Activity feeds are a cornerstone of modern apps, driving user engagement through personalized, real-time updates. Whether you're building a social platform, e-commerce app, or collaborative team tool, choosing the right solution for activity feeds can significantly impact your application's scalability, performance, and development speed.
Stream and Social.plus (formerly Amity) both offer robust activity feed functionality, but they differ in their approach, feature depth, and developer experience.
Stream focuses on delivering a highly personalized, scalable, and developer-friendly activity feed solution purpose-built to handle complex use cases with unmatched flexibility and efficient performance.
Stream supports three core feed types to power different parts of the user experience:
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For You Feed: A personalized discovery surface that blends trending, following, and interest-based content to keep users engaged from the very first session.
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Notification Feed: A real-time, aggregated stream of alerts and updates so users never miss important activity.
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News Feed: Chronological or ranked timelines of posts, updates, and conversations that feel familiar and keep communities active.
Beyond feeds, Stream also includes Stories and Groups/Forums (similar to Reddit-style threads), giving you the building blocks to create a fully interactive social experience tailored to your app.
On the other hand, Social+ integrates activity feeds into its broader all-in-one social platform, offering a simpler approach for applications that prioritizes quick deployment alongside other social features like groups, forums, and stories.
In this comparison, we'll explore the key differences between Stream and Social+ for activity feeds—focusing on features, pricing, SDK availability, and developer experience—to help you make an informed decision that aligns with your technical requirements and business goals. If you're a developer looking to build a high-performance feed with granular control or a team aiming for fast integration within a broader toolkit, this guide will clarify which platform best meets your needs.
Feature Breakdown
Stream Activity Feed Features
Stream provides a comprehensive suite of activity feed functionalities, including:
- Aggregation: Automatically groups similar activities based on custom rules, ensuring a streamlined user experience.
- Real-Time Updates: Delivers instant content changes, keeping users engaged with live information.
- Reactions and Comments: Supports likes, comments, and various reactions, fostering interactive user engagement.
- Hashtags and @Mentions: Enhances content discovery and user interaction within the app.
- Custom Ranking: Allows personalized content ranking to display the most relevant information to each user.
Beyond these core capabilities, Stream offers an extensive set of advanced features:
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Powerful Filtering: Read a feed with fewer than 10 filters while maintaining no-filter read performance levels.
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Personalization: Deliver tailored feeds for every user with no activity depth limits.
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Activity Selectors: Mix popular, nearby, and interest-based content without needing custom pipelines.
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Groups & Forums: Enable an unlimited number of threaded and nested comments to support community and forum-style conversations.
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Stories: Share ephemeral image or video updates to drive engagement and increase daily usage.
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Engagement Features: Add comments, polls, ranking, images, URL previews, and @mentions to create interactive social experiences.
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Advanced Activity Features: Use activity expiration, bookmarking, querying, search, sharing, and reposts for familiar social patterns out of the box.
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Performance at Scale: Feeds V3 runs 25× faster than V2 for most use cases with sub-100 ms latency, ensuring feeds stay fast as your app scales.
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Notifications: Keep users informed with real-time alerts and updates through dedicated notification feeds.
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SDKs & UI Kit: Build quickly with Stream's extensive SDKs and prebuilt UI components for front-end and back-end development.
Social+ Feed Features
Social+ also offers activity feed capabilities, enabling:
- Personalized Feeds: Delivers content tailored to user preferences.
- Engagement Tools: Includes features like likes and comments to boost user interaction.
- Integration with Other Social Features: Seamlessly combines feeds with groups, forums, and stories for a holistic social experience.
Pricing Comparison
When evaluating activity feed solutions, understanding the pricing structures of Stream and Social+ is crucial for aligning with your project's budget and scalability needs.
Stream's Pricing
Stream offers tiered feeds pricing plans to accommodate various application sizes and requirements:
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Build (Free): Start building for free with 125,000 API calls and 5,000 activities, including core features like Flat & Timeline Feeds, Notification & Aggregated Feeds, security & compliance, and access to Stream's global edge network. This tier is ideal for early development, prototypes, and testing.
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Start ($499/month): Includes 1,250,000 API calls and 50,000 activities, plus access to Ranked Feeds, ticketed support, and the same enterprise-grade security and global edge infrastructure. This tier is well-suited for production apps that are starting to scale and need robust feed features out of the box.
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Elevate ($899/month): Offers 3,750,000 API calls and 150,000 activities, along with all Start-tier features. This plan is designed for applications experiencing significant growth and requiring greater capacity, support, and performance.
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Enterprise (Custom): Tailored for large-scale deployments, the Enterprise tier is built to scale to hundreds of millions of users with activity-based pricing. It includes all previous features plus 99.999% SLA, SAML/SSO, private dedicated servers, and 24/7 support, making it ideal for mission-critical, large-scale applications with complex requirements.
Social+'s Pricing
Social+ provides flexible pricing based on monthly active users (MAUs):
- Core Plan: This plan includes social features, chat, and video, with additional costs per MAU beyond the base limit, suitable for applications seeking a comprehensive suite of social functionalities.
- Max Plan: Offers all Core features plus AI analytics, AI moderation, and full HD live streaming, with scalable pricing per MAU, ideal for applications requiring advanced analytics and streaming capabilities.
The Primary Pricing Difference
Stream's tiered plans offer clear limits on feed updates and concurrent connections, ensuring predictable costs as your application scales.
- Feature Set: Stream provides a comprehensive set of all plans, with additional capabilities in higher tiers, allowing you to choose a plan that fits your application's needs.
- Customization: Both platforms offer customization options, but Stream's detailed feature breakdown per plan provides clarity on the tools available at each pricing level.
Developer Experience
Stream is renowned for its developer-friendly environment, offering:
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Comprehensive Documentation: Detailed developer documentation and tutorials to facilitate seamless integration.
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Active Community Support: Engages a vibrant developer community for collaboration and assistance.
Social+ also supports developers with:
- Extensive Documentation: Provides resources to guide integration.
- UI Kits: Offers design elements to aid in building social features.
- Developer Portal: Centralizes tools and information for developers.
Available SDKs
Stream offers a comprehensive set of client-side and server-side SDKs.
Server-side SDKs include:
- NodeJS
- Python
- Ruby
- PHP
- Java
- .NET
- GO
- Rest API
Client-side SDKs provide first-class support for modern platforms, including:
- JavaScript
- iOS
- Android
- React
- React Native
- Flutter
This extensive SDK support ensures developers can integrate activity feeds seamlessly across different platforms.
Social+ provides SDKs for multiple platforms, including:
- Android
- iOS
- Flutter
- React
- React Native
- Typescript
- Angular
- Ionic
These SDKs enable developers to incorporate social features into their applications effectively.
Which is the Right Feeds Solution for Your App?
Both Stream and Social+ offer robust activity feed solutions with various features, pricing options, and developer tools. Stream stands out with its comprehensive feature set, flexible pricing tailored to different application sizes, and a developer-centric approach that includes extensive SDK support and community resources. Social+ provides a holistic social platform experience, integrating activity feeds with other social features, which may appeal to applications seeking an all-in-one solution.
For developers prioritizing a feature-rich, scalable, and developer-friendly activity feed solution, Stream presents a compelling choice. Its focus on performance, customization, and support can significantly enhance the development process and end-user experience.
Don't take our word for it. Check out successful customer stories about feeds, try Stream for free, and create your account today.