Best alternatives to Quickblox: A detailed comparison

When evaluating chat and calling solutions for your in-app communication project, Quickblox might have seemed like a good starting point. It is, after all, a beginner-level infrastructure provider offering SDKs and APIs to build messaging and calling functionalities. However, as many developers and businesses have discovered, Quickblox often falls short when compared to category leaders like CometChat, Stream, and Sendbird.

The core issue lies in the depth and comprehensiveness of features – an area where QuickBlox notably lags behind its competitors. This can leave developers frustrated, especially when certain limitations surface during implementation or usage. If you’re here, chances are that Quickblox didn’t meet your needs, and you’re exploring more robust alternatives.

Before diving into the list of alternatives, let’s take a closer look at Quickblox's limitations:

1. No support for email and SMS notifications

While Quickblox enables push notifications via integrations with APNs (iOS) and FCM (Android) through its dashboard, it doesn’t offer built-in support for email and SMS notifications.

A complete notification engine is crucial for ensuring users stay informed even outside the app, but configuring email and SMS notifications requires separate setups. This adds to your development effort, costs, and time, making Quickblox less than ideal for teams seeking an all-in-one solution.

2. Lack of advanced moderation capabilities

QuickBlox's content moderation features are rudimentary at best. While they provide:

The moderation system falls significantly short of modern standards. Their rule-based approach allows users to:

However, these methods are easily circumvented and lack the sophistication of AI-driven moderation. Unlike competitors like CometChat that offer automatic AI-powered content screening, QuickBlox's solution is fundamentally limited. Adding insult to injury, these basic moderation features are not even included in standard pricing plans – they're sold as costly add-ons.

3. Lack of deeper user engagement features

While Quickblox covers essential messaging functionalities, it lacks advanced features that boost user engagement, adoption and enhance communication experience.. Missing capabilities include:

These limitations can significantly impact user experience and reduce the potential for meaningful interactions within your application.

4. Pricing challenges

Quickblox’s pricing model is another pain point. Plans are tiered based on fixed user limits, and exceeding these limits requires upgrading to a higher plan or paying additional overage fees.

The real issue lies in how Quickblox calculates users: it counts all registered users in your app, whether active or inactive. In contrast, platforms like CometChat only bill for monthly active users (MAU), ensuring fairer pricing. This distinction can significantly inflate your costs with Quickblox, especially as your app scales.

5. No analytics and insights

QuickBlox lacks essential analytics and insights features, offering no tools for tracking user engagement, message activity, calling performance, or other key metrics. . Without built-in business intelligence (BI) or data visualization tools, businesses are unable to analyze performance or make data-driven decisions, limiting their ability to improve user experiences and optimize communication workflows.

1. CometChat

CometChat is a comprehensive chat infrastructure provider that offers powerful APIs and SDKs to businesses, enabling real-time communication within their mobile apps and websites.

Whether you are an established enterprise or an innovative startup, CometChat caters to organisations of all sizes that wish to quickly and easily integrate chat, voice, and video calling features into their existing applications, without the need to build everything from scratch.

What sets CometChat apart are our standout features:

1. Best-in-class UI kits

CometChat simplifies building modern, engaging chat interfaces with our comprehensive UI kits. By leveraging these UI kits, developers can deliver polished and intuitive messaging experiences without reinventing the wheel. These kits include:

• A complete range of chat elements, such as message lists, input bars, and chat bubbles, inspired by leading messaging platforms.

• Intuitive component hierarchy and organization, making it easy for developers to integrate and customize.

• Diverse layout options tailored for various use cases, whether you’re building a social chat app, a support platform, or a collaborative workspace.

2. 360-Degree Notification Support

Unlike Quickblox, which limits you to push notifications, CometChat provides a comprehensive notification system with out-of-the-box integration for:

• Push notifications (APNs and FCM).

• Email notifications with advanced features like tap-to-reply, where users can respond directly via email, syncing the reply as an incoming message in the chat.

• SMS notifications, ensuring users are reachable even outside the app.

CometChat further enhances the notification experience with:

• Customizable notification templates for consistent branding.

• User-configurable notification preferences, empowering users to choose how they want to receive updates.

• Admin controls to tailor notification settings for different user groups or use cases.

This 360-degree approach ensures a seamless and reliable communication experience for your user

3. Advanced moderation with AI filters and rules engine

• AI-Powered content filtering: Automatically screen messages for toxicity, spam, harassment, and profanity.

• Conditional rules engine: Set automated moderation actions based on filter results. For example, flagged content can be automatically blocked, masked, or escalated to admins.

• Moderation dashboard: Gain insights into blocked and flagged users and content.

