Sendbird or PubNub – Complete Chat Service or Data Stream Network
Sendbird or PubNub are two good solutions for building chat and messaging into your application. Both offer a complete chat framework, including chat API, various messaging SDKs, and the chat infrastructure to handle real-time traffic.
So how do you choose between them?
Comparing Sendbird and PubNub
Before releasing ChatEngine, PubNub offered the Data Stream Network, a product similar to Google Firebase and a platform designed for real-time synchronization across devices. For a couple years, the company offered basic messaging, but never specialized in chat and messaging features.
Sendbird, on the other hand, specializes in full-featured chat and messaging for your applications. Its engineers build all of Sendbird’s messaging features—except auto-translation (Google Translator, Microsoft Translator, etc.)—so that our customers need not integrate with other services unless, of course, they’d like to. In short, Sendbird is the one-stop shop for all of your messaging and chat needs.
As you can see from the chart below, PubNub offers a similar messaging tool to Sendbird. While some of PubNub’s features are built in-house, others are third-party plugins called BLOCKS, not offered natively by PubNub, but useful nonetheless.
Please review the comparison charts below to see which features each company provides:
3 factors that differentiate Sendbird from PubNub:
Three factors separate Sendbird and PubNub:
- Moderation tools and Administrative control
- Specialization
- Platform support for chat and messaging
Your app is where users connect.
Admin Control and Moderation
Moderation tools are obviously important for online communities, gaming, and live media streaming. But they’re also important for marketplaces that facilitate conversation between two parties or, really, any company that wants great in-app communication and tighter control of their communications and branding. SendBird builds all its moderation features in-house and gives you or your community managers control through the Sendbird dashboard.
Looking at the comparison chart, you’ll see that PubNub doesn’t provide full moderation or admin control. PubNub requires third-party solutions or pre- and post-webhooks to moderate conversation or provide many standard moderation features like profanity filters, user ban/mute, and channel freeze.
When managing conversations and communities at a small or massive scale, the ability to monitor and moderate conversations is critical for both your brand and user community.
Sendbird builds all of its moderation tools in-house so that you can protect your conversations directly from your dashboard, whether you need to preemptively set filters to replace or block profanity or the admin needs the ability to ban, mute or delete users. PubNub’s moderation tool is supported through BLOCKS and focuses on auto-moderation like detecting malicious messages or images, but Sendbird supports agents engagements directly. Simply put, Sendbird provides premium moderation tools out of the box so our customers can start moderating conversations right away.
Sendbird – Chat and Messaging Specialists
We are chat and messaging experts. Our product’s mission is to make communication and exchange easy and clear on every digital platform and, further, to be the most innovative technology for chat and messaging for any business.
Sendbird’s engineers are award-winning. In 2016, we won Stackshare’s Top New Tool of the year. Last year we were the #7 Utility Tool in Stackshare’s top 50 developer tools. And at Developer Week, we won a DEVIES Award for innovation in API Infrastructure. So developers not only ???? SendBird but they love our technology too!
Our team of award-winning engineers continue to research and wrestle with ways to make your business’s chat a great experience. Whether you’re thinking about the scale of one feature or all of them, Sendbird’s proven scalability ensures that potential innovations in your product roadmap will always be possible.
Our company is always trying to innovate our service, and you can see our commitment to chat and messaging in the rapid growth we’ve seen in only 2 years.
Platform Support
SendBird offers SDKs for basically every major platform: iOS, Android, React Native, Javascript, .NET, and Unity. We’re proud of that fact.
PubNub’s ChatEngine is a viable option for iOS, Android, and Javascript.
Since the maturation of messenger market—including Facebook Messenger, WeChat, LINE, Kakao, etc.—consumers expect a lot from their chat and messaging experience. Deploying messaging in your mobile app or website isn’t only about letting your users chat with one another, but it’s also about having the front-end features your users expect and the backend tools to manage a reliable experience and understand your customers.
Sendbird endorses Proof of Concept (POC) comparisons
There’s no better comparison than the one you and your team conduct independently. Sendbird thinks it’s essential to develop first-hand experience of the chat solutions you might commit to.
Many of our customers conduct Proof of Concept (POC) comparisons with other services before choosing their final chat solution. If you have the engineering resources and time, we encourage you to build your app with Sendbird and other chat solutions side-by-side. It will be the surest way to develop first-hand experience of the chat solutions available on the market. Always feel free to reach out if you need any help with this.
