Chat SDK Comparison: Architecture, Scale & Pricing Across 9 Providers

Chat SDKs often promise the same things. You've heard it before - fast integration, real-time messaging, moderation, scale.

The differences show up in the details. How does each one handle offline users? What does the pricing include? And how locked into their UI are you, versus building your own?

This post compares nine chat SDKs and APIs on what matters most in practice, including use case, architecture, and pricing.

How to Evaluate a Chat SDK

Before comparing vendors feature-by-feature, it helps to know what you're actually building.

"Chat SDK" now covers at least three different things:

1. Person-to-person messaging (the focus of this piece)
2. AI-agent/copilot conversations
3. Dedicated customer-support chat

A tool built for one of these isn't automatically good at the others. Everything below assumes you're evaluating for user-to-user messaging.

Here's what to consider.

Use Case Fit

Start by thinking about how your end users will actually use chat within your app.

For example, this might be:

• Support-desk workflows (ticketing, agent handoff)
• Social, marketplace, or community apps
• Bundling chat with voice and video from the start
• Trust and safety as a requirement (dating, marketplaces, kids' apps, live communities)

If moderation is core to your product, treat it like voice or video. Decide up front whether it runs on the same infrastructure as your chat, or gets added later from a separate vendor. Regulated surfaces (the EU's DSA, the UK and Australia Online Safety Acts, COPPA) tend to force that call sooner.

A quick way to narrow the field is to look at what similar apps in your space use. If an SDK was built for your type of product, its defaults will likely already fit your needs.

Platform and Language Coverage

This is worth checking first, because it can rule a vendor out completely.

If there's no real client library for a platform you ship to, you're either wrapping their REST API yourself or ruling the vendor out entirely.

Check both client SDKs (like iOS, Android, web, React Native, Flutter) and server-side language support if you need backend integration.

Architecture and Delivery Guarantees

How a client stays connected shapes the actual user experience.

Keep in mind:

• Persistent WebSocket, long-polling, and pub/sub-layered architectures all handle real-time delivery differently.
• Check whether messages can arrive out of order, and how the SDK handles a message sent while a user was offline.
• A chat app that silently drops or reorders messages under bad network conditions creates a worse experience than one that's simply a bit slower but consistent.

Scalability & Reliability

Total users and peak concurrent connections are different numbers, and vendors often meter (and bill) them separately.

For example, a support app with 50,000 registered users might only ever have 200 people chatting at once. A livestream chat might spike to thousands of concurrent connections in a single channel for an hour.

Check both numbers against your actual usage pattern; don't only look at monthly active users.

On the reliability side, uptime and redundancy tell you what happens when something goes wrong.

Consider this:

• You should look for a formal SLA tied to a specific uptime number. Also, check whether the network operates across multiple regions with failover.
• Public status pages (where available) tend to be a more honest signal than a marketing claim, since they show actual incident history.

AI Features

Most vendors now build AI directly into their messaging stack. Current offerings often include some combination of the following:

• AI-assisted moderation (toxicity and image detection)
• Translation and smart replies
• Conversation summarization
• In some cases, a full AI-agent/copilot layer running alongside human chat

Whether you need any of this depends on your product, but it's good to know which vendors treat it as a "core" initiative. That affects both cost and how well it's actually integrated.

How It Plays With Other Real-Time Products

Several vendors in this comparison also sell video, voice, AI moderation, or activity-feed APIs, and increasingly position chat as one piece of a bundle.

If you expect to need, for example, livestreaming or a social feed alongside chat, using the same vendor can mean less integration work later. But, that only pays off if you actually need those other products. Buying a bundle for one piece you'll use is a cost you don't need to take on.

Customization Depth

Think about how much of the interface is yours to shape, versus given to you.

• Pre-built UI: Ship faster, less code to maintain, but you're working within the vendor's design patterns
• Headless/low-level client: Full control over the interface, but you're building and maintaining the UI yourself
• Both: Some vendors let you start with pre-built components and drop to the low-level client later without switching products

Neither approach is objectively better. It depends on how much frontend work you want to own.

Flexibility and Hosting Model

These are two separate questions you should ask together.

