CometChat: Is It the Ultimate Communication Tool for Your Platform?

CometChat enables users to effortlessly add chat functionality in their web and mobile applications and facilitate communication with customers.

Engaging with your customers effectively is a crucial part of every business. It will help you understand their pain points, preferences, likes and dislikes, etc., to provide better products and services to them.

But, managing customer communications can be a complicated task. You need advanced systems to empower your internal team to effectively handle customers.

So, whether you are building an iOS, Android, or web application, you must add chat and messaging features to your application to engage easily with customers. 

Modern solutions like CometChat can ease this process.

The platform offers awesome chat and messaging features like sharing docs, files, stickers, emojis, etc., streamlining communication and giving quality customer experiences.

Let’s discuss CometChat more and explore its offerings to decide if it can meet your needs.

What Is CometChat?

CometChat is an extensive communication solution that allows businesses to integrate chat features into their websites and applications. It is an in-app messaging SDK and chat API that can empower you to integrate video calling and HD voice. 

This chat platform lets you connect and collaborate with customers in real-time through voice, video, and text chat. Plus, it is simple to integrate into your website application through SDKs, APIs, UI Kits, and no-code widgets. 

CometChat is also known as an in-app or an API messaging tool, enabling you to organize your chats into private or group chats where you can work together and share files. It has a language translation functionality that translates live chat accurately in real-time so that customers using any language can easily chat with your customer support without any barrier. 

CometChat empowers developers to build a full-featured and reliable chat experience into your web and mobile app. Its powerful SDK and chat API are designed specifically to enable you to ship faster using three steps:

• Install SDKs: SDKs are available for iOS, JavaScript, and Android. All these work together so that cross-platform can be set up easily. 
• Connect securely: You just need a single line of code to set up a secure connection.
• Build your experience: You can use UI elements and build extensions and features to create a complete experience. 

Moreover, CometChat allows you to use different tools to add video and voice calling along with conferencing capabilities to their applications. You can send or receive media files via CometChat since the platform allows sharing data like photos, audio and video clips, and GIFs. 

CometChat Products

#1. Chat and Messaging

With CometChat, you can quickly add group and 1-on-1 text chat in your application with additional features, including media sharing, read receipts, and more. Supercharge your in-app chat and messaging solution with many extensions, such as email notifications, app notifications, and more. 

CometChat offers all the necessary features for a better chat and messaging experience. These include:

• 1-on-1 private chat: You can send messages directly in the chat box in public, password-protected, and private conversations. 
• Group conversations: You can also send messages to many customers at a time in private or public conversations. It also supports password-protected conversations.
• Threaded conversations: You can continue and organize messaging by accessing the ongoing conversations already started with a message, for example, Slack. 
• Unread messages and count: Keep your conversations organized by marking and counting unread messages. 
• Indicators: There are many indicators in the chat feature, such as online presence indicators, typing indicators, and indicators for read receipts. These indicators help you know the status of the customers. 
• Record and send voice messages: CometChat allows you to send and receive voice messages quickly, letting you know the issue and clarify the same with your customers. 
• In-app chat: The in-app chat and messaging functionality lets you quickly find and organize all the messages. This helps you search a given message directly from the search history. 

CometChat’s developer-focused chat feature comes with the building blocks you require to get a production-ready application in a matter of time. 

#2. Extensions

CometChat’s extensions enable you to delight your customers. Over 40 extensions specially designed to maximize moderation, security, engagement, and more. Let’s explore all the extensions that CometChat offers. 

• Applozic: Applozic is a chat widget that syncs with CometChat to get real-time chat data. 
• Stickers: You can send stickers in your chats. It can be managed from the dashboard easily. 
• Email replies: CometChat enables you to respond faster to chat messages from your email inbox directly, no matter what platform you are on. 
• Polls: There are polls in the chat to know the opinion of the customers quickly. 
• Reactions: You will find a variety of emoji reactions that you can use and allow your customers to use. This is a quick way of responding to any message while expressing emotions.
• Data masking: Data masking is an essential extension in the chat that allows hiding sensitive data like email addresses, social security numbers, and phone numbers.
• XSS filter: Filter your messages to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This can be done by converting malicious codes to non-executable messages. 
• Email notifications: Email notifications let you track the important messages so that you won’t miss anything from customers and allow them to come back to your application or site anytime. It helps you send and receive email notifications for unread texts via SendGrid, an official partner of CometChat. 
• Profanity filter: This powerful extension detects bad or faulty words from a message automatically and allows you to disallow further messages or mask them from that user.

