CometChat: Is it the ultimate communication tool for your platform?

CometChat allows users to easily add chat functionality to web and mobile applications to facilitate communication with customers.

Engaging effectively with customers is an important part of any business. This helps us understand their pain points, preferences, likes and dislikes, and provide better products and services.

However, managing customer communications can be a complex task. Enabling your in-house team to effectively serve your customers requires sophisticated systems.

So, whether you’re building an iOS, Android, or web application, you need to add chat and messaging features to your application so you can easily interact with your customers.

Modern solutions like CometChat can facilitate this process.

The platform offers great chat and messaging features such as sharing documents, files, stickers, emojis, and more to streamline communication and provide a quality customer experience.

Let’s learn more about CometChat, explore its offerings, and decide if it can meet your needs.

What is CometChat?

CometChat is a comprehensive communications solution that allows businesses to integrate chat functionality into their websites and applications. This is an in-app messaging SDK and chat API that allows you to integrate video calling and HD voice.

This chat platform allows you to connect and collaborate with your customers in real-time through voice, video, and text chat. Additionally, it can be easily integrated into your website applications through SDKs, APIs, UI kits, and no-code widgets.

CometChat, also known as an in-app or API messaging tool, lets you organize your chats into private or group chats to collaborate and share files. We have a language translation feature that accurately translates live chat in real-time, making it easy for customers in any language to chat with customer support without any barriers.

CometChat allows developers to build full-featured, reliable chat experiences into their web and mobile apps. Its powerful SDK and chat API are specifically designed to help you ship faster using these three steps:

• Install the SDK: The SDK is available for iOS, JavaScript, and Android. All of these work together, making it easy to set up cross-platform.
• Connect securely: Setting up a secure connection requires only one line of code.
• Build your experience: You can use UI elements and build extensions and features to create complete experiences.

Additionally, CometChat allows you to add video and audio calling and conferencing functionality to your application using a variety of tools. The CometChat platform allows you to share data such as photos, audio, video clips, and GIFs, so you can send and receive media files via CometChat.

CometChat products

#1. chat and messaging

CometChat lets you quickly add group chats and one-on-one text chats to your applications with additional features like media sharing, read receipts, and more. Enhance your in-app chat and messaging solution with many extensions such as email notifications, app notifications, and more.

CometChat provides all the features you need to improve your chat and messaging experience. These include:

• 1-on-1 private chat: Send messages directly to the chat box for public, password-protected private conversations.
• Group conversations: You can also message many customers at once in private or public conversations. It also supports password-protected conversations.
• Threaded conversations: Continue and organize your messaging by accessing ongoing conversations you’ve already started in Messages, such as in Slack.
• Unread messages and counting: Organize your conversations by marking and counting unread messages.
• Indicators: The chat feature has many indicators, including online presence indicators, typing indicators, and read receipt indicators. These metrics help you understand how your customers are doing.
• Record and Send Voice Messages: CometChat allows you to quickly send and receive voice messages to inform your problem and clarify the same to your customers.
• In-app chat: In-app chat and messaging features allow you to quickly find and organize all your messages. This allows you to search for specific messages directly from your search history.

CometChat’s developer chat features come with the building blocks you need to get production-ready applications out of the box.

#2. Extensions

CometChat extensions allow you to delight your customers. Over 40 extensions specifically designed to maximize moderation, security, engagement, and more. Let’s explore all the extensions that CometChat has to offer.

• Applozic: Applozic is a chat widget that syncs with CometChat to get real-time chat data.
• Stickers: You can send stickers in chat. Easily managed from your dashboard.
• Email Reply: CometChat allows you to quickly respond to chat messages directly from your email inbox, no matter what platform you’re using.
• Survey: To quickly find out what your customers think, we have a survey in your chat.
• Reactions: Find a variety of emoji reactions that you can use or allow your customers to use. This is a quick way to respond to messages while expressing emotion.
• Data Masking: Data masking is an important enhancement to Chat that allows you to hide sensitive data such as email addresses, social security numbers, and phone numbers.
• XSS filter: Filter messages to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This can be done by converting the malicious code into a non-executable message.
• Email notifications: Email notifications allow you to track important messages so you never miss a message from your customers and can return to your application or site at any time. Helps you send and receive email notifications of unread texts via SendGrid, CometChat’s official partner.
• Profanity Filter: This powerful extension automatically detects profanity or flawed words from messages and allows you to ban further messages or mask messages from that user .

