Chat

PubNub Chat: Our Flexible Chat SDK for Powerful In-App Chat

3 min read Nishith Agarwal on Nov 13, 2019
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Update, November 2024: This article is very old, but the great news is we have a modern take on the Chat SDK that supports multiple platforms. Find out more at https://www.pubnub.com/docs/chat/overview

is the digital transformation that’s undeniably taking over the world. More businesses today are adopting chat as the new medium of communication for their consumers; from chatting with friends on social media apps, to resolving delivery issues, to finding a match on your favorite dating app. And chat must be embedded within the consumer applications to provide a seamless experience that is rich, unique, and engaging for customers. We're pleased to announce PubNub Chat, our new product offering powerful APIs to add chat to your mobile and web applications easily. It'll allow you to get up and running quickly with pre-built features, without sacrificing the flexibility to create powerful and innovative experiences that suit the unique needs of your business and customers.

Built-in Chat Features with Simple Chat APIs

PubNub Chat comes preloaded with all the core chat features you can imagine. Building a chat application from scratch is time-consuming and can get complex. Why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can use our simple APIs to add these features quickly? 
  • Manage users and chatrooms
  • Share in-app messages
  • Send typing indicators
  • Delivery and read receipts
  • Show unread message counts
  • Trigger mobile push notifications
  • Add emoji reactions
  • Store messages in history
  • Show online/offline indicators
  • Data encryption
  • Manage permissions and controls
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Complete Flexibility and Control (And It’s Fast!)

With PubNub Chat, developers get full control and the flexibility to customize the user experience the way they want it instead of getting locked into a black-box solution. It's your UIs, your logic, and your chat experience. And while typically having this level of flexibility and control might mean it’ll take you a lot of time, PubNub Chat was built with speed of development in mind. So you don’t have to choose between building quickly and having full control -- you just get both. Our serverless functions allow you to execute custom logic on the edge to transform, block, route or aggregate in-flight messages as they go through the PubNub network. Imagine having full control over whether you want to block profanity, replace swear words with wildcards, or ban users if they continue to spam with inappropriate messages. You can also choose from our collection of pre-built integrations with third-party services like Amazon Cognito, IBM Watson, Sift Ninja, SendGrid and many more for extensibility beyond our network.

Reliability, Scale, Performance

Deploy your unique chat solution on the trusted PubNub network that delivers real-time messages in <30ms, guaranteeing 99.999% uptime SLA, and meeting compliance needs for HIPAA, GDPR, and more. Our network is built with security, scalability and reliability first, so you can focus on creating the best experience while PubNub takes care of the rest.

Let’s Get Started

Getting started with PubNub Chat is easy. Visit our Chat Documentation to find sample code,  reference guides, and tutorials to start building your first chat app.