• In-flight message moderation: This extension gives you moderation interface access where you and your team can review messages manually before letting them go live. 
• Link preview: Provide your customers with the link preview feature in the chat so they can have an idea of what is inside the link before clicking it. This enhances security.
• Smart replies: The smart replies extension enables you to reply to messages easily using any device with basic input capabilities, such as a smartwatch. This extension saves you time while giving responses. 
• SMS notifications: You can ensure that all the essential messages don’t get skipped with an SMS notification extension. CometChat partners with Twilio to allow you to send notifications via SMS for unread messages. 
• Message translation: Copying and pasting messages using an external translation service is time-consuming and unmanageable. For this, CometChat offers a message translation extension that enables you and your customers to communicate easily. This way, CometChat never allows any language to become a barrier between conversations.
• Collaborative whiteboard: It is an online whiteboard that enables easy collaboration using smart drawings, sticky notes, and more. 
• Collaborative document: CometChat allows you to share any document in the chat for easy and fast reviews, planning, communication, and collaboration. 
• Slow mode: Slow mode extension slows down the messages in the chat to make them legible. 
• Report message and user: You can allow your customers to report to the users and messages in the chat. 
• Message shortcuts: It lets your users create and share messages by using shortcuts, for example, hb for Happy Birthday. 
• Avatars: CometChat lets you add avatars to your profiles, and even the users can add their preferred avatars to their profiles. This extension is useful for websites and applications. 

• Bitly: Bitly is a third-party tool that allows you to shorten the URLs. It also helps your brand grow. 
• TinyURL: TinyURL is another tool used to shorten unwieldy URLs.
• Message saving: Easily bookmark any chat message for future reference. 
• Reminders: You can create scheduled reminders for the messages and others. 
• Mentions: This extension allows users to easily tag another user in a conversation. Also, they can see when they have been tagged. 
• Pin message: You can pin important messages to one-on-one and group conversations for quick reference. 
• Sentiment analysis: You can generate metadata additionally to determine whether a message is negative, neutral, positive, or mixed. In addition, you can filter and flag rude messages. 
• Thumbnail generation: Sharing a high-resolution image may incur a higher bandwidth. The thumbnail generation extension helps you generate small, medium, or large thumbnail links in your chat message metadata. 
• Disappearing messages: CometChat lets your users share messages that can easily disappear after a certain period. 
• Rich media preview: It allows you to have unique and responsive embed codes for your rich media publishers and others.
• Chatwoot: You can easily connect and transfer messages between Chatwoot and CometChat.
• Tenor GIFs: It help users say what they exactly mean by using GIFs. 
• Stipop: It helps create good experiences for users and can enhance user engagement by 20% with Stipop’s stickers. 
• Intercom: You can connect Intercom with CometChat, making it accessible for support agents and users to chat 1-on-1.
• Virus and malware scanner: Keep your customers safe by scanning images, videos, and files using a malware scanner. 

• End-to-end encryption: This extension by Virgil Security secures your customers’ messages easily. 
• Giphy: The Giphy extension also helps you share animated GIFs in your messages.
• Gfycat: Gfycat lets users create, browse, and send GIFs. 
• Live streaming by api.video: You can build, operate, and scale live-streaming videos in the application using this. 

#3. UI Kits

CometChat has a great user interface that gives you a modern chat experience. Also, this helps you speed up your time-to-market process. In every UI kit, you will find a sketch file, UI components, and an open-source chatting application. 

You will get:

• Pixel perfect design: Every UI kit is specifically designed to ensure better pixel perfection. 
• Drag and drop option: CometChat’s UI kits come with the drag and drop option that you use to arrange the business logic you create. 
• Ability to customize: The source code allows you to customize the user interface exactly according to your needs. 

You can integrate with different UI kits, such as Android Java, iOS Swift, Flutter, Angular, React, Vue, and React Native, using simple, customizable code. In the latest v4 version, CometChat improves the developer experience by including a modular architecture that gives you the flexibility to create and customize mobile and web apps. 

