When integrating real-time communication features into your application, selecting the right SDK provider is crucial for both functionality and cost-effectiveness. Amity (recently rebranded as Social Plus) is primarily a social engagement platform, specializing in integrating features like social feeds, forums, and stories that drive community interaction.
While Amity does include chat capabilities in their SDK suite, it's important to understand that chat is not their core product offering. This presents several considerations for developers specifically seeking chat functionality:
01.
Bundled pricing
Amity's chat SDK comes bundled with their entire social feature suite. This means you'll be paying for a comprehensive social platform even if you only need chat functionality.
02.
Chat getting less product focus
Since Amity's primary focus and expertise lie in social community features, their chat solution may not receive the same level of development attention and innovation as their core social engagement tools.
03.
Resource efficiency: Implementing Amity's SDK for chat alone means integrating a larger, more complex system designed for social features, which could impact your application's performance and resource utilization.
For projects where chat is the primary requirement, choosing a dedicated chat SDK provider would likely offer better value, more specialized features, and more efficient resource usage.
Amity is better suited for projects where comprehensive social engagement features are the main objective, with chat serving as a complementary function.
In this blog, we'll explore several alternative solutions to Amity, comparing their features and performance capabilities to help you identify the chat SDK that best aligns with your specific requirements and use cases.
Understanding the core challenges when using Amity for chat implementation
Limited chat-specific feature
Amity's messaging capabilities are basic compared to dedicated chat solutions, missing many features that modern users expect.
Voice notes and audio messaging capabilities, which are crucial for quick, hands-free communication
Location sharing features needed for delivery, dating, or service-based applications
Structured messages that enable rich, interactive content within chats.
Voice calling features, making it insufficient for applications requiring complete communication capabilities.
Rigid pricing structure
Amity's pricing model is structured around its complete social suite, which creates several challenges
A fixed minimum cost of $1,250/month regardless of feature utilization.
No option to purchase chat functionality separately from other social features
Highly restrictive chat UI kits
Unlike chat UI kits that are modular and component-rich, Amity provides just two basic components: a chat room (chat interface) and a chat home page (inbox with recent conversations). This restricted structure presents several challenges:
Amity’s UI kits lack the modular approach that allows for customization of individual elements like composer, message lists, search bars, or profile avatars, making it impossible to tailor them for specific needs or branding.
Development teams are forced into a difficult choice: either accept Amity's default UI elements, which often fall short of modern user experience requirements, or invest significant time and resources into building custom components from scratch.
Absence of robust content moderation features
Despite positioning itself as a community platform, Amity's content moderation tools are surprisingly basic. Amity provides a basic blacklist-based text moderation feature, along with a URL filtering system.
This approach might have been adequate a decade ago, but it fails to address the sophisticated challenges faced by modern online communities. There's no proactive content screening, configurable-rule based automation, and no advanced AI-based filtering systems to detect and prevent harmful content.
These are essential for community-focused platforms, which are prone to scams, phishing attempts, and spam. Without advanced moderation filters to screen messages or enforce rules automatically, community managers are left with a significant gap in ensuring a safe and enjoyable user experience.
In addition to this , they do not posses HIPAA compliance, making it unsuitable for healthcare applications.
Top 6 alternatives to Amity
1. Cometchat
CometChat is a highly versatile communication platform that offers robust APIs and SDKs for seamlessly integrating real-time messaging, voice, and video chat features into both mobile and web applications.
Unlike Amity, which is primarily focused on community-based engagement, CometChat recognizes the importance of communication across a wide range of industries, including telehealth, e-commerce, social networking, and dating.
With its customizable chat components, CometChat provides a comprehensive communication solution that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any application, offering a more complete and adaptable experience.
Key features of CometChat
Premium UI kits: CometChat offers high-quality UI kits that offer a modern, intuitive experience, with modular and ready-to-use UI components. They are compatible with major front-end frameworks like React, React Native, Angular, Flutter, Vue and Android.
AI powered content moderation: CometChat offers a comprehensive, AI-driven moderation system that automatically screens messages in real-time for harmful content and violation. With intelligent AI filters to detect inappropriate content, spam and phishing attempts, potential threats are flagged before they are sent.
Conversational AI features: CometChat enhances user interactions through features like conversation starters, smart replies, conversation summarizers, and a personalized conversational coach, making communications more engaging and efficient.
