People frequently come to us with a request to create a text chat. Some of them want a messenger with a chat being the main or the only function. Others need to add chat into different projects, such as telemedicine. In this article, we’ll take a look at the most popular options for chat creation.

All solutions for chats can be split into two categories:

1. Ready-made chat platforms, such as Firechat, SendBird.

They have prepared functionality for main chat options. The developer needs to put a small effort and time to add a chat into an app or a website. But the behavior of functionality has strict borders by a platform creator, and possibilities for customization are limited.

2. Technologies for exchanging data between client and server, such as Firebase Cloud Messaging, Node.js + Socket.io.

They allow building a very flexible chat solution upon them. Those technologies take time to implement but offer unlimited possibilities for customization.

All the four solutions are cross-platform, they work on the web, iOS, Android.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging is a platform for information exchange between a mobile app and a server. It’s widely used for notification send-out, and it can be used to build a chat on its foundation.

Advantages:

• Free for products with up to 100 simultaneous users.As a Google product, one can expect stable work when used correctly
• With comprehensive documentation and high popularity, developers can find any answers quickly, which saves time and money
• No need to buy an additional server, you can do everything on the Firebase server
• Thanks to the  Firestore database, the servers will automatically come into existence or be eliminated when they are not needed, which will save you a ton of money. Node.js and socket.io will make you create scaling separately
• Data is cached by default and is available for search in chat offline

#chat #nodejs #messaging-app #firebase #node