• UI approach: Does the SDK hand you a fully pre-built chat interface you skin and ship, a headless client you build your own UI on top of, or both?
• Hosting: Is this managed-cloud only, or does the vendor offer self-hosted/on-premise deployment for teams that need direct control over where data lives?

Whichever you choose depends on how much you want to build yourself versus how much control you need.

Pricing Model

Most vendors bill based on monthly active users, but "active" is defined differently by each vendor.

• Some count a single login regardless of device count
• Others charge separately for peak concurrent connections on top of MAU
• A few bill by message volume, connection minutes, or a feature-gated tier structure

The model matters because it determines how your bill increases as you grow.

Common Billing Terms in This Space

Chat SDK pricing uses a handful of terms that mean slightly different things depending on the vendor. Here's what you'll run into in this comparison:

• MAU (Monthly Active User): The core metric almost everyone bills on. The catch is that "active" isn't standardized. Some vendors count one login as one MAU, no matter how many devices connect; others count differently. Make sure to read the fine print.
• PCC (Peak Concurrent Connections): The highest number of users connected to chat at the exact same moment. This is a different number from MAU, and several vendors bill it separately. A spike in simultaneous usage can hit a PCC limit even if you're nowhere near your MAU cap.
• Connection-minutes: Instead of counting users, this bills for every minute a client holds an open connection, whether or not they're actively sending messages. An idle but connected user still accrues cost under this model.
• Message volume: Some vendors bill per message sent or delivered, rather than per user.
• Overage: The rate charged once you exceed what's included in your plan. Don't assume one flat rate covers everything.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Let's take a high-level look at nine top providers.

Why These?

Each of these providers is built primarily as a chat SDK or API for developers to integrate into their own product.

We did not include any white-label apps, internal team-chat tools, or general-purpose backends where chat is a side feature.

That scope leaves out some tools people sometimes lump into this category, like:

• Firebase Firestore and Supabase can absolutely power a chat feature, but they're general-purpose databases with no chat-specific tooling (message ordering, presence, moderation) built in. You'd be building a chat SDK's worth of logic yourself on top of them.
• Matrix/Element is an open protocol and reference implementation rather than a vendor product with the same kind of managed pricing and support this piece is comparing.
• Discord's API is built for Discord's own platform, not for embedding chat into a third-party app.

9 Chat SDKs Compared

Each of the following sections covers use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing. We start with Stream since that's us, then move through the rest.

Stream

Stream is a chat API and SDK for developers building chat into an existing product, like social apps, marketplaces, on-demand/gig platforms, community and creator apps, and livestream chat alongside video. It supports HIPAA-eligible configurations, which show up in healthcare and telehealth use cases.

Platform coverage spans iOS, Android, Flutter, React, React Native, Angular, JavaScript, Unity, and Unreal, plus server SDKs for Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET, and Go.

It ships both a low-level client (for teams building fully custom UI) and pre-built UI kits, so you can start with the pre-built option and drop to the low-level client later without switching vendors. It's a managed-cloud product; there's no self-hosted option.

Strengths

• Scalability: Stream can scale to 5 million concurrent users in a single channel at under 40ms latency, with API responses typically ~9ms. This is achieved through edge routing, Redis-backed caching, and WebSocket-layer optimizations like cuckoo filters and skip lists to keep presence checks fast at volume. There's no hard cap on concurrent users, members, messages, or channels.

• Scale and adoption: Stream powers communication for over 1 billion end users worldwide. Integration is fast on the developer side, too. Most teams reach their first working message in under 50 lines of code. In a survey of Stream's own customers, 70% reported that integrating Stream Chat increased user engagement.
• Reliability: A 99.999% uptime SLA is available on enterprise plans. The backend runs on Go, and Stream operates its own global edge network across various server locations rather than routing everything through a single region, which keeps latency low worldwide.
• Multi-product scope: Stream also offers SDKs for Video, Activity Feeds, AI Moderation, and Vision Agents. They're sold separately, but they run on the same backend, so adding one later means no second vendor and no reworking your data model. Moderation especially stays a single system across all your surfaces instead of a bolt-on per product.
• Platform breadth: Unity and Unreal support matters specifically for gaming chat, a use case several competitors in this list don't cover natively.

Weaknesses

• Stream is built around full customization, so it could be more setup than needed for a simple, single-purpose support widget.
• AI-based moderation and other advanced features are available as add-ons rather than in the base plan.
• PCC is billed as a separate metric from MAU, so a usage spike can hit two limits and two charges at once instead of one.