• In-flight message moderation: This extension gives you access to a moderation interface where you and your team can manually review messages before they go live.
• Link preview: Give your customers a link preview feature in chat so they can see what the link is about before they click it. This increases security.
• Smart Reply: The Smart Reply extension makes it easy to reply to messages using a device with basic input capabilities, such as a smartwatch. This extension saves you time in responding.
• SMS notifications: SMS notification extensions can help you avoid skipping all your important messages. CometChat has partnered with Twilio to allow you to send notifications of unread messages via SMS.
• Message translation: Copying and pasting messages using external translation services is time-consuming and difficult to manage. For this reason, CometChat offers a message translation extension that allows you and your customers to communicate easily. This way, with CometChat, no language becomes a barrier between conversations.
• Collaboration Whiteboard: An online whiteboard that makes collaboration easy with smart drawings, sticky notes, and more.
• Collaborative documents: CometChat lets you share any document in chat to review, plan, communicate, and collaborate easily and quickly.
• Slow Mode: The Slow Mode extension slows down messages in chats to make them easier to read.
• Report messages and users: You can allow customers to report users and messages in chats.
• Message shortcuts: Users can compose and share messages using shortcuts (such as hb for Happy Birthday).
• Avatars: CometChat allows you to add avatars to your profile, and users can also add avatars of their choice to their profiles. This extension is useful for websites and applications.

• Bitly: Bitly is a third-party tool that allows you to shorten URLs. It also helps your brand grow.
• TinyURL: TinyURL is another tool used to shorten unwieldy URLs.
• Save messages : Easily bookmark chat messages for later reference.
• Reminders: You can create scheduled reminders such as messages.
• Mentions: This extension allows users to easily tag another user in a conversation. You can also see when you were tagged.
• Pin messages: You can pin important messages to your 1:1 and group conversations for quick reference.
• Sentiment analysis: Additional metadata can be generated to determine whether a message is negative, neutral, positive, or mixed. Additionally, you can filter and flag rude messages.
• Thumbnail generation: Sharing high-resolution images can incur higher bandwidth. The thumbnail generation extension helps you generate small, medium, or large thumbnail links within the metadata of your chat messages.
• Disappearing Messages: CometChat allows users to share messages that simply disappear after a certain period of time.
• Rich media preview: Create your own responsive embed code for rich media publishers and more.
• Chatwoot: Easily connect and transfer messages between Chatwoot and CometChat.
• Tenor GIF: Help users convey exactly what they mean using GIFs.
• Stipop: With Stipop stickers, you can create a great experience for your users and increase user engagement by 20%.
• Intercom: Connect Intercom to CometChat to allow support agents and users to chat one-on-one.
• Virus and Malware Scanner: Keep your customers safe by scanning images, videos, and files with our malware scanner.

• End-to-end encryption: This extension by Virgil Security makes it easy to protect your customers’ messages.
• Giphy: The Giphy extension also helps you share animated GIFs within your messages.
• Gfycat: Gfycat allows users to create, view, and send GIFs.
• Live streaming with api.video: Use it to build, manipulate, and enhance live streaming video within your applications.

#3. UI kit

CometChat has a great user interface that provides a modern chatting experience. This also helps reduce time to market. All UI kits include sketch files, UI components, and an open-source chat application.

You get:

• Pixel-perfect design: All UI kits are specially designed to ensure better pixel-perfection.
• Drag and Drop Option: CometChat’s UI kit comes with a drag and drop option that you use to place the business logic you create.
• Customization capabilities: Source code allows you to customize the user interface exactly to suit your needs.

You can integrate with various UI kits such as Android Java, iOS Swift, Flutter, Angular, React, Vue, React Native, etc. using simple and customizable code. With the latest v4 version, CometChat incorporates a modular architecture that provides flexibility in creating and customizing mobile and web apps, improving the developer experience.

#4. SDKs and APIs

Easily integrate chat using CometChat’s SDK and API. Easy to use and fully customizable. The REST API allows you to interact with various resources in the chat feature, such as users, groups, and messages.

