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.

150M+

Monthly active chat users

2.5Bn+

Messages a month

2M+

Concurrent chat users

100k+

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

“We didn’t know how hard it was to build chat at our scale. With Sendbird, we were able to get to market faster and also meet our users’ high bar.”
| Product team
“We needed to quickly find new digital ways for our users to build meaningful connections and Sendbird’s video calling API promises to do just that.”
| Ben Celebicic, CTO

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