Pricing

Stream's chat plans are priced by MAU, with higher tiers providing access to more advanced features and capabilities.

1. Free tier: 1,000 MAU and 100 concurrent connections per month
2. Start: Starts at $399/month for up to 10,000 MAU
3. Elevate: Starts at $599/month for up to 10,000 MAU
4. Enterprise: Talk to Sales

Sendbird

Sendbird started as a chat API and SDK but has expanded into a communications API platform. This includes chat, voice/video calling, business messaging, and an AI concierge product (Delight.ai) bundled under one vendor.

Sendbird's solution pages point to healthcare, financial services, on-demand/delivery, marketplaces, retail, and social/community apps. They also offer a dedicated support-desk product and Salesforce connector, which makes it a natural fit for teams building customer support chat specifically.

Platform coverage spans iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), Android (Kotlin/Jetpack Compose), JavaScript/TypeScript, React, React Native, and Flutter, plus a server-side Platform API. It's managed-cloud only; no self-hosted option. One Sendbird "application" maps to a single client app, though users on that app can reach it from any supported platform.

Strengths

• Channel architecture built for different scales: Standard group channels cap at 100 members (300 on dedicated instances), while "open channels" use dynamic partitioning to support public chats with millions of participants, and "supergroup channels" scale private group chat to thousands of members.
• Built-in moderation and compliance: Get TLS 1.0-1.3, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC coverage, plus a moderation dashboard included on paid plans. This is useful for regulated industries that don't want to build this themselves.
• Multi-product scope: Chat sits alongside Sendbird's voice/video calling and Delight.ai concierge product, so teams that expect to need AI-agent tooling or voice/video later can add it under the same vendor without a separate integration.
• Aggregate scale: Sendbird reports 7 billion+ end users and 300 million+ MAU across its platform, with 99.9%+ uptime reported on its communications platform page.

Weaknesses

• PCC is capped at 5% of your MAU limit on Starter and Pro plans: This is a real ceiling that can matter more than the MAU number itself for apps with high simultaneous usage.
• Message retention is limited: You only get 6 months unless you're on Enterprise.
• Sendbird's only permanent free option is the Developer plan: This is intended for testing, not production traffic. The more generous 1,000 MAU free tier commonly advertised is actually a 30-day Pro trial; once it expires, accounts drop down to the Developer plan.

Pricing

• Starter: $429/month for 10,000 MAU (billed annually)
• Pro: $579/month with added features like translation & image moderation
• Enterprise: Custom-quoted

Overages apply to both MAU and PCC once you exceed plan limits.

Twilio Conversations API

Twilio Conversations is one API within Twilio's larger Messaging product family. It's the one built for multi-party, cross-channel conversation threads. Conversations lets chat, SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger all flow into the same conversation object.

Twilio fits teams that need a single thread to follow a customer across channels. Someone starts in SMS, moves to in-app chat, and the conversation history stays intact either way.

It's a natural fit for customer support and conversational commerce, and it underpins Twilio's own Flex contact center and Frontline products.

Platform coverage includes JavaScript, Android, and iOS client SDKs, plus a REST API for server-side use. It's managed-cloud only, with no pre-built chat UI. You build the interface yourself on top of the API.

Strengths

• True omnichannel threading: This is the one capability on this list that a chat-only SDK genuinely can't replicate. A single conversation can span chat, SMS, and WhatsApp with shared history.
• Reconnect handling: Client SDKs auto-reconnect after network loss or backgrounding, with message history cached locally and re-synced, plus a synchronization-status event tells you when the client has fully caught up.
• Platform-level reliability: 99.95%+ monthly API uptime and 193 billion+ messages sent and received annually across Twilio's broader Messaging network, though this is a platform-wide figure rather than one specific to Conversations.
• Ecosystem fit: Teams already using Twilio for SMS or WhatsApp add chat under the same account and billing relationship rather than a new vendor entirely.

