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.

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.

I would never recommend this product

Absolutely terrible. We ended up cancelling our subscription, and asked for a partial refund for the unused portion of the costs. They refused. We contacted the credit card company and asked to rebate the charges, and Sendbird fought it. We were unable to get anything at all. What kind of a company takes your money and refuses to rebate unused service. We are are a B2C startup and every dollar counts. At the same time, I believe in customer service, and would never screw a customer out of their money. What a bunch of dirtbags! I would never do business with this company again! We ended up having our devs make a chat in house. Stay away. Far away.

Pros

Very little - the basic interface was ok

Cons

They wanted to charge us way more for moderation tools, which we believed should be an essential part of any chat software. And we were in development mode with virtually no users - so we needed time to ramp up to scale.

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.

Responsive and helpful partner to build a chat feature with

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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