Messaging chat SDK, or messaging chat API, is a bundled collection of modules with exposed interfaces that allow you to integrate and acquire the in-app instant messaging ability in your app or platform.
Are you searching for the best Chat API and SDK platform for developers? Look no further! In this article, we will introduce you to the top-notch solutions that can enhance your chat functionalities and take your application to the next level. Whether you are building a messaging app, customer support system, or any other communication-based platform, finding the right Chat API and SDK is crucial.
Why Use a Chat SDK
Chat SDK is a cloud-based service provided by providers like ZEGOCLOUD or Twilio. With the integrated mobile chat SDK, your users can instantly send and receive text messages in your app.
You integrate the chat API and SDK into your app and will not touch any backends unless you want to listen to the system monitoring notifications. In a few lines of code to finish integrating a live chat SDK, the instant messaging module will be a part of your app.
Most chat SDKs are commercial products, but most of the commercial vendors like ZEGOCLOUD offer a good amount of usage of free chat SDK for developers to get started quickly.
The Value of Messaging Chat SDK
Almost 3.21 billion users worldwide actively use over-the-top messaging apps to communicate daily. This usage rate will increase to over 3.51 billion users in 2025. Like nearly everyone, you might have experience using a built-in instant messaging feature on Facebook or Gmail occasionally. People have migrated from traditional email or telephone calls to online chat or instant messaging. To follow the trend and get hold of their users, enterprises are quickly switching from formal email communication to in-app chat SDK solutions in this information era.
The value of instant messaging is to help you follow your users’ footprints closely, riding ahead of the tide of the internet. In-app instant messaging has been a must-have feature for different scenarios, including online education, video conference, voice or video chat room, customer care, or online marketing.
1.Education scenarios
In an online classroom, a video conference, or a live streaming training room, participants mainly use real-time voice or video to communicate. They will also use the whiteboard, screen sharing, and document sharing for teaching or collaborations. Let’s imagine that voice and video are not working because of network bandwidth reasons, and users feel so necessary to send real-time text messages for emergency communications. There is any situation where there are so many users, and it is not appropriate for them to speak too much, and the host will let them send instant messages to show their options. In-app chat has been a standard feature for this scenario.
- Chat SDK Value for Businesses
Regarding online marketing, instant messaging has opened a window on your website and let your marketing team get hold of your website visitors promptly. Your marketing team has invested relentlessly in all source channels, including Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Quora, etc. Potential clients come and visit your website with their needs and eagerness. They browse pages and develop the will to speak with your people, but it is troublesome to make a phone call, and they submit an information form without knowing when your people will contact them. The most immediate needs of your visitors would be able to instantly chat with your salesperson. Chat SDK is just the right tool to open a text chat window on your website to your prospects.
The value of messaging chat SDK is much more than the above. The core value is that it can help you to connect with people instantly at the lowest cost. We will cover more use cases soon.
The Use Cases of Chat SDK
Besides the scenarios mentioned above, there are many more use cases of chat SDK. We will cover the prominent instances here.
- Social & Communities
In a social networking context, messaging chat is the right choice to connect with your users. To keep a safe psychological distance among users, platforms must choose the right way to let users interact. Voice chat might be aggressive for total strangers, not to mention video chat. Email is conservative and keeps a safe social distance, but it is way too slow to get a response. Netizens are impatient and want immediate answers. Instant messaging allows users to pin each other with text messages in a one-on-one or group chat manner. If the other participant is not online, he or she will receive the news once he gets online, which serves perfectly as what email does.
- Team Collaboration
I have to say that in terms of team collaboration, text messaging is also the central interaction approach. Being busy with work, office workers communicate with each other in an asynchronnical way. Teams discuss various topics in different groups and private chat with one another. Famous team collaboration platforms, including Slack and Lark, are both building the platform with instant messaging as the core part. If you make a team collaboration system, you can choose chat SDK, like ZEGOCLOUD pre-built UIKits, to integrate the instant messaging feature into your system.
- Online Shopping
E-commerce has become one primary commercial internet application. Online shopping has become the majority of our daily shopping activities. When you are looking at some product with interest online, there are circumstances where you want to speak with the shop owner or customer service person promptly. For example, you want to buy a live rabbit and worry that the rabbit might die during the extended delivery period. You won’t make a phone call since it is too psychologically costly and costly for the shop customer center. Instant messaging will be the right choice since one customer service person can watch over many chat boxes with customers. You can integrate ZEGOCLOUD chat SDK into your e-commerce. It supports web and native apps, giving you more leeway to improve user experience.
4.Telehealth
ZEGOCLOUD empowers telehealth scenarios with in-app chat SDK, voice SDK, and video SDK, allowing your users to interact in a diagnosis session through text message, real-time voice, and video. Voice and video chat are, of course, the most straightforward approach for a medical diagnosis. However, instant messaging is more convenient in some quick and light online diagnosis scenarios. Let’s say, for example, you want to buy medicine on prescription, but you don’t have a doctor’s prescription; you might need to go through a process of quick online diagnosis. The doctor will ask you a few questions and give you some medicine. Since it is a delicate process, the online doctor has gotta watch tens of informal sessions with patients online, and messaging chat will be the right choice for the scenario.
