Exyte Chat is an open-source library provided by Exyte. Exyte is a software development agency with a remote team headquartered in New York and Dubai. They offer their iOS Chat library for you to integrate into your codebase on your own as a showcase of what their team can do for you. It's an awesome way to showcase yourself, but you have to be aware of the effort involved if you choose to go with Exyte Chat compared to Stream Chat.
Exyte Chat requires you to bring your own backend.
They state it is a SwiftUI library. But be aware, at the time of this writing, the main list of chat messages is just a wrapped UITableView.
Nothing wrong with that, but just be aware of that fact. Down the line, it probably will cause severe restrictions when you need to customize your chat experience.
Bring Your Own Backend, or Don’t?
Another huge difference between Exyte Chat and Stream Chat is that Exyte Chat requires you to bring your own backend. They recommend using Firebase Firestore as a chat backend. This is a solid platform to choose from, but it is also “just a database.” You still need to take care of many details related to notifications, attachments, and everything else that comes with a chat implementation.
You could put Stream’s Chat API as a backend behind Exyte Chat. But we think it is much better to go with our complete package. By opting for Stream Chat instead of Exyte Chat, you will get a fully integrated solution that scales with you as you go. Using our free tier you will most likely get a lot further compared to using the free tier of Firebase Firestore.
On top of that, you need to do all the integration and maintenance of connecting Exyte Chat to Firestore, AND you only get basic chat features compared to Stream Chat’s full UI kit of chat functionality.
Supported Platforms
Exyte Chat is iOS only. Stream Chat offers SDKs for React, React Native, Javascript, Swift (iOS), Android, and Flutter. All of Stream’s client-side SDKs come with up-to-date, thoughtfully designed UI kits supporting common chat use cases: social chat, team collaboration, live streams, in-game chat, and integrates with your AI solution. Your designers can choose to use Stream Chat UI kits as provided or pick and choose components for a more customized user experience.
Choose Stream Chat, and you will be done in mere days compared to weeks of work and future maintenance if you choose Exyte Chat.
Developer Support and Migration
When working with any of Stream’s SDKs, we know how important it is to get exceptional developer support. We provide dedicated support channels and elaborate documentation. We are here to help you succeed with Stream Feeds, Stream Chat, and Stream Video.
As a part of supporting you on your journey when integrating with Stream, all of our frontend SDKs are thoroughly documented and open source. That way, you can know with absolute certainty what is going on in your codebase when needed
Suppose you are already deep in Exyte Chat and are running into issues. Please be aware that if you migrate to Stream Chat, we can help you integrate all your existing chats into our platform.
Conclusion
We love open source and enjoyed exploring and comparing what Exyte Chat did in their open-source library.
In this case, Stream Chat would beat Exyte Chat hands down in a head-to-head comparison. However, we also feel it would not be fair to pit ourselves against Exyte Chat in such a way. Excyte Chat is clearly a piece of reference material made by its creators to showcase its team, which is an amazing group of engineers you would want to work with.
So, if you happen to decide to work with Exyte and they offer to implement a chat feature in your product, tell them to consider using Stream Chat. You will be gobsmacked by how fast and full-featured Exyte will deliver that chat feature to you.
And if you want to get started with Stream Chat, sign up for a free Stream Chat account today and start coding.
