Introduction

In today’s fast-paced milieu, almost all businesses are moving towards building a solid chat platform in order to boost their communication efficiency. Have you been planning to create a chat platform of your own? In this article, we shall conduct a detailed analysis on the best chat solution to choose from Firebase, Firechat, MirrorFly, and Node.js+Socket.io so that you can get one step closer to your chat platform development. Stay with us and read on! 

Did you know there are two different categories of chat solutions? Yes! Let us take a closer look at them one by one.

1. Ready Made Chat Platform Solution

To put it in simple words, ready-made chat platforms can provide you with instant chat solutions. They have fully-featured chat features that can be integrated into any application or website easily. Readymade chat solutions save you from the burden of building an application from scratch, thereby, saving capital and resources. Some of the best examples of ready-made chat solutions are Firechat and CONTUS MirrorFly.

2. Chat Solution Involving Technologies for Data Transfer Between Client & Server

Such kinds of chat solutions provide you with customizable chat features, though it might take a bit longer time to implement the technologies involved. Firebase and Node.js+Socket.io are some of the best examples of this kind of chat solution.  

Some of the Best Online Chat Solutions to Choose From 

Proceeding further, we shall delve into the details of each chat solution one by one. This will help you gain a clear vision of each of them, thereby enabling you to choose the best one for your business requirements. 

1. Firebase: One of the Best Solutions To Build a Chat Platform

Firebase helps you run and build successful applications. It enables information exchange between an application and a server.  Firebase is backed by Google. Businesses can easily integrate Firebase with their teams’ favorite tools such as Google Ads,  Data Studio, Slack, and many others.

Advantages   

• Get fully managed backend infrastructure to accelerate app development. 
•  Gain user engagement with state-of-the-art analytics, A/B testing, and messaging campaigns. 
•  Find pre-packaged, open source bundles of codes that automate development tasks. 
• Access cross-platform SDKs that are easy to integrate on iOS, Android, and the Web.
• Get comprehensive documentation that can help your developers carry out the implementation process pretty fast, thereby saving time and additional capital.

Disadvantages

• Database limitation: One of the biggest disadvantages of Firebase is its real-time database limitation to 200k connections. On the other hand, Firestore allows around 1 million connections at the same time. Well, Firebase has a huge user base. But it’s beyond comprehension why they have such limits. This can be one of the loopholes in Firebase.
• Payment required for products exceeding 100 users: Another disadvantage can be it is only free for products that have up to 100 simultaneous users. Any product beyond this number is a paid one. Basically, the whole cost thing is assessed by the read and write operation in the database. The higher the amount of data, the higher the price. 
• Slow offline search: In addition to the two disadvantages mentioned above, there is one more limitation.  It starts working slowly during offline search.  If the number of documents in the base is around a hundred, the offline search may be affected and can turn slower. The database structure needs to be really strong to avoid this problem. 

2. Firechat: One of the Best Chat API Providers

Open-source real-time chat widget that has been built on Firebase. Firechat comes with a plethora of advanced chat features such as multi-room chat, multi-user, moderator function, chat invitations, private messaging, and much more.

Advantages

• Saves time and capital: As it is a ready-made chat solution, it saves you from the process of creating a chat platform right from the ground. This, in turn, ensures that you can save your time and capital. It can be utilized for developing other business requirements. 
• Easy to modify: Firechat is super easy to extend and modify. You can customize the features according to your unique requirements. 

Disadvantages

• Lacks some essential chat functions: One of the major disadvantages about Firechat is that it does not cover all the crucial chat features.  For instance, important chat functions such as unread messages, deleted messages are not supported by Firechat.  Also, there is a user participation limit upto 100 in group chats.
• Works slowly offline: Like Firebase, Firechat also starts working slowly during offline search. Moreover, only those Firechat products are free that have a 100 users limit.

3. CONTUS MirrorFly: Best Chat API

CONTUS Mirrorfly Chat API is a self-hosted communication solution that comes with a complete power-packed suite of advanced chat features. It supports real-time chat, video calling, and audio calling for web and mobile applications. Most importantly, it encourages the privacy and security of chats via end-to-end encryption.  

Advantages

• Customized chat solution: First of all, it is a ready-made chat solution. So, it saves your time and money on building a communication platform from scratch. It is 100% customizable and provides you with endless customization options and upgradable functionalities. Hence, MirrorFly  can easily meet your unique business requirements without any hassles. 
• Scalable: MirrorFly offers high scalability and performance. Messaging is well-built to connect 10M+ users and 1B+ conversations. It is automatically provisioned to adjust to your current user base.  
• Safe & secure chat solution: All collaboration mediums are completely encrypted.  It has various security layers such as end-to-end encryption, Signal Protocol, HIPAA, GDPR compliances, and AES 256.
• Pack of advanced features: MirrorFly has a plethora of chat features to offer such as 1-to-1 private and group chat, personalized profiles, multi channels, secure file sharing, search filters,  call queuing, and many other features.

Disadvantages

• Not as popular as Firebase and socket.io: In today’s fast-paced world, people generally don’t have much time to research well and hence tend to follow whatever seems trending. Isn’t it?  Apparently, Firebase and Socket.io have garnered more popularity for themselves when compared to MirrorFly. This might place you in a doubt before choosing it as your chat API. 
• Price issues: Price also acts as a disadvantage in the case of MirrorFly. This is because you’re required to make a one-time payment. Some businesses might find it difficult to transfer the entire amount in one go.  

4. Node.js+Socket.io

Node.js is a platform that is built on Chrome’s JavaScript. It enables you to build scalable applications. On the other hand, Socket.io can be described as a library that enables real-time communication between the browser and the server. So, basically, both of them together make for one of the best chat solutions. Node.js comes with the real-time data exchange library Socket.io to build a chat platform that offers customized solutions.

Advantages

• Realization of all functionalities: Be it logic or server data, the developer can have everything in control.  Node.js+Socket.io even supports message-deleting chat functions that are not even found in  Firechat.
• Scalable: Has the potential to give way to automatic scalability. It can easily be done on AWS and other readymade solutions. In this case, scalability needs to be developed by a programmer.  
• Fast chat solution: The smooth integration between Node.js+Socket.io leads to a smoother launch of messages directly.  This, in turn, leads to the fast performance of the chat platform.  
• Free usage: The best part about this chat solution is that you don’t need to pay for the monthly technology. However, you might be required to pay the server cost. 

Disadvantages

• More time and money consumption: This chat solution will require you to invest more time and money in building your chat platform as it is not readymade and the developer needs to craft everything from scratch. This might cause delays in your business communication process.
• Lack of experience for chat solution development: Developing this chat solution is not an easy task. You might be required to seek expert help, which would again incur additional costs. This might make you want to switch to a ready-made chat solution.
  

Which Chat Solution Should You Choose?

Every business is unique and so are its requirements. It is advised to perform full-fledged research before making your final choice. Opt for a chat solution that meets your business communication goals and can offer customized chat features.  

We hope this article helps you identify the best chat solution for your business. What are you waiting for? Choose the best chat solution and take a step forward towards building the best chat platform to ace your communication goals!