TalkJS as an alternative to PubNub Chat

Find out how PubNub Chat compares to the TalkJS Chat API by diving in this comprehensive overview of features, pricing, and key benefits. We’ll pinpoint the core differences between the platforms and showcase TalkJS as a PubNub Chat alternative.

Table of contents:

• Feature comparison
• Pricing comparison
• Key differences
• Bottom line

Feature comparison

Both platforms have comparable messaging features by supporting 1-on-1 chat, group chat and rich media messaging, and similar features. The differences start to show up when comparing the chat UI capabilities and the moderation system.

TalkJS excels in providing a pre-built and fully featured chat UI that’s highly customizable. It makes the frontend side of the integration feel like a breeze, with no need to piece together the UI components and design. With PubNub, you’ll have to build the chat interface from scratch.

When comparing the moderation features, PubNub takes the lead by providing both content and image moderation features. While TalkJS offers basic moderation features.

Pricing comparison

Both provider base their pricing on the number of by MAUs (monthly active users), but PubNub also charges per payload, which they call transactions.

Let’s start with PubNub, as it offers a significantly more complicated pricing scheme with additional pricing for support. Users can start by subscribing to a Free plan (<200 MAU) or the Starter plan for $49/month with a limit of 1500 MAU. But that’s not all, it’s essential to read the tiny text just below the pricing, the so-called charge per transaction.

Users also get charged additionally for:

• Overages for MAU
• Monthly messages
• Functions execution
• Message storage

The chat API is a relatively new PubNub product, so the pricing isn’t built around chat, but around a low level Pub/sub platform. Bear in mind that pricing above 10k MAU gets somewhat murky as you need to talk to sales.

In contrast, TalkJS offers three simple and transparent plans that scale with MAUs. You pick the most suitable plan and apply overages if you exceed the limit. Enterprise starts at 100k MAU.

With regard to features, the TalkJS Basic and Growth plans provide core messaging essentials as well as some advanced ones like:

• Pre-built UI
• Customizable chat UI theme
• Webhooks
• Reply-via-email directly (email-chat sync)
• Support via chat
• Custom email notifications and domain (Growth)
• Priority access to roadmap (Growth)

For use cases that require an on-premise installation, custom paperwork, a proper SLA, or guaranteed performance under heavy load, the Enterprise plan is a great fit. It also offers at-rest encryption and dedicated phone support.

Key differences

Chat UI

Most chat APIs provide a backend-as-service along with UI components or Sketch designs (UI design kit) to make the frontend part of the integration somewhat faster. With PubNub, you have to create the chat UI from scratch. They claim to have a React SDK, but it’s basically nonexistent, it provides an unstyled box you can type text into. Because of this, the PubNub integration will take at least a few months to finish.

TalkJS, on the other hand, provides a complete chat solution, frontend and backend, in a single package. You get the infrastructure, the code, and a fully functional chat with highly customizable UI, including the design. The UI is forward compatible, so the chat will keep working on future devices, new features, or future browser bugs. In other words, you can deploy our chat solution in a couple of hours.

With TalkJS Themes you can customise the TalkJS user interface. From quick tweaks to fonts and colours, to completely changing the markup in certain areas. You could have a light theme, a dark theme, but you might also have themes with UI elements that you only show to a particular subsection of your users.

And it's not all about styling — it's about functionality as well. You can create a Theme that works great for your Slack-style app, mobile messenger, and even a live comment section next to a video livestream.

Support

TalkJS provides support via in-app chat during working hours, and it’s included in all pricing plans. The entire TalkJS support team is staffed with developers. And that is something few companies can boast about. Any time you contact support via website chat or by email, you are talking to one of our developers. With no additional charges.

“This is the best customer service and support I’ve received in a long time, and that goes a long long way for being happy with a company 🙂

There’s bugs with software some times no matter who you use, but you’ve been very receptive to hearing about them and fixing them which is great! Very impressed with the quality of the chat though and the service you’ve been providing. “

—— Dan, JiffyTask

PubNub has separate pricing for support. It offers a couple of pricing tiers starting with the free plan that doesn’t guarantee a response time, and support is available only via email. The first plan with any kind of guarantees starts at $500/month.

Moderation

PubNub chat is equipped with a couple of useful moderation tools. It provides features to support content moderation and image moderation. These tools make it easy to protect your users as well as your brand.

TalkJS provides basic moderation tools like the activity view in the dashboard where companies can monitor chats, and act accordingly. And also a pro-active way to moderate messages by suppressing information like email or links by using the mask contact info feature.

Notifications

TalkJS provides a robust notification system with advanced features that keep the users in the loop across different platforms. For example, users can reply to the email notification directly or jump back into the chat platform – either way, their response will safely reach its destination.

The PubNub chat notification system is limited to push notifications and SMS notifications via a third-party API and doesn’t support email and desktop notifications.

Bottom line

When comparing TalkJS and PubNub Chat, the primary thing you should consider is how long it will take to get the solution up and running. Implementing TalkJS takes from a couple of hours to a couple of days, in good part, because of its fully-featured chat UI with a design you can customize. With PubNub, you get the backend-as-a-service, but you need to design and build the chat UI from scratch, and that can add up to a lot of work on the frontend.

Ready to start coding? TalkJS is free for development and testing. You’ll have plenty of time to customize and integrate your chat. You pay when you decide to go live. Try it out!