5.Gaming
If you are an enthusiastic gamer, you must have the experience of team-collaborating with your fellow game partners to win a game. In-game voice is, of course, a good choice for collaboration, and it can set your hands free and allow you to speak with one another in a walkie-talkie manner. However, when there are too many people in a game, or it is not convenient to talk loudly, say, in a net bar, instant messaging is an excellent alternative for gamers to communicate and express their passion and excitement. ZEGOCLOUD provides both chat SDK and in-game voice SDK for gaming scenarios; you can try and see which of them is better for your situation.
The Basic Features of Chat SDK
A chat SDK must provide features to allow users to initiate invites, send instant messages, do one-on-one text chat, join groups and send public and private messages. We will go through the basic features quickly.
- Session Module:It lets you obtain the session list and iterate each session; you can send messages to a specific user, a group, or a chatroom.
- Room Module: It allows you to create a chat room, destroy a chat room, and obtain a chat room list. The feature can be used jointly with live streaming and voice chat rooms.
- Group Module: It allows you to create a group, destroy it, and save the relationship chains of the group members.
- Message Module: It allows you to send rich messages to users and chat rooms, including text, images, files, audio, and other announcements.
- Message Priority: In high concurrency or challenging network situations, priorities must be set on messages to ensure that important messages are transmitted with more sources. Less critical messages can be discarded to ensure high-priority messages are sent successfully.
- Offline Messages: If the receivers of messages were not online, they would be sent as well, and the receivers would receive the notifications once they logged in to the system. The news sent in the offline state will be transmitted and saved on the server side.
How to Choose Messaging Chat SDK
Most people may think that instant messaging has long been a standard application on the market. There is nothing new in terms of features or functionalities. The answer is yes and no. Yes, it has been a standard product, and the chance that a specific vendor creates a novel effect is slim. However, you must examine a few critical aspects to choose the proper messaging chat SDK seriously.
- Easy and Fast to Integrate
There are pitfalls to some chat messaging SDK choices. Some may take you more than a week to integrate. There may be chances that you encounter mistakes if you call the chat API the wrong way. A good chat SDK should be easy to integrate, and you should be able to integrate and test it in a couple of hours, even if you are an apprentice developer. It should be robust enough to resist the wrong usage, for example, calling the chat API in the wrong order or passing the incorrect parameters into the chat API.
ZEGOCLOUD fully considers exceptional usage of its mobile chat SDK, makes its chat SDK as simple and neat as possible, and also provides abundant documentation to guide developers to integrate easily. On top of that, ZEGOCLOUD launched a UIKit edition of its messaging chat SDK, which is a low-code version. The ZEGOCLOUD chat SDK UIKit provides modulized UI components for developers to build GUI according to their design tastes.
- Compatibility and Extendibility
You may need to test if the mobile chat SDK is compatible with the OS platforms where your users are active. For example, you may want to try if the chat SDK is compatible with most Android smartphone models. The test cost is high, and your team may not be able to cover all of them. You may turn to some testing vendors for assistance. If you want to do a preliminary test, you can do it independently and refer to a mouth recommendation of the market as a supplement.
There is a high chance that you will use real-time voice SDK or video SDK in your app too. In that case, it would be ideal that the vendor you choose, like ZEGOCLOUD, can provide a complete solution that includes chat app SDK and voice/video SDK. Choosing the SDK suite from the same vendor can save you a lot of collaboration and compatibility issues. Moreover, it allows you to extend the scope of your app to include more features for more scenarios. For example, on top of text messaging, your users will be allowed to speak with one another via real-time voice in a training room.
- Support for High Concurrency and Reliability
Suppose you have a large DAU ( Daily Active Users) on your platform, or you foresee that the DAU will grow at a high rate after passing a certain threshold. In that case, you must consider reliability in a high concurrency situation. Most chat app SDK vendors’ products perform similarly, and you cannot see which can outcompete the other in an average case. If you want to find out which one is the best performer, you can increase the concurrency and see which one will remain stable and reliable when concurrency is high.
ZEGOCLOUD team has experience supporting extremely high DAU ( more than 200 million daily active users) and applied the knowledge and technology to its data acceleration network, MSDN. The data transmission network has over 500 BGP centers in 212 countries or territories. The MSDN can support super high concurrency globally and ensure extra-low latency (less than 300ms) for real-time engagement. With the power of MSDN, ZEGOCLOUD’s chat SDK can help you to achieve genuine real-time interaction at a high concurrency without limit.
Conclusion
It would be wise to choose the best chat SDK from vendor solutions. When you evaluate choosing a good chat app SDK, you may need to consider many factors. The most critical factors are revenue, cost, and risk. ZEGOCLOUD’s mobile chat SDK can help you to launch your product at extra-low cost and risk and maximize your gain. And ZEGOCLOUD offers a good amount of free chat SDK usage.