Weaknesses

• There's no pre-built chat UI: Expect more frontend work than UI-kit vendors like Stream, Sendbird, or CometChat.
• Billing has more moving parts than a flat MAU model: This means per-active-user pricing, plus separate SMS/MMS/WhatsApp message rates, plus media storage, plus any phone numbers you provision.
• It's less of a fit for teams that only need in-app chat and have no plans to touch SMS or WhatsApp, since you'd be paying for and configuring a multichannel system to do a single-channel job.

Pricing

Starts at $0.05 per active monthly user, plus media storage (starting around $0.25/GB/month), plus standard Twilio SMS/MMS/WhatsApp rates for messages sent on those channels. Volume pricing kicks in above 20,000 MAU.

PubNub

PubNub started as a general-purpose real-time messaging network (pub/sub for IoT, live dashboards, multiplayer games, and chat alike), and its Chat SDKs sit on top of that same core network rather than being a standalone chat backend.

Because chat is one of several things PubNub's network is built to carry, it fits teams that may need chat alongside other real-time features (like live dashboards, IoT device state, and multiplayer presence) under one platform, rather than teams that only need chat.

Strengths

• Global low-latency network: Clients connect over WebSocket, TCP, or MQTT (with long-polling as a fallback) to the nearest of 15+ global Points of Presence. PubNub cites response times of under 30ms.
• Reliable reconnect handling: SDKs reconnect automatically and catch up using a saved timetoken, with ordering guaranteed per-channel via serial timetoken IDs.
• Reliability claims: Get 99.999% uptime SLA, plus GDPR and HIPAA compliance.
• Interoperability by design: Since chat is one of several things the network is built to carry, it's a solid fit if you also need IoT telemetry, live location tracking, or multiplayer state in the same product.

Weaknesses

• No built-in moderation dashboard: Profanity filtering, image moderation, and similar logic have to be written as custom PubNub Functions, a serverless layer you code yourself.
• The default reconnect catch-up buffer only holds about 100 messages for up to 20 minutes; recovering anything beyond that requires the paid Message Persistence add-on.
• Strict message ordering across multiple publishers needs an app-level sequence field. The platform's default guarantee is per-channel.
• Because Chat SDKs sit on top of general pub/sub, some chat-specific conveniences that come standard elsewhere (a built-in admin dashboard, for instance) aren't part of the core offering.

Pricing

• Free tier: Covers up to 200 MAU, 1 million function calls/month, and 1GB of storage (7-day retention).
• Starter: $98/month for 1,000 MAU with storage up to 6 months.
• Pro: Moves to unlimited storage and custom volume pricing, commonly landing around $3,000/month at 100,000 MAU.

All plans include unlimited channels and messages; you pay for MAU, not per message.

Agora

Agora built its name on real-time voice and video (SD-RTN, its global low-latency network reportedly carrying 80 billion+ minutes of voice/video monthly), and Chat is a separate product on top of a different underlying architecture. It's a persistent socket-based architecture with a focus on high-concurrency messaging.

Platform coverage spans Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Flutter, React Native, and Unity. It's managed-cloud only, with a mix of headless API and some pre-built UI components.

Strengths

• High-concurrency architecture: Chat has an asynchronous design intended to handle millions of concurrent requests, with MSYNC maintaining the real-time connection and a "smart heartbeat" that adjusts ping frequency based on network conditions to reduce battery and data use on mobile.
• Reliable offline delivery: Messages are queued server-side and automatically delivered when a recipient reconnects or logs back in, with offline push (via FCM/APNs) covering the case where the app isn't running at all.
• Product bundling: Teams already invested in Agora's video/voice products get chat under the same account and data model, rather than a separate integration.

Weaknesses

• No specific concurrency or latency benchmark published for Chat itself: Agora's well-documented sub-400ms latency claims apply to its RTC (voice/video) network, not Chat. Its Chat docs describe "millisecond scale" delivery without a specific test result behind it.
• Two separate usage metrics to track: MAU and PCC are billed differently. A multi-device user counts once toward MAU but multiple times toward PCC.
• Only 10% of MAU is included in the free PCC allowance before overages kick in at $5/connection.
• Translation and content moderation are separate paid add-ons.

Pricing

• Free tier: Covers up to 500 MAU
• Starter: $349/month for 5,000 MAU
• Pro: $699/month for 10,000 MAU

CometChat

CometChat is a chat API and SDK built around fast integration via UI kits, with a global edge network and both cloud and self-hosted (on-premise) deployment options.

