Open Source Sendbird Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Sendbird.
The best open source alternative to Sendbird is Ethora. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Sendbird alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Sendbird is SAMA.
Sendbird alternatives are mainly Automation but may also be Collaboration & Communication or Customer Support & Success. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Sendbird.
A messaging SDK platform with AI bots for web, mobile and WordPress, for developers adding chat to an app they already have.
Ethora packages real-time messaging, AI bots and the backend behind them into SDKs you drop into an existing application. The repository itself is a monorepo that gathers every SDK, tool and sample app as a git submodule, so one clone gives you the whole ecosystem to navigate.
Messaging runs over XMPP with a REST API in front of it. A set of hosted services covers the web app, the API, the XMPP gateway and a playground for trying the React chat component and exporting code before writing any of your own. Every SDK also supports pointing at a self-hosted server.
The clients are published separately and tracked against a shared feature matrix.
- React: a JavaScript chat SDK for embedding conversations in any web app.
- React Native: one component covering iOS and Android.
- Android: a native Kotlin SDK.
- iOS: a native Swift SDK.
- WordPress: a plugin that adds a chat widget with no code.
- Bots and agents: an XMPP and LLM bot framework, RAG demos, a site crawler and an MCP server for IDE and agent integration.
Shared capabilities include sending, editing, deleting and replying to messages, reactions, typing and delivery indicators, paginated history, media, one to one and group rooms, unread counters, push notifications, prebuilt UI and an offline cache, with coverage varying by platform. A setup command scaffolds a project, and the matrix is reviewed monthly.
Chat server and messaging protocol built on uWebSockets, offered as an alternative to XMPP, with web and Flutter clients alongside it.
SAMA is a chat server and a messaging protocol written as a deliberate alternative to XMPP, which its authors call the only widely spread standard in this space. It arrives as a server plus working clients rather than a specification to implement yourself.
The server runs on Node.js with uWebSockets, keeps its data in MongoDB and uses Redis for cluster coordination. Nodes find each other through Redis records carrying each node's WebSocket address, establish links with a ping and pong handshake, and retry on a widening delay when a connection breaks. When a node vanishes for good, a surviving node clears the records it left behind, so user and device state does not go stale.
The API is documented one area at a time.
- Users: accounts, authentication and the calls around a user record.
- Conversations: creating and managing conversations between users.
- Messages: sending, delivering and retrieving message history.
- Activities: presence and status for connected devices.
- Address book: contact lists reconciled against server side users.
- Push notifications: delivery to devices that are not currently connected.
The server is GPL 3.0, and clients exist for the web and for Flutter in their own repositories. Local development, full deployment and end to end tests are documented on the project's docs site, and the whole stack can be exercised on a public cloud instance before anything is installed.
