well as manage abusive users by freezing channels, muting users, removing/banning users from chat rooms, and deactivating users entirely.
SendBird enables businesses to interface with conversational bot brains and integrate them into their application's chat and messaging experience. Push notifications are sent in real-time to update users who are away from the app, while admin messages display user activity and notices to other users within chat channels. Users are able to send files and custom data such as videos within chat messages using the file transfer feature and auto-thumbnail generation turns these files into thumbnails viewable in the messaging window. Read receipts help track the read status of messages, and typing indicators display whenever a user on the other end is typing, in real time.
Pros
Plug and Play
Cons
Needed to customize quite a bit and the customer support is not the fastest.
I think the product is useful and needed. Chat is quite difficult to implement into an app on both the front-end and back-end. SendBird makes it much easier to do so, but still needs work in terms of documentation and support. It was not that easy to implement a front-end solution, albeit a custom one. I would like to be able to speak with a tech support staff via chat. It was very difficult to get support over email with long wait times in between correspondence - at least when I was a non-paying member. One might say that is a crucial time to convert someone to paying. A direct line via Slack or even their own messaging service would be incredibly useful. I still have issues to this day with implementation related to connecting, temporary messages, caching, error handling, etc. There are a LOT of odds and ends that need to be taken care of, and I'm willing to bet most apps implementing this solution are not bug free or on par with more mainstream chat services and I think it should be.
Overall, I like the product. I think there's a lot more that can be done with it, and I look forward to future releases.
Pros
Definitely makes it easy to add chat. Saves a ton of time and headaches. It's a better back-end solution than I could have done personally.
Cons
- Needs better technical support.
- Needs a better front-end solution.
- Not very easy to implement.
I launched my app Pro Photo Shoot using SendBird as the engine for in-app messaging. I was very pleased with the way the API handled conversations, as it really took a lot of work out of the process, which can be very complicated if building from scratch.
A few things in the suggestion box:
- Faster, faster, faster! Make the API as fast as possible.
- Improve your console to make it easier to drill down into a conversation when needed
Pros
Ease of use.
Decent SDK and REST interface.
Cons
Documentation is a little thin. It could be more robust with details, examples, and use cases.
Responsiveness to our client needs is always the top priority for us. Thank you for your feedback and I will make sure to serve customers betters in production and inquiry responses - Mark (Head of Growth at SendBird)
Not having to implement it by ourselves :)
Pros
On top of the customisable API, one thing I appreciated the most was how easy you can communicate with the team behind SendBird. Had a request regarding some push notifications with WatchOS that were actually missing and within a few days, after some email exchange, here it was.
Cons
The fact it is not open source I would say. Open sourcing it would make it better for the community.
Thank you for being a valued customer Nicolas! Deeply appreciate your kind words. We look forward to further contributing to C&Z Tech's success.
No need to develop chatting tool, Low cost for using such tool
Pros
Easy to use, quick response for issues or inquiries. Also it's easy to implement at the beginning of the service.
Thank you for your kind review, we feel extremely lucky to have been a part of Pikicast's mega growth journey in the past two years!
Start with the FREE plan. Contact SendBird for a custom pricing model.
Engage and retain, listen and market to 1+ million concurrent participants per application (according to our load tests) and host over 100,000 concurrent chat participants per channel for live-videos and events.
Install a bot Interface to create an AI-assisted messaging experience for customers inside your application.
Unlike simple customer service chat, SendBird's chat solution is fully customizable and serves organizations in a broad spectrum of industries, including eCommerce, enterprise messaging, on-demand, and more.
SendBird includes all the technical features to enable user-to-user, user-to-business, and business-to-business communication inside any mobile, web, or enterprise service.
SendBird supports iOS (Objective-C and Swift), Android, Web (JavaScript), Unity, Xamarin, and it is also compatible with React Native.
Below are some frequently asked questions for SendBird.
SendBird offers the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Start with the FREE plan. Contact SendBird for a custom pricing model.
SendBird offers the following features:
SendBird has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Small Business
SendBird supports the following languages:
English
SendBird has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices SendBird supports
We do not have any information about what integrations SendBird has
SendBird offers the following support options:
FAQs, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support
Sendbird allows you to get up and running with a chat solution pretty quickly. We have since customized it a lot (integrating it with Slack, building notifications etc). It is pretty good for plug and play if you are looking for a basic chat service. We don't use their UI, but their UI is good straight out of the box.
Their response time is a bit slow, and they have made some changes to their product without warning and detailed descriptions of those changes.
All in all it was a good solution for us because we needed to focus on other things and don't have the bandwidth to worry about make sure our chat foundation is reliable. Sendbird has been pretty reliable with only a couple of times going down. Their pricing is good for what you get.
If you are just looking for a plug and play chat service then you should definitely consider Sendbird. If you are looking to customize it a lot like we have, then I would suggest thinking about what you are trying to achieve, as it may be better to just start from a little lower level like socket.io.
We ultimately decided on Sendbird, and have been pretty happy thus far.