Good chat foundation that you can build upon

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.

A Growing Product

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.

Solid product, but much more room for growth

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.

Found it was the most customisable chat API available for iOS (and Android).

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.

I, as a prodecre at Pikicast; mobile media, am currently using Sendbird for live streaming service.

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.

Very flexible, Very customizable, Very good!

Our product relies heavily on the messaging aspect, so we chose our chat SDK really carefully. Before settling on SendBird, we tried about 10 different chat SDKs. SendBird was the clear choice for us due to how customizable and flexible it is. This flexibility gave us the freedom to easily build many features using their SDK. Sendbird is still evolving. We sometimes experience service issues and interruptions from time to time. However, their customer support is really amazing and they have been extremely helpful. They even built specific features we suggested. TL;DR: Go for it!

Pros

Flexible & Customizable, great customer support

Cons

Infrequent service interruptions and bugs

Affordable andd Simple Communication Agent.

SendBird is a good form of communication through chats between organizations and other firms, and also between individuals.

Pros

The software makes the process of chatting more so users vs users chat more efficient and easy.
The software is easy to customize in order to fit the needs of the users.

Cons

The technical support team of SendBird is slow in performing their ideal role of helping the users.

Overall SendBird is a killer product, and a critical part of our product offering.

An (almost) out of the box production-ready and performant chat as a service solution with incredible group communications features that is easy to integrate and build on.

Pros

For our use case the large scale public and private group chats were absolutely essential. The performance is impressive, the API straightforward, and the iOS client code provided was good enough for us to build on and ship production worthy code quickly.

Cons

The API has a few design flaws and, while superior to the competitors offerings that we have direct experience with, the iOS client code is pretty mediocre. Building truly high quality client UI/UX will still involve a significant amount of effort.

Implementation was super easy and functional very quickly. We got up to speed super quick.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Great product/service

We've been working with SendBird for nearly 2 years. The customer service has been excellent and the learning curve to get up and running, minimal. Already a great service/product when we began, it's been nice seeing the team refine and expand the product. Each iteration has been well thought out and implemented. Highly recommended.

Pros

Ease of use, minimal learning curve

Cons

A couple times in the early days I found the documentation lacking a little but it appears this is no longer an issue.