Some SDKs are:

• Flutter Chat SDK: Flutter Chat SDK helps you add chat to your Flutter applications.
• JavaScript Chat SDK: Add text, audio, and video calls to your JavaScript website within minutes.
• Swift Chat SDK: The Swift Chat SDK lets you add text chat and calling functionality to your iOS applications in minutes.
• React Native Chat SDK: This allows you to add video and voice calls along with text chat to your React Native applications within minutes.
• React Chat SDK: Instantly add video and audio calling functionality to your React website.
• Angular Chat SDK: Also helps you add calling and chat functionality to your web applications in minutes.
• Vue Chat SDK: Easily add chat and calling functionality to your website.
• Other SDKs: CometChat offers many other SDKs such as Java Chat SDK, jQuery SDK, and Kotlin Chat SDK.

Some APIs are:

• Chat API: CometChat allows you to manage messages, groups, and users for a given application through a chat API.
• Analytics API: CometChat’s analytics API easily embeds usage reports into your website applications.
• App Management API: The App Management API allows you to create and manage applications on the go.

Browser compatibility

CometChat supports almost all WebRTC browsers, including Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Opera. There is also beta compatibility with the Safari browser. It is also compatible with all Android browsers, but has beta compatibility with iOS browsers.

Prices and plans

CometChat offers different pricing plans to meet the demands of different businesses.

• Essentials: Priced at $109 per month, includes core chat features, easy integrations, global infrastructure, email support, and more.
• Pro: Priced at $529 per month and includes powerful user engagement, Chatwoot or Intercom integration, post-event webhooks, 15,000 minutes of video and audio, and more.
• Custom: CometChat offers custom options so you can choose the package that best suits your business needs. This includes multi-app creation, shared deployments, dedicated cloud deployments, 50,000 minutes of video and audio, and more.

Start with the free plan and see how CometChat can help your business with in-app chat and messaging.

alternative

However, if you don’t like CometChat, check out the alternatives below.

#1. one signal

Maximize customer engagement and drive customer loyalty with OneSignal’s communication features such as email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging.

Allow your customers to receive messages instantly when they pick up the phone. This is because notifications are the single source of truth for mobile applications.

OneSignal’s web push notifications keep your customers updated even when they’re not on your website. It works with Firefox, Opera, Edge, Yandex, Chrome, and Safari. Manage your messaging journey across channels with an easy-to-use, no-code workflow builder.

Get 15-minute setup, real-time reporting, incredible scalability, A/B testing, superior segmentation, automated messaging, intelligent delivery, and results analytics.

Get all the features you need for free, or switch to a paid plan starting at $9 per month.

#2. In-app chat

Leverage skills and bots from multiple platforms that can easily work in a single chat interface. In-app chat lets you experience advanced messaging features for your web or mobile applications.

You’ll see options like copy, edit, delete, typing indicator, timestamp, push notifications, notification settings, message forwarding, chat recovery, read receipts, and more.

Additionally, you can share media files such as images, videos, audio, hyperlinks, emojis, files, contacts, locations, and GIFs. In-app also offers other advanced features such as local search, global search, @mentions, reactions, following threads, pinning messages, gallery view, canned replies, E2E encryption, announcements, and offline messaging. .

You can start with a free subscription. This includes 10 MAUs, 5 concurrent connections, 5000 messages, etc. Enjoy even more benefits with the latest features with paid plans starting at $39/month.

#3. fresh chat

Engage with your customers on any channel with Freshchat’s smarter conversations. This makes it easy for support, sales, marketing, and bots to converse with customers. Messaging, email, voice, and live chat options are available to engage with your customers.

Freshchat allows customers to use their preferred channels: mobile, web, Messenger, LINE, Facebook, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, and more. Choose from over 33 languages ​​to customize in-app messages based on your customers’ preferred language.

Plus, to experience the true potential of Freshchat, you get tons of useful integrations, team inboxes, canned responses, live translation, visitor info, bulk actions, and more for free. There are also paid plans that give you access to advanced features.

last word

CometChat allows you to interact with your website visitors and customers in real time. So, if you want to add in-app chat and messaging functionality to your application or site, CometChat is one of the best options with plenty of useful features.

Its SDK and API allow developers to easily add text chat, audio, and video calling to their applications using simple lines of code. If not, try some alternatives to CometChat.

Next, check out our in-app chat solutions to build better user engagement.