360 degree notification system: Centralised dashboard to setup, manage and send push notifications across Android, iOS, and Web. Also send un-read messages as notifications through SMS and email, along with a tap to reply feature.
Developer-friendly experience: CometChat is built with developers in mind, offering plug-and-play UI kits and SDKs for easy integration, which drastically reduces development time.
Exceptional support: CometChat delivers top-tier customer support across multiple channels, including email, chat, Slack, and community forums, ensuring customers always have access to the help they need, whenever they need it.
2. Streamchat
Originally known for its Activity Feeds API, Stream has expanded its offerings to include real-time chat through its StreamChat API. This API allows developers to seamlessly integrate chat features into applications. StreamChat provides a variety of functionalities, including a Messaging API, Chat SDKs, user management, message moderation, channel management, file sharing, and push notifications.
Despite these features, StreamChat primarily relies on its SDKs for integration, supported by basic UI kits that offer limited business logic. While these UI kits provide the foundational elements needed for a chat interface, they may not offer the flexibility required to integrate specific business processes. Additionally, StreamChat does not natively support SMS and email notifications, requiring custom development, which could increase both development time and complexity for businesses aiming to enhance their messaging capabilities.
3. Sendbird
Sendbird is a real-time communication platform that enables businesses to integrate in-app chat, voice and video calls, AI chatbots, and omnichannel messaging into their applications. While the platform offers a solid foundation for communication features, recent shifts toward a stronger emphasis on AI and omnichannel messaging have raised concerns about the long-term focus and support for its core chat product.
One of the main challenges with Sendbird is its pricing model, which is based on Peak Concurrent Connections (PCC). This model can quickly become expensive, particularly during periods of high usage or traffic spikes. Additionally, strict usage caps mean that if you exceed the allotted PCC limits, service may be disrupted until payment is made, which can negatively impact user experience. Furthermore, key features like message retention and large group chats are often locked behind the Enterprise plan, limiting flexibility for smaller businesses or startups.
While Sendbird provides UI kits to help developers build chat interfaces, these kits lack the advanced features and customization options needed to create a more dynamic and tailored chat experience. Developers are often required to invest significant time and effort into adding these complex features themselves. Additionally, the absence of UI kits for popular frameworks like Flutter, Angular, and Vue adds further complexity to the development process, making it harder to adapt the platform for modern web and mobile app frameworks.
4. Agora
Agora is a Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service (RTE PaaS) that allows developers to seamlessly integrate real-time audio, video, and chat functionalities into their applications. Founded in 2014, Agora provides a comprehensive suite of tools and APIs designed to help developers create interactive, real-time experiences across a wide range of industries, including education, gaming, telehealth, and e-commerce.
While Agora’s core strength is its powerful audio and video capabilities, which enable high-quality communication experiences, its chat functionality also offers a solid foundation for real-time text-based communication. Although chat may not be as advanced or feature-rich as its audio and video offerings, it provides the essential tools for integrating live messaging into applications, making it a suitable option for developers seeking a reliable, multi-channel communication platform.
5. PubNub
PubNub is a cloud-based platform that provides developers with the infrastructure needed to build, manage, and scale real-time applications. The platform's core offering is its powerful publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging API, which facilitates the delivery of real-time data across a variety of use cases.
However, while PubNub’s pub/sub model is effective for building real-time messaging systems, it often requires significant custom development to implement chat features and create a user interface from scratch. For businesses, this can result in time-consuming and complex development processes, as they must build out essential functionality and integrate features that are often already included in other platforms, making PubNub a less turnkey solution for chat-centric applications.
6. TalkJs
TalkJS is a messaging API designed to make it easy for developers to integrate chat functionality into websites and mobile apps without needing to build everything from scratch. It offers a highly customizable chat interface that can be easily embedded into your platform, enabling seamless communication between users within your app or website. TalkJS is highly versatile and works well for a wide range of use cases, including online marketplaces, customer support, social platforms, and community forums, helping to boost user engagement and interaction.
However, while TalkJS excels in text-based messaging, it does not support voice or video calling features. For businesses seeking a more comprehensive communication solution that includes both in-app voice and video calls, TalkJS may fall short. In such cases, it's recommended to explore alternative platforms that offer these integrated communication functionalities for a more complete user experience.
Aarathy Sundaresan
Content Marketer , CometChat