Product comparison: Sendbird vs. Pusher’s Chatkit

Sendbird and Pusher’s Chatkit are two solutions companies might consider for building chat and messaging into an application. Pusher is a generic real-time infrastructure and Chatkit is currently one of their recent Beta products. Sendbird, on the other hand, is a complete chat solution that delivers a premium chat and messaging experience for any platform.

This article compares the two products – Chatkit by Pusher and Sendbird – and demonstrates why Sendbird is the market leader in chat and messaging SDKs and API.

Executive Summary

• Sendbird is a premium messaging experience for your app.
• Sendbird can scale over one million concurrent connections
  in a single application and can have up to 2,000 users in a
  chatroom.
• Sendbird is the world’s chat specialist
• We provide you advanced moderation tools to ensure the trust and safety of your community and brand

Learn about Sendbird’s premium chat and messaging product.

Key Areas of Differentiation

• Premium messaging experience
• Scalability
• Expertise in Chat
• Advanced Chat Moderation Tools

Premium messaging experience

In April 2018, the monthly active users (MAU) for messenger apps was 76% the world’s population. That means that most of the globe is accustomed to a great messaging experience and will immediately be unengaged without it.

To stay engaged, consumers expect a messaging experience similar to popular messenger apps. Sendbird offers the same premium messaging that consumers experience everyday, and more, in your mobile and web applications – whether it’s 1:1, group, or open channel chat.

Features include typing indicators, read receipts, user presence, @Mentions, built-in push notifications, encrypted media sharing, public and private group and open channels. We also provide advanced features like chatbot interface, user-to-user blocking, auto-thumbnail generation, auto-translation, encrypted files and much more.

We ensure a premium experience for our client developers with our API and webhooks. They allow developers to build custom features with real-time data, like a custom notification system, sentiment analysis, custom analytics and more.

As you will notice in the comparison chart below, when you compare Pusher’s beta chat solution, Chatkit, to Sendbird’s solution, Pusher’s offering is basic and limited.

Currently, Chatkit only offers a few features limited to typing indicators, public and private rooms, message storage, and cross-platform SDKs for 1-on-1 messaging and group chats.

Scalability

Sendbird is the world’s most scalable chat.

With our highly scalable product, you will be able to build the features you want now and in the future. Sendbird’s group chat and Super Group chat allow up to 300 and 2,000 users, respectively. Our open channels can support tens of thousands of users. Sendbird’s infrastructure can support over a million concurrent connections for a single application.

Pusher’s Chatkit provides support for 100 members in a group channel. The scalability of their concurrent connections is unkown.

For companies with a large app MAU or DAU, high scalability is a necessity.

But a scalable product is also important because it gives you freedom on your product roadmap. And it never limits the future features you might want to build should they require higher numbers above a vendor’s hard limits.

Expertise in Chat

Pusher’s main service isn’t Chatkit. It’s one of several products that they offer within their real-time infrastructure. This either can be positive or negative. But when considering Chatkit, it could raise questions about how quickly they can innovate their chat features and how they might support clients looking for a more advanced messaging experience.

However, Sendbird’s sole focus is to create the most scalable and full-featured chat and messaging solution for enterprise companies. Meaning that our goal in the present and in the future is to provide the best chat solution for our customers and to continue to innovate our chat and messaging products.

Our team of award-winning engineers continue to research and wrestle with ways to make our customers chat a great experience, and as our company continues to innovate our service, those features will be available to you.

Advanced Chat Moderation Tools

On top of all of our core and advanced messaging features, Sendbird also provides powerful admin and moderation tools so that companies can moderate conversation to protect the integrity of their brand. Sendbird’s moderation tools allows your managers to proactively monitor and moderate your chatrooms with features like freeze channels, user mute/ban, admin messages, profanity filters, spam flood protection and much more.

Currently, Pusher’s Chatkit does not provide most of these moderation features as well as the core and advanced messaging features.

Compare Sendbird to Chatkit

There’s no better comparison than the one you and your team conduct independently. Many of our customers conduct POC comparisons with other services before choosing their final chat solution. If you have the engineering resources and time, we encourage you to build your app with Sendbird and other chat solutions side-by-side. Please feel free to reach out if you need any help with this.