It markets itself toward SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and community apps. Dating, telehealth, and education specifically get their own UI kit variations.

Platform coverage spans Web (JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue), iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, and Ionic (via Capacitor/Cordova). It's one of two vendors in this comparison offering a genuine self-hosted option alongside managed cloud.

Strengths

• Fast, low-latency delivery: WebSocket-based persistent connections are automatically managed by the SDK, with sub-100ms real-time delivery and guaranteed message ordering. Automatic message syncing, caching, and pagination handle offline/history without custom build work, and reconnection after a network drop is automatic.
• Self-hosted option at real scale: On-premise deployment documentation describes support for 10,000 to 250,000+ MAU with linear scalability and a sub-100ms latency target, which is one of the more detailed self-hosted scale claims among vendors in this comparison.
• Global reach: Their edge network spans 35+ locations.
• Vertical-specific tooling: Purpose-built UI kit variations for dating, telehealth, and education reduce setup work for those specific product types.

Weaknesses

• Pricing considerations: MAU overage and concurrent-connection overage are billed separately. This means there are two metrics to track, similar to Sendbird and Agora. Voice and video calling are also billed separately per minute, on top of chat.
• Gated moderation and AI features: These are included in higher tiers rather than in the base plan.
• Group chat has a functional ceiling below its stated cap: CometChat's own docs allow up to 100,000 members in a group, but once a group exceeds 300 members, conversation and unread-message-count updates stop working correctly.
• No dedicated gaming SDK: Unlike Stream, PubNub, and Agora, CometChat doesn't publish Unity or Unreal support. This is a gap if gaming chat is part of your use case.

Pricing

• Free "Build" plan: Covers up to 100 MAU with core features
• Basic: $299/month for essential features
• Advanced: $399/month, includes AI rule-based moderation, HIPAA, translation, and other advanced features
• Enterprise: $999/month with zero overages and OpenAI-powered moderation

Ably

Ably, like PubNub, builds its Chat SDK as a layer on top of a general-purpose pub/sub network rather than shipping a standalone chat backend. Each chat "room" is one underlying Pub/Sub channel, and chat operations (messages, typing, reactions, presence) are all Pub/Sub messages under the hood.

It fits teams that need chat alongside other real-time features on one platform, like live data dashboards, collaborative editing, IoT, or multiplayer state.

Platform coverage for the dedicated Chat SDK is currently JavaScript, TypeScript, and React. Ably's broader Pub/Sub SDK library spans many more languages and platforms for teams building on the lower-level product directly. It's managed-cloud only, with a headless client and no pre-built chat UI.

Strengths

• Detailed, published reliability numbers: This includes a global mean latency of 37ms, round-trip latency under 50ms at the 99th percentile from top PoPs, and under 99ms mean across all 700+ PoPs, including remote ones. Plus, you'll get a 99.999% global availability target (about 5 minutes 15 seconds of downtime per year).
• Strong delivery guarantees: Message ordering is guaranteed from any single publisher to all subscribers, with a 100% message delivery guarantee once a message is acknowledged as accepted, backed by multi-region redundancy.
• Resilient network design: Clients connect to the nearest of 700+ global points of presence, with regional clusters operating semi-independently and communicating peer-to-peer across regions.

Weaknesses

• No built-in moderation: Profanity filtering, banning, and similar logic have to be custom-built, the same gap as PubNub.
• Narrow chat-specific platform coverage (JS/TS/React only): Especially compared to other vendors in this comparison (even though the underlying Pub/Sub product supports far more platforms).
• Pricing is usage-based (connection-minutes plus messages) rather than flat MAU: This takes more modeling to predict costs than a simple per-user price. Good to keep in mind for apps with long-lived idle connections, since connection minutes accrue even when a client isn't actively sending anything.

Pricing

Usage-based: billed on connection-minutes (every minute a client holds an open connection, active or idle) plus messages published/delivered. An MAU-based pricing option is also available as an alternative model. Channels beyond an included allowance are billed separately.

TalkJS

TalkJS is a chat API built around a pre-built, highly customizable frontend and out-of-the-box notifications (push, email, SMS, desktop) rather than a bare low-level client you assemble yourself.

