Sendbird Chat - A complete chat API with moderation & translation

What do you like best about the product?

It makes it easy for us to add reliable in-app chat, voice, and video features without building complex communication infrastructure from scratch. Its APIs and SDKs are well documented, highly customizable, and support multiple platforms. I also appreciate its scalability, security, moderation tools, and overall reliability, which help our team deliver communication features much faster.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some advanced customization options and premium capabilities are only available on higher-tier plans, and debugging complex integrations may require more in-depth technical knowledge. Overall, these are manageable trade-offs for the functionality it provides.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It solves the challenge of building and maintaining real-time communication features from scratch. Instead of spending months developing messaging infrastructure, we can quickly integrate secure chat, voice, and video capabilities into our application. It reduces development time, improves user engagement, lowers maintenance effort, and allows the team to focus on delivering core product features rather than managing communication infrastructure.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Sendbird is its developer-friendly APIs and ready-to-use messaging features. It makes it easy to add real-time chat and communication capabilities to applications without building the entire infrastructure from scratch. Easy integration through well-documented SDKs and APIs. Real-time messaging with low latency and reliable delivery. Support for one-to-one chats, group conversations, and multimedia messages. Built-in moderation, user management, and message history. Scalable architecture that handles growing user bases effectively. The most valuable feature is the ability to implement chat functionality quickly. Instead of spending time developing and maintaining a messaging backend, the team can focus on building the core application while relying on Sendbird for communication features. The biggest benefit is faster development and improved user engagement. It reduces implementation effort, provides a reliable messaging experience, and allows teams to launch communication features much more quickly.

What do you dislike about the product?

While Sendbird is a robust messaging platform, there are a few areas where I think it could be improved. Pricing can become expensive as the number of users and messages increases. Some advanced customization options require additional development effort. Debugging real-time messaging issues can occasionally be challenging. The dashboard could provide more detailed analytics and monitoring capabilities. Initial configuration for advanced features may have a learning curve for new teams. The biggest challenge is cost as applications scale. Sendbird offers excellent reliability and features, but organizations with rapidly growing user bases need to monitor usage carefully to manage expenses.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sendbird solves the challenge of building and maintaining real-time messaging infrastructure from scratch. Instead of developing chat services, message delivery, user presence, and scalability internally, Sendbird provides these capabilities through ready-to-use APIs and SDKs. Enables real-time messaging without building a custom backend. Reduces development time with pre-built chat features. Supports scalable one-to-one and group conversations. Simplifies user management, message history, and moderation. Provides reliable message delivery and synchronization across devices. In my day-to-day work, Sendbird helps integrate chat functionality into applications quickly while minimizing the effort required to manage messaging infrastructure. This allows the team to focus on developing core product features instead of maintaining communication services. The biggest benefit is faster product development. By leveraging Sendbird's infrastructure, we can deliver reliable in-app communication features more quickly, improve user engagement, and reduce the ongoing maintenance burden.

I used Sendbird  as part of testing and validating chat functionality in a mobile application. From a QA perspective, I found the platform to be stable and well-documented, which made it easier to verify messaging workflows and troubleshoot issues. The APIs were consistent and overall, it provided a reliable foundation for real-time communication features.

The flow I tested involved validating one-to-one chat between two users. I verified that messages were delivered and displayed correctly in real-time, checked message ordering and timestamps, and ensured unread message counts updated accurately. I also tested scenarios where a user went offline and came back online to confirm messages were synchronized properly. Additionally, I validated file attachments, push notifications, and basic error handling for network interruptions to ensure the chat experience remained reliable across different conditions.

My primary experience with Sendbird  was from a QA perspective, focusing on validating the end-user messaging experience rather than implementing the SDK. I tested core chat workflows such as one-to-one messaging, message delivery and synchronization, unread counts, push notifications, file attachments, and behavior during network interruptions. I also verified cross-platform consistency, logged defects and worked with developers to validate fixes before release. Overall, my focus was ensuring the chat functionality was reliable, intuitive, and met the expected user experience.

From both a QA and product perspective, the Sendbird features I found most valuable are real-time messaging, read receipts, delivery receipts, typing indicators, offline synchronization, push notifications, file sharing, cross-platform SDKs and UI Kit, scalability, and of course, moderation and security.

From my perspective as a QA engineer, Sendbird helped our team deliver a reliable in-app messaging experience without having to build a chat solution from scratch. The platform's stability, documentation, and feature set made it easier to validate messaging workflows, identify issues, and ensure a consistent user experience across mobile platforms. This allowed the team to focus more on improving the product itself rather than solving underlying messaging infrastructure challenges.

From a QA perspective, using Sendbird likely saved significant development and testing effort compared to building a chat solution internally. Instead of spending time validating custom messaging infrastructure, our team could focus on testing the application's business workflows and user experience. Since the core chat functionality was stable, we encountered fewer issues related to message delivery or synchronization, allowing us to spend more time on edge cases, integrations, and release quality rather than debugging the underlying chat system.

One area that could be improved is the handling and visibility of unread message counts. In some scenarios, keeping unread counts perfectly synchronized across multiple devices, sessions, or after reconnecting can be challenging. More flexibility in configuring unread count behavior, along with clearer documentation and debugging tools for these scenarios, would make it easier for developers and QA teams to validate and troubleshoot messaging workflows.

