SendBird

Comments: Sendbird allows you to get up and running with a chat solution pretty quickly. We have since customized it a lot (integrating it with Slack, building notifications etc). It is pretty good for plug and play if you are looking for a basic chat service. We don't use their UI, but their UI is good straight out of the box. Their response time is a bit slow, and they have made some changes to their product without warning and detailed descriptions of those changes. All in all it was a good solution for us because we needed to focus on other things and don't have the bandwidth to worry about make sure our chat foundation is reliable. Sendbird has been pretty reliable with only a couple of times going down. Their pricing is good for what you get. If you are just looking for a plug and play chat service then you should definitely consider Sendbird. If you are looking to customize it a lot like we have, then I would suggest thinking about what you are trying to achieve, as it may be better to just start from a little lower level like socket.io. We ultimately decided on Sendbird, and have been pretty happy thus far.

Pros: Plug and Play

Cons: Needed to customize quite a bit and the customer support is not the fastest.

Comments: I think the product is useful and needed. Chat is quite difficult to implement into an app on both the front-end and back-end. SendBird makes it much easier to do so, but still needs work in terms of documentation and support. It was not that easy to implement a front-end solution, albeit a custom one. I would like to be able to speak with a tech support staff via chat. It was very difficult to get support over email with long wait times in between correspondence - at least when I was a non-paying member. One might say that is a crucial time to convert someone to paying. A direct line via Slack or even their own messaging service would be incredibly useful. I still have issues to this day with implementation related to connecting, temporary messages, caching, error handling, etc. There are a LOT of odds and ends that need to be taken care of, and I'm willing to bet most apps implementing this solution are not bug free or on par with more mainstream chat services and I think it should be. Overall, I like the product. I think there's a lot more that can be done with it, and I look forward to future releases.

Pros: Definitely makes it easy to add chat. Saves a ton of time and headaches. It's a better back-end solution than I could have done personally.

Cons: - Needs better technical support.
- Needs a better front-end solution.
- Not very easy to implement.

Comments: I launched my app Pro Photo Shoot using SendBird as the engine for in-app messaging. I was very pleased with the way the API handled conversations, as it really took a lot of work out of the process, which can be very complicated if building from scratch. A few things in the suggestion box:
- Faster, faster, faster! Make the API as fast as possible.
- Improve your console to make it easier to drill down into a conversation when needed

Pros: Ease of use.
Decent SDK and REST interface.

Cons: Documentation is a little thin. It could be more robust with details, examples, and use cases.

Comments: Not having to implement it by ourselves :)

Pros: On top of the customisable API, one thing I appreciated the most was how easy you can communicate with the team behind SendBird. Had a request regarding some push notifications with WatchOS that were actually missing and within a few days, after some email exchange, here it was.

Cons: The fact it is not open source I would say. Open sourcing it would make it better for the community.

Comments: No need to develop chatting tool, Low cost for using such tool

Pros: Easy to use, quick response for issues or inquiries. Also it's easy to implement at the beginning of the service.