15 August 2023
The Best Integrated Community Chat Tools: An Ultimate List for Businesses
Do you plan to integrate community chat into your platform, but are overwhelmed by the many options? We've gathered 10 companies that look the most prominent. Learn and make the choice.
Building communities around the platform is a reliable way to increase retention and revenue. You can enhance users’ communication with specialised tools, such as in-app chats, engagement widgets, and marketing tools. If these chats are sticky enough, they will become the users’ favourite place to discuss related topics, share opinions, and communicate with like-minded people.
It is crucial to make the user experience in these in-app chats much closer to familiar messengers and apps like live chats with comments on YouTube and Twitch. However, building an in-app chat that is convenient for users and replaces habitual messengers is a challenging task that requires a specific product and tech team. It is much easier to partner with a SaaS company to implement a fully customisable solution with proven efficiency.
Let’s explore the most popular and convenient chat options, which are easy to integrate and can enhance your users’ conversations.
Watchers
Fully customisable community live chats that can be integrated on different platforms: any apps, websites, mobile or desktop web, and second-screen for TV. 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. Additionally, Watchers emphasises the importance of a second screen in retaining sports audiences and attracting Gen Zers. Watchers is a plug-and-play solution that requires almost no development resources from the client's side. Additionally, Watchers offers a range of widgets and tailored solutions for various industries.
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. Therefore, clients can obtain high-quality initial data.
Suitable for huge events with tens of thousands of concurrent users.
Advantages: marketing and engagement tools such as pop-ups, coupons, quizzes and polls, copy-bet and copy-deal widgets; various moderation options, including AI; fast integration process; high expertise in the community-building instruments for media and sports companies; chatbot integration; intuitive user journey that is quite close to usage of popular messengers.
Domains: video platforms; sports; gaming; stock trading services
Founded in the UK in 2021
Sceenic
The product of this England-based company is primarily focused on a watch-together experience, provided through chat based on SDK and API technology. That can be film, series, sports, or live music events. These tools offer opportunities to simultaneously watch and communicate via audio or video, co-watching with guests and celebrities, or hosting a private watch party, as it has become increasingly popular during the pandemic. Users can send invitations to each other and notifications about their friends’ groups. Analytics enable partners to view in real-time the number of rooms opened on the platform and the time users spend in each room.
Advantages: a high quality of video chats; vast experience in organising watch-party events for 10-20 participants
Domains: video platforms, sports, live events
Founded in the UK in 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 this is a popular functionality that matches several industries, such as fitness and healthcare, because it provides a simple way to offer consultations to users.
By the way, Amity doesn't have any preferred domains and works with any of them, including retail, fintech, health and 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 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: marketplaces, social communities, retail and digital health
Founded in the USA in 2013
LiveLike
LiveLike specialises more in interaction with audiences than in building communities. The platform appears to focus on developing engagement tools, such as widgets, alerts, and notifications, rather than 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 to improve platforms with live blogs, chats, and direct messages. Users can communicate via text and voice messages, and these conversations can serve as the basis for the first-party data that Arena gathers for its 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, and 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 and enhancing user engagement and interaction.
One of the company’s goals is to cultivate valuable insights and enhance business outcomes. They provide sentiment and emotion analysis to optimise content engagement, offer essential data insights on trending topics, compelling articles, and user engagement. It helps partners to revolutionise the content strategy.
Advantages: developed comment section; deep work with the analytics and developing ads tools; strong company values for saving publishers and against toxicity
Domains: media and publishers
Founded in 2015 in the USA
Geneva
Geneva is a group chat app that connects users with other people they want to meet and the things they want to do nearby. Geneva has video, audio, chat, broadcast, and forum rooms. These groups have the tools people need to keep guests and their parties organised, up-to-date, and secure. However, if previous companies worked with platforms, Geneva worked directly with end users who downloaded the app and created their chat rooms.
Founded in 2019 in the USA
PubNub
This company focuses on building business tools, rather than communities, but they also offer 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 integrate these capabilities seamlessly. 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
If you would like to integrate community chats with semantic or sentiment analysis, deep analytics, and AI-powered moderation into your app or website, please fill in the form below. We will help you find the best solution!