It works for teams that want a fast, mostly frontend integration. Marketplaces, auction platforms, and two-sided services are common use cases. If you need chat live in minutes with minimal backend work, it's a nice fit.

Platform coverage is JavaScript, React, React Native, and Flutter, plus a REST API. It's managed-cloud only.

Strengths

• Fast, mostly pre-built integration: A customizable chat UI ships out of the box, alongside push, email, SMS, and desktop notifications with no separate service to wire up.
• Exactly-once message delivery: Sends support an idempotency key, so retried requests are guaranteed to process exactly once within a 24-hour window rather than risking duplicate messages.
• Built-in moderation: Includes word blocklists, contact-info masking, and a dashboard for monitoring and deleting messages, plus REST API/webhook access for custom logic (rules-based rather than AI-assisted).
• Modern architecture option: A newer "chat UI components" package offers framework-agnostic React/web components with an open-source default theme, as an alternative to the original pre-built inbox widget.

Weaknesses

• Group chat size is capped by plan: 100 participants on Basic, 300 on Growth (plus separate, higher "guest" limits) with overage charges beyond that.
• The core library loads dynamically from TalkJS's CDN rather than shipping as a bundled dependency: This is noteworthy if you have a strict content security policy or need fully offline bundling.
• A single subscription covers just one website or app: Multiple products need multiple subscriptions. If you need a fully custom, headless UI or expect very large group chats, you'll likely want to consider another vendor on this list, given TalkJS's per-plan participant caps.
• Gated features: Advanced features like real-time translation, message search, and SLA guarantees are only available in higher tiers.

Pricing

• Basic: $279/month, including 10,000 MAU (additional MAU at $0.04/user)
• Growth: $569/month, including 25,000 MAU (additional MAU at $0.03/user)
• Enterprise: Custom

Development mode is free indefinitely; going to production requires entering billing info.

MirrorFly

MirrorFly is the outlier in this list: built on XMPP and self-hosted by default, rather than the managed-cloud model every other vendor here uses. Teams run it on their own servers, private cloud, or a dedicated instance MirrorFly hosts for them, and retain direct ownership of where data lives.

It's positioned for teams that need self-hosting for data sovereignty, compliance, or cost-at-scale reasons. This includes telehealth, banking/financial services, telecom, and social/community platforms.

Platform coverage spans Android, iOS, Web, React Native, and Flutter. Unlike the other eight vendors in this comparison, self-hosted is the default rather than an alternative option.

Strengths

• Full data control: Self-hosting means your team, not a vendor, controls where data lives. This is relevant for regulated industries with strict data-residency requirements.
• Generous concurrent-connection allowances: PCC allowances scale with plan tier (10% of MAU on the entry tier, 25% on the mid tier, and 50%+ on the top tier), a notably more generous PCC-to-MAU ratio than Agora's or Sendbird's 5-10%.
• Encryption coverage: Includes TLS/SSL, AES-256, and DTLS/SRTP for calls, with GDPR and HIPAA compliance across tiers.

Weaknesses

• No published concurrency or latency benchmarks: Public technical documentation is thinner than the other vendors in this comparison, and self-hosted materials emphasize customization and data ownership over specific performance numbers.
• No free trial in the traditional sense: The entry-level tier is free for the lifetime of use but limited to basic 1-to-1 chat, with group chat, moderation, translation, and voice/video all gated to paid tiers.
• Being self-hosted by default means your team owns more of the operational burden (scaling, patching, uptime) than with a fully managed vendor, in exchange for the data control.

Pricing

• Essentials Plan: $399/month for unlimited messaging and storage + private and group chat
• Premium Plan: $999/month, includes 7,500 minutes of 1:1 and group voice/video calling

MirrorFly also offers a self-hosted option with full source code access and on-premise deployment. Pricing is not publicly available.

Which One Fits Which Use Case?

Closing Thoughts

None of these nine is a wrong choice.

They're built for different tradeoffs. A team building a livestream chat app and a team building a telehealth platform with strict data-residency requirements shouldn't end up at the same vendor, and the criteria in this piece are meant to help you figure out which tradeoffs matter for your specific situation.

Pricing models, feature gates, and published benchmarks change often in this space, so treat the specifics here as a snapshot rather than a permanent reference. It's worth checking each vendor's current docs before you commit. We'll revisit this comparison as the landscape shifts.