Sendbird vs. Stream:
A head-to-head comparison
#1 chat API for leading brands
Sendbird is the leading in-app chat, voice, and video API for market leaders who connect and engage tens of millions of users every day. Sendbird is trusted by global brands such as Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Delivery Hero, and Teladoc.
Started with activity feeds, then added chat
Stream started as an activity feed API servicing customers such as CNBC Sports and Crunchbase. Stream then added a new chat offering which for the most part targeted smaller-scale startups and SMBs, with some recent exceptions.
Trusted by the world's most popular apps
The apps that hundreds of millions of users rely on every day are built on Sendbird.
Monthly active chat users
Messages a month
Concurrent chat users
Global developers
At Sendbird,
we believe that choosing a communication API is for the long term. Sendbird has been supporting high-scale, global apps like Reddit from day one and for years. When you look at Sendbird and Stream head-to-head, Sendbird delivers a superior and more mature chat solution that can be enriched with voice and video conversations, or used for customer support. Over the years, Sendbird has won the trust of leading customers and built its interaction platform for scale, reliability, and performance.
Sendbird Chat
The richest and the most scalable chat API.
Sendbird Calls
High-quality voice and video for engaging group and direct calls.
Sendbird Desk
The best support agent interface for live chat customer support.
Achieve more with Sendbird Chat
| FEATURE DIFFERENCES | Sendbird | Stream |
Chat – Engagement and conversion  | ||
| Supergroups (up to 20k users) |  |  |
| Bulk messaging announcements | | |
| Soft cap on connection limits for seamless scalability | | |
| Open-channel dynamic partitioning | | |
| Delivery receipts (to the recipients’ device) | | |
| Translated message count optimization | | |
| Push notification translation | | |
| Do-not-disturb and @user-mention-only notifications | | |
| User team support | | |
| Enforced unique reaction | | |
| Pinned messages | | |
| Quotes replies | | |
| Slash commands | | |
| Chat – Advanced features | ||
| Cross-platform offline mode support | | |
| High-speed and -security OpenSSL TLSv1.3 protocol for fast app start-up time | | |
| User-to-user blocking | | |
| Automatic regular expressions moderation (tel, credit card#) and domain filtering | | |
| Advanced analytics dashboard | | |
| Chat – Developer tools | ||
| .Net and Unity SDKs (in addition to JavaScript, iOS, Android, and Flutter SKDs) | | |
| Full chat dataset export (channel + users) | | |
| Backend wrapper libraries | | |
* For a complete list and description of our products check out our docs
Security and compliance
Years of in-house security and compliance expertise.
- All communication to and from Sendbird servers is encrypted using TLSv1.3/SSL with authentication devices for the client- and server-side.
- All files are saved with AES256 encryption in our private cloud and access is tightly restricted.
- Sendbird conducts regular third-party penetration testing to proactively ensure security and address potential vulnerabilities.
Enterprise-ready
Trusted and battle-tested for enterprise-grade performance and global scale.
- Global reach – high-availability data centers across 8 global regions.
- High concurrency – millions of concurrent connections per app.
- White glove support
- 24/7 Level-based support
- Emergency hotline
- Slack support
- Customer success manager
- Quarterly business reviews
- Custom setup
- IP whitelisting
- Dedicated servers
- Public static IP
- Custom pricing