• Contextual moderation with AI: Leverage AI-powered prompts and filters for targeted moderation.

4. Scalable and transparent pricing

CometChat’s pricing model is designed to grow with your business. Unlike Quickblox, which counts all registered users (including inactive ones), CometChat only charges for monthly active users (MAU). This approach:

• Reduces costs by ensuring you pay only for actual usage.

• Simplifies scaling, as you’re not penalized for inactive user accounts.

Moreover, CometChat offers unlimited file uploads, advanced moderation, and other premium features within its standard plans, eliminating hidden costs and surprises

2. PubNub

PubNub is a cloud-based platform designed to help developers build, manage, and scale real-time applications. Its core offering is a robust publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging API, which enables seamless real-time communication by sending messages to designated "channels" or "topics." Subscribers can then receive content tailored to their specific interests. This architecture provides scalability and flexibility, allowing publishers and subscribers to function independently while ensuring rapid delivery of real-time updates—such as chat messages or live game scores.

However, while the pub/sub model simplifies the foundation of real-time messaging systems, it can require significant custom development for implementing features like chat functionality and user interfaces. As a result, businesses may face challenges in integrating these features, leading to potentially lengthy and complex development processes.

3. Agora

Agora is a Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service (RTE PaaS) that enables developers to integrate audio, video calling, live streaming, and chat capabilities into their applications. Founded in 2014, Agora supports a wide range of industries—such as education, gaming, telehealth, and e-commerce—by providing powerful tools for building real-time communication solutions. While Agora is widely recognized for its audio and video technologies, its chat product, though available, tends to take a backseat in comparison.

Agora's core offerings include low-latency APIs for seamless audio and video integration, live streaming tools, and a variety of SDKs and UI Kits that simplify the development process. To cater to different needs, Agora offers three key integration options: SDKs for deep customization, UI Kits for faster setup, and an App Builder for no-code development, making it easier for developers to create real-time engagement solutions without extensive coding. These tools help to enhance user experiences and streamline the process of adding real-time communication features into applications.

4. Sendbird

Sendbird is a real-time communication platform that allows businesses to integrate in-app chat, voice and video calling, AI chatbots, and omnichannel messaging. While it provides a robust infrastructure and premium features like content moderation, recent industry shifts toward AI and omnichannel solutions have raised concerns about the platform’s ongoing focus on its core chat product.

One of the challenges with Sendbird is its pricing model, which charges $5 per Peak Concurrent Connection (PCC). This can become expensive, especially during high-usage periods, and strict usage caps mean that exceeding limits on monthly active users or PCCs can disrupt service until payments are made. Additionally, advanced features such as message retention and large group chats are only available on the Enterprise plan, making it less accessible for smaller businesses.

The platform’s UI kits offer basic components for building chat interfaces but lack advanced features, requiring developers to implement more complex logic themselves. Moreover, the absence of UI kits for popular frameworks like Flutter, Angular, and Vue complicates customization and extends development timelines. As a result, businesses may face challenges in scaling and tailoring the platform to meet their specific needs.

5. Streamchat

GetStream initially gained recognition for its exceptional Activity Feeds API but has since expanded its offerings to include real-time chat through the StreamChat API. This solution enables developers to seamlessly integrate chat features into their applications, providing key functionalities such as a Messaging API, Chat SDKs, user management, message moderation, channel management, file sharing, and push notifications.

However, StreamChat primarily relies on chat SDKs for integration, accompanied by basic UI kits that offer a visual framework but lack more advanced business logic integration. This limitation can be restrictive for those seeking a solution that combines an intuitive chat interface with tailored business processes. Additionally, StreamChat does not natively support SMS or email notifications, requiring extra custom development to implement these features, which can lead to increased development time and complexity.

6. Talkjs

TalkJS is a messaging API designed to simplify the process of adding chat functionality to websites and mobile apps, removing the need for extensive custom development. It offers a highly customizable chat interface that can be easily embedded, enabling smooth and efficient communication between users. TalkJS is versatile, making it ideal for a variety of use cases such as online marketplaces, customer support, social platforms, and community forums, helping to boost user engagement.

However, TalkJS focuses solely on text-based messaging and lacks built-in voice and video calling features. Businesses looking for a more comprehensive communication solution with integrated voice and video capabilities may need to explore other vendors that offer these functionalities.

Aarathy Sundaresan

Content Marketer , CometChat

Aarathy is a B2B SaaS Content Marketer at CometChat, excited about the convergence of technology and writing. Aarathy is eager to explore and harness the power of tech-driven storytelling to create compelling narratives that captivate readers. Outside of her professional pursuits, she enjoys the art of dance, finding joy and personal fulfillment.