#4. SDKs and APIs

You can easily integrate chat using CometChat’s SDKs and APIs. They are easy to use and fully customizable. Its REST API lets you interact with various resources of the chat functions, including users, groups, messages, and more. 

Some SDKs are:

• Flutter chat SDK: Flutter chat SDK helps you add chat to the Flutter application. 
• JavaScript chat SDK: You can add text, voice, and video calling to the JavaScript website within minutes. 
• Swift chat SDK: Swift chat SDK allows you to add text chat and calling features to your iOS application in minutes. 
• React native chat SDK: This lets you add video and voice calling along with text chat to your React Native application within minutes. 
• React chat SDK: You can add video and voice-calling features to the React website in a matter of time. 
• Angular chat SDK: It also helps in adding calling and chatting features to your web application in minutes. 
• Vue chat SDK: You can add chatting and calling features to your websites easily. 
• Other SDKs: CometChat offers many other SDKs for you, like 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 particular application through its chat API. 
• Analytics API: CometChat’s analytics API embeds usage reports in the website application with ease. 
• App management API: With app management API, you can create and manage your application on the go. 

Browser Compatibility

CometChat supports almost all WebRTC browsers, such as Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Opera. It has a beta compatibility with Safari browser as well. It is also compatible with all Android browsers but has beta compatibility with iOS browsers. 

Pricing and Plans

CometChat comes with different pricing plans to meet the demands of different businesses:

• Essentials: The price is $109/month and includes core chat features, easy integration, global infrastructure, email support, and more. 
• Pro: The price is $529/month and includes powerful user engagement, integration with Chatwoot or Intercom, post-event webhooks, 15k video and voice minutes, and more. 
• Custom: CometChat gives you a custom option so that you can choose the perfect package for you according to your business use. It includes multi-app creation, shared deployment, dedicated cloud deployment, 50k video and voice minutes, and more. 

You can start with a free plan to understand how CometChat is helpful for your business in-app chat and messages. 

Alternatives

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

#1. OneSignal

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

Let your customers quickly get your message when they pick up their phones. This is because notifications are the single source of truth for mobile applications.

OneSignal’s web push notification allows you to keep up with your customers even when they are not on your website. This works on Firefox, Opera, Edge, Yandex, Chrome, and Safari. You can manage your messaging journey across different channels with its easy-to-use workflow builder using no code. 

You will get a 15-minute setup, real-time reporting, incredible scalability, A/B testing, superior segmentation, automated messaging, intelligent delivery, and results analysis.

Get all the necessary features for free, or go for paid plans starting at $9/month. 

#2. In-App Chat

Leverage the skills and bots from multiple platforms that can work in a single chat interface easily. In-App Chat enables you to experience advanced messaging features for your web or mobile application.

You will get options like copy, edit, delete, typing indicator, time stamp, push notifications, notification settings, message forwarding, chat restoration, read receipt, and more. 

Furthermore, you can share media files like images, videos, audio, hyperlinks, emojis, files, contacts, locations, GIFs, and more. In-App offers other advanced features, including local search, global search, @mentions, reactions, follow thread, pin message, gallery view, canned response, E2E encryption, announcements, offline messages, and more. 

You can start with its free subscription, which includes 10 MAUs, 5 concurrent connections, 5000 messages, and more. With a paid plan starting at $39/month, you can experience more benefits with modern features. 

#3. Freshchat

Engage your customers with Freshchat’s smarter conversations functionality on any channel. It allows support, sales, marketing, and bots to have an easy conversation with customers. You will get messaging, email, voice, and live chat options to engage with your customers. 

Freshchat lets your customers use the channels they prefer, such as mobile, web, Messenger, LINE, Facebook, Apple Business Chat, or WhatsApp. You can choose from over 33 languages to customize your in-app messaging according to the customer’s preferred language. 

Furthermore, you will get many useful integrations, team inbox, canned response, live translation, visitor intel, bulk action, and more for free to experience the true potential of Freshchat. It also has paid plans that offer advanced features and functionalities for your use. 

Final Words

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 features to your application or site, CometChat is one of the best options available, with plenty of useful functionalities.

Its SDKs and APIs enable developers to easily add text chat, voice, and video calling to your application using a simple line of code. If not, you can try some CometChat alternatives.

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