It is super stable. After trying to build our own using firebase... This was an awesome experience that got us deployed super quick. It is fully featured and ready out of the gates requiring very little adaptation.

There are still some things that are not included in our portal management. However, engaging support has been able to resolve them.

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.

Plug and Play

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

We wanted a simple, fast, chat solution to drop into our app. Sendbird promised this, but did not deliver.

Seemed like it had the features we wanted, small hungry team that promised a lot.

Poor quality product, terrible documentation, engineering support that didn't know how their own product worked. We paid a lot of money for this software, got locked in, have regretted it every day since. Will leave as soon as we can.

Very pleasant and would recommend using Sendbird to other engineers looking for chat integration.

The customer service team has been very responsive with any inquiries. Although they are a third party partner, it feels like they are in my own team. Integration was very easy and straightforward as well.

Sometimes when there are errors, we have to reach out to them, instead of them reaching out to us.

Not having to implement it by ourselves :)

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.

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