15 August 2023
The best integrated community chat tools for 2023—an ultimate list for businesses
There are solutions for community and support chats, with focus on engagement, on comments and on small cozy parties. Learn and make the choice.
Building communities around the platform is a reliable way for retention and revenue growth. You can scale users’ communication with special tools like in-app chats, add engagement widgets and marketing tools there. If these chats are sticky enough, they will become the users’ favorite place to discuss related topics, share opinions, and communicate with like-minded people.
Making the user experience in these in-app chats much closer to familiar messengers and apps like live chats with comments on YouTube, Twitch is crucial. But building in-app chat that will be convenient for users and replace habitual messengers is a challenging deal and requires a particular product and tech team. Much easier to partner with a SaaS company to implement a fully customizable solution with proven efficiency.
Let’s look at the most popular and convenient chats that are easy to integrate and can boost your users’ conversation.
Watchers
Fully customizable community live chats that can be integrated on different platforms. The most related domains for Watchers are video platforms, sports apps, betting, and stock trading services. It means Watchers chats are suitable for live content when users have topics to discuss in real-time, such as sports games, betting odds, or fresh shows and films on VoD platforms. Also, Watchers provides the idea of a second screen as crucial to keep sports audiences and attract Gen Zers. Watchers is a plug-and-play solution with almost no development resource needed to integrate.
Watchers’ developed chats help partners to gather a lot of user feedback, literally stay in touch with the real audience; the company offers semantic and sentiment analysis of UGC content on chats. So, clients can get high-quality first data.
Also, it is suitable for big events with thousands of concurrent users.
Advantages: developed marketing and engagements tools such as coupons, quizzes and polls, copy-bet and copy-deal widgets; different moderation options; fast integration process; high expertise in the communities instruments for media and sports companies, chatbot integration; intuitive user journey that is quite close to messengers’ usage.
Domains: video platforms, sports, betting and stock trading services
Founded in UK, 2021
Sceenic
The product of this England-located company is firstly about watch together experience—provided by chat based on SDK and API technology. That can be film, series, sports, or live music events. These tools provide opportunities for simultaneous watching while communicating via audio or video, co-watching with guests and celebs, or just a private watch party as it became so popular during the pandemic. Users can send invitations to each other, and notifications about their friends’ groups. Analytics allow partners to know in real-time how many rooms are opened on the platform, how much time users spend the room.
Advantages: a high quality of video chats; vast experience in the organizing watch-party events for 10-20 participants
Domains: video platforms, sports, live events
Founded in UK, 2013
Amity
White-label social features for apps or websites with ready-to-use SDKs and APIs. The most common features are group and 1-1 live chats. User profiles are also available, and it is a popular functionality that matches with several industries such as fitness and health care, because it's a simple way to provide consultations for users.
By the way, Amity doesn't have any preferable domains and works with any of them: retail, fintech, mentioned health & wellness and fitness.
Advantages: easy scalability, ready SDK solution, convenient for large companies and small businesses providing personal services
Domains: any
Based in Thailand in 2020
Sendbird
The company provides integrated chat and support chat tools, desks, audio calls, and live streaming on websites and apps. The most popular Sendbird's features are based on the users' opportunity to communicate via video, send gifs, voice messages, and pictures to chats. So, users can exchange emotions in any possible way. Also, there is a user profile to save all their chats—private and public.
Advantages: many supported opportunities for communication
Domains: market places, social communities, retail and digital health
Founded in the USA in 2013
LiveLike
LiveLike specializes more in interaction with audiences rather than building communities. Seems like the platform tends to develop engagement tools such as widgets, alerts, and notifications, but not the chat platform itself. It helps activate users and grow revenue but gives fewer opportunities to listen to the audience.
Advantages: engagement, information, and deal widgets for revenue growth
Domains: entertainment and sports platforms, fintech, e-commerce
Founded in the USA in 2015
Arena
The company offers improving platforms with live blogs, chats, and direct messages. Users can communicate with text and voice messages, and these conversations can be the base for the first-party data that Arena gathers for the clients. However, it compensates with its agile performance and rapid responsiveness, ensuring a seamless experience through mobile browsers. Cons: as they claimed in July 2023, Arena's dashboard lacks iOS and Android apps.
Advantages: different types of messages are available, fast implementation of the solution
Domains: events, entertainment, sports
Founded in the USA in 2018
Openweb
OpenWeb, formerly known as Spot.IM, is a social interaction platform focused on fostering online communities around digital content. By partnering with publishers, OpenWeb provides comprehensive moderation services. Headquartered in New York, the company maintains a global presence with offices in Israel, California, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada. OpenWeb's cutting-edge technology empowers publishers and content creators to effectively manage comment sections, engage in polls, and curate live blogs. Their diverse product suite encompasses a dedicated module for streamlined topic tracking, an intuitive information dashboard, and a range of adaptable advertising modules. The platform's growth is spearheaded by its commitment to innovation in enhancing user engagement and interaction.
One of the company’s goals is cultivating valuable insights and enhancing business outcomes. They provide sentiment and emotions analysis to optimize content engagement, offer essential data insights on trending topics, compelling articles, and user engagement. It helps partners to revolutionize the content strategy.
Advantages: developed comment section; deep work with the analytics and developing ads tools; the strong company’s values for saving publishers and against toxicity
Domains: media and publishers
Founded in 2015 in the USA
Geneva
Geneva is the group chat app connecting users to the other people they want to meet and the things they want to do near them. Geneva has video, audio, chat, broadcast, and forum rooms. These groups have the tools people need to keep guests and their parties organized, up-to-date, and secure. But if previous companies work with platforms, Geneva works directly with end users who download the app and create their chat rooms.
Founded in 2019 in the USA
Pubnub
This company is more about building business tools, not communities, but they also provide in-app chat tools and engagement widgets. PubNub is a platform designed to construct and manage lightning-fast, dependable real-time interactive mobile, web, and IoT applications, from essential chat functions to geolocation and dispatch services. They focus on security and empower businesses to seamlessly integrate these capabilities. Globally, more than 2000 companies foster connections among customers through their technology.
Advantages: scalability of the service, opportunity to build the whole app based on the PubNub variants of SDK
Domains: Enterprise Software, gaming, Ed-tech, Fintech, sports
Founded in the USA in 2010
Comet chat
CometChat's communication platform facilitates effortless text chat (both one-on-one and group), voice and video calls, media sharing, and customer support chat. These features are available for websites and applications across various industries. The platform also aids partners in integrating their tools with new services from collaborators, fostering smoother connections.
Domains: Ed-tech, dating, live-streaming, marketplaces
Founded in the USA in 2009
