How Shaadi.com Built Safe, Real-Time Conversations at Scale

At a glance:

In the world of online matchmaking, trust isn't just a feature, it's the foundation. 

Shaadi.com, one of India's largest and most trusted matrimonial platforms, has been connecting families and individuals for over two decades. With millions of active users across multiple countries, their engineering team faces a unique challenge: enabling meaningful conversations between potential matches while maintaining safety, privacy, and cultural sensitivity at scale.

The team at Shaadi.com knew that communication features weren't just nice-to-haves. They were the bridge between a profile browse and a real connection. But building and maintaining a robust, secure, and culturally appropriate messaging and calling infrastructure in-house? That's a full-time engineering commitment that would pull resources away from their core matchmaking intelligence and user experience innovations.

This is the story of how they approached that problem.

When messaging becomes product infrastructure

As Shaadi.com evolved, messaging stopped being just another feature and started behaving more like product infrastructure.

Users expect conversations to feel instant and intuitive. They expect messages to sync across devices. They expect notifications to arrive at the right time. And especially on a platform like Shaadi.com, they expect conversations to be moderated, respectful, and safe.

Building all of this in-house across multiple platforms would mean:

• Maintaining real-time infrastructure at massive scale

• Implementing moderation logic that works across languages and contexts

• Keeping feature parity between Android, iOS, Flutter, and web

• Continuously evolving chat, voice, and video experiences without regressions

The team needed a solution that let them focus on product behavior and user safety, not the mechanics of real-time communication.

A cross-platform reality

Shaadi.com runs a multi-platform ecosystem:

Tech stack

• Flutter

• Android (Native)

• iOS (Native)

• JavaScript (Web)

That meant any communication solution had to behave consistently across very different environments while still giving engineers the flexibility to tailor experiences where needed.

Rather than stitching together separate tools for chat, calling, notifications, and moderation, the team looked for a platform that could act as a single, extensible communication layer.

Integrating chat, voice, and video without reinventing them

Shaadi.com integrated CometChat using a combination of SDKs and UI Kits, allowing them to move quickly while retaining control over the user experience.

CometChat products used

• Chat & Messaging

• Voice & Video Calling

This approach let the team:

• Launch real-time 1:1 messaging with delivery receipts, presence, and sync

• Add in-app voice and video calling without managing WebRTC complexity

• Maintain consistent behavior across Flutter, native mobile, and web apps

Because the SDKs are platform-native, the integration fit naturally into their existing architecture instead of forcing a rewrite or abstraction layer.

Moderation as a first-class concern

On a matchmaking platform, trust isn’t optional, it’s foundational.

Shaadi.com placed strong emphasis on moderation, not just to block obvious abuse, but to create an environment where users feel comfortable engaging in conversations over time.

Using CometChat’s moderation capabilities, the team could:

• Apply predefined rules to filter harmful or inappropriate content

• Adapt moderation logic as community guidelines evolved

• Maintain performance without pushing moderation complexity into the client apps

This meant safety decisions could be adjusted centrally, without requiring frequent app releases, an important consideration at Shaadi.com’s scale.

Notifications that respect context

Messaging doesn’t end when the app is closed.

Shaadi.com uses notifications to re-engage users thoughtfully bringing them back into conversations without overwhelming them. With CometChat’s notification support, the team could connect real-time events in chat to platform-native notifications across devices.

This helped maintain conversational continuity, especially in cases where users switch between mobile and web.

Learning from conversation data

At scale, understanding how users communicate is as important as enabling communication itself.

Through Insights, Shaadi.com’s team gained visibility into:

• Messaging activity patterns

• Engagement trends across platforms

• How users move between chat, voice, and video

These insights inform product decisions not just about communication features, but about the broader user journey on the platform.

Keeping the focus on product, not plumbing

One of the biggest wins for the Shaadi.com engineering team was not having to treat chat and calling as isolated systems.

By integrating a single communication platform:

• Engineers avoided maintaining parallel real-time systems

• Product teams could iterate faster on user experience

• Safety and moderation stayed centralized and consistent

• Feature parity across platforms became easier to manage

Instead of building and maintaining infrastructure, the team could focus on refining how people connect.

A communication layer that grows with the product

For Shaadi.com, real-time communication isn’t a static feature, it evolves with user expectations, cultural context, and platform growth.

Using CometChat as a foundational layer has allowed the team to support that evolution without constantly reworking core systems.

You can read more about their journey and implementation details in the full customer story here: https://www.cometchat.com/customer-stories/shaadi

Shrinithi Vijayaraghavan

Creative Storytelling , CometChat

Shrinithi is a creative storyteller at CometChat who loves integrating technology and writing and sharing stories with the world. Shrinithi is excited to explore the endless possibilities of technology and storytelling combined together that can captivate and intrigue the audience.