If you are building a modern app today, in-app chat is no longer just an extra feature. Marketplaces, e-learning platforms, telehealth apps, and SaaS products all use real-time chat so users can ask questions, get support, and work together without leaving the experience.
From a distance, it looks like you should be able to "just add chat" with a few components. As soon as your team starts planning the details, you run into real-time infrastructure, security, moderation, analytics, and cross-platform support. At this point, people usually ask themselves: should we really build everything ourselves, or should we use a chat platform that's made for that?
Why Building In-App Chat From Scratch Slows Teams Down
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Real-time chat is about more than just a text box and a send button. You need to be able to send messages reliably, have correct order, presence, typing indicators, push notifications and sometimes voice or video calls. Each feature has limits when it comes to network reliability, reconnection, and syncing across devices.
As well as that, there are security and compliance requirements. These include authentication, role-based permissions, data privacy and abuse protection. As usage grows, everything must be able to adapt without breaking. It is easy for chat to delay release dates and use engineering time that should be spent on the product's main value.
Meet CometChat: One Platform for Real-Time Chat, Voice, Video, and AI
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CometChat is a communication platform that brings together chat, voice and video calling, and AI-powered assistants on a single, secure stack. Instead of making everyone follow the same integration pattern, CometChat provides several ways to connect to its chat API and chat SDKs.
You decide how much of the code you want to write yourself and how much you want CometChat to handle. The result is a flexible approach to chat integration that works for experiments as well as products.
Four Integration Paths to Match Your Skills and Timeline
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CometChat offers four main ways to connect. They both use the same reliable backend, but you have a different level of control over the user interface.
- Widget Builder (no code) lets you configure a fully featured chat and calling widget in the dashboard, then embed it in your app with a small snippet.
- UI Kit Builder (low code) sits on top of CometChat’s UI Kits and lets you design the interface visually.
- UI Kits (prebuilt UI) provide modular chat components with built in business logic for message lists, input areas, calls, and state management.
- SDKs and APIs (full code) give experienced