Overall, my experience with Sendbird was positive. Beyond improving unread count synchronization, I think more built-in debugging and diagnostic tools would be valuable for developers and QA teams when troubleshooting real-time messaging issues. Additional test utilities or dashboards to inspect message delivery, synchronization status, and notification events would make it easier to reproduce and verify edge cases. While the documentation is generally good, adding more examples for complex scenarios such as multi-device synchronization, offline recovery, and notification behavior would further improve the developer and testing experience.

I have been using Sendbird for two years.

Sendbird was a stable and reliable platform throughout my experience. During testing, the core messaging functionality such as real-time message delivery, synchronization, and notifications performed consistently. While we occasionally encountered edge cases, such as unread count synchronization or network reconnect scenarios, these were relatively minor compared to the overall stability of the platform. I kept raising issues with Sendbird's support team. Overall, I found Sendbird dependable for production use and well-suited for applications requiring real-time chat.

From my experience, Sendbird handled our application's messaging requirements reliably and scaled well for our use case. We did not experience issues with normal day-to-day messaging, and the platform consistently supported real-time communication across users and devices. While I was not responsible for load testing or infrastructure, I found the chat functionality stable and responsive during feature testing, regression testing, and release validation. Based on that experience, I believe Sendbird is well-suited for applications that need to scale as their user base grows.

My experience with Sendbird's customer support was positive. The team was responsive and helpful in addressing technical questions, and together with the detailed documentation, it helped us resolve issues efficiently during development and testing.

Sendbird was the primary chat solution used in the project I worked on, so I do not have direct experience migrating from another messaging platform.

I do not have access to organization-wide ROI metrics, so I cannot provide specific numbers. From my perspective as a QA engineer, using Sendbird likely saved development and testing time because the team did not have to build and maintain a custom chat infrastructure. It allowed us to focus on validating business workflows and user experience instead of troubleshooting core messaging functionality. This contributed to more efficient testing cycles and smoother releases, although I cannot quantify the exact time or cost savings.

To the best of my knowledge, the team considered solutions such as Firebase, Twilio  Conversations, and CometChat  before choosing Sendbird. I was not directly involved in the evaluation process, but Sendbird was selected for its comprehensive feature set, reliable real-time messaging, scalability, and ease of integration.

I recommend clearly defining your messaging requirements before integrating Sendbird and taking advantage of its SDKs and documentation to speed up development. From a QA perspective, it is also worth planning test cases for edge scenarios such as network interruptions, offline synchronization, unread message counts, multi-device behavior, and push notifications. Overall, Sendbird is a solid choice if you are looking for a reliable, scalable chat solution without the overhead of building and maintaining your own messaging infrastructure.

I had a good experience with Sendbird. It provided a reliable and feature-rich messaging platform that simplified testing and helped our team deliver a quality chat experience without building the infrastructure from scratch. From a QA perspective, I appreciated its stability, documentation, and comprehensive feature set. While there are opportunities to improve areas such as unread count synchronization, debugging tools, and documentation for advanced scenarios, I would still recommend Sendbird to teams looking for a scalable and dependable in-app messaging solution. I rated this review an 8 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Sendbird  is to develop chats on mobile development or mobile apps and also integrate that to our backend. I developed custom chats using Sendbird-like UI with Jetpack Compose on Android and used the custom views that it brings, including their own SDK.

I used Sendbird  for a chat for reporting orders. We had an app for buying things online and used Sendbird so customers could interact directly with a backend, with Sendbird portal or backend services where they could report whatever was going on with their order.

The best features Sendbird offers me is the ability to detect the state of a person, such as whether someone is online or has already replied or read the message. It is a way to be updated about how your messaging is going through status. Some applications or some SDK chats do not have enough information for getting the current status of the message that has been sent or the online activity of the end users, so that is something that is really valuable about Sendbird.

Having those status updates, such as knowing if someone is online or has read a message, helps my team and my users because sometimes if you do not see a status regarding a message, you feel you are not being talked to or reviewed. For example, if you send a message to some kind of chatbot and do not see activity feedback, such as the chat being online, the message being read, or somebody typing, that kind of thing makes the user feel more engaged. However, if you send messages and do not know whether that message was received or read, the user starts feeling as though they are not being given feedback or attention.

Sendbird is really valuable because I was able to create a chat from scratch in two to three days and a custom chat in a week by implementing things from scratch. I would say that is a really good tool or SDK to use if you are worried about speeding up and using standard behavior, because Sendbird brings almost all the features or functionality that any chat should have, such as group chat and direct chat.

For Sendbird to be improved, I would say creating more multi-platform SDKs is essential. People right now are working and do not care about the programming language itself. With AI-driven development happening, I would say include more AI-driven development or include more options on different libraries and languages.

I would appreciate keeping the documentation informed and getting more sample codes because I noticed that there were some samples that were not really up-to-date with the current development trends.

I have been using Sendbird since 2019, which is seven years.

5

I think everything is valuable and I have no other improvements to suggest.

My advice to others looking into using Sendbird is that they should try it because if you need to build a chat, Sendbird already has an option that behavior implemented, and you do not have to worry or lose time implementing from scratch.

Regarding Sendbird's AI capabilities, I think we need to consider how the information is being transported and what protocols we should implement so that AI cannot compromise the information security and integrity.

I think Sendbird's AI capabilities are really accurate. It has been predicting things as it is supposed to. It has cross-references and the answers are valuable. My overall rating for this review is ten out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )