The state of chat 2019, explaining available options for open source Chat SDKs and API, commercial options as well as tools for building Chat in -house. Revision 1, document is still being updated. Pricing research: https://medium.com/@scott_11393/what-i-learned-researching-chat-api-pricing-the-stream-blog-5722512854d0 EjabberD: https://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/ Stream: https://getstream.io/chat/ Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/

1. The state of Chat
May 2019 Update

2. Overview
It’s never been easier to add chat or messaging to your application. Excellent
open source and hosted Chat APIs & SDKs are available.
In this presentation:
● Open source Chat SDKs
● In-House Chat Tech Stacks
● Cheap Chat SDKs
● Premium Chat APIs

3. Open Source
The open source options have a few advantages
● You can see the code and it’s free
And these disadvantages
● Hosting costs can be relatively high due to inefficient tech
● Requires ongoing maintenance
● Documentation and developer ease of use is often poor
● Low level compared to commercial providers, requires substantial dev work to create an end user
chat experience
Open source makes most sense if your development team is cheap/free. If your developers are
expensive, you’re not going to have a good experience with these open source platforms.

4. Open Source Chat Providers
Backend Tech:
Eclipse Mosquitto (XMPP): https://mosquitto.org/
VerneMQ (XMPP): https://vernemq.com/
EMQ X (XMPP): https://www.emqx.io/
EJABBERD (XMPP): https://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/

5. In-House Chat
Tools for building your own in-house Chat
Socket.io: https://socket.io/
Faye: https://faye.jcoglan.com/
Gorilla: https://github.com/gorilla/websocket
Redis: https://redis.io/
Elastic: https://www.elastic.co/
TiNode: https://github.com/tinode/chat

6. In-House Chat - Frontend
Tools for building your own in-house Chat
React Native Gifted:
https://github.com/FaridSafi/react-native-gifted-chat
iOS chat: https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-iOS
Chat SDK Android: https://github.com/chat-sdk/chat-sdk-android

7. Cheap Chat SDKs
Firebase is priced extremely competitively by Google cloud. You can build chat on
top of Firebase, but it’s not really made for it. I’m highlighting this option though
since:
● Faster to integrate and cheaper than open source options
● Not perfect/ but kinda works
This is solid option to consider if you’re bootstrapping a startup or working on a
hobby project

8. Premium Chat APIs
● Stream
● Sendbird
● Pusher
● Twilio
● Pubnub

9. Stream
● Frontend Components included
● Affordable pricing
● Tech based on Go, RocksDB and Raft
● Easy to learn chat SDK: https://getstream.io/chat/get_started/
● 99.999 uptime SLA available
●

10. Sendbird
● No frontend components available
● Translation integrated into the product
● Replay of a livechat
● Xamarin support
● Price point is one of the highest in the market

11. Pusher
● Known for its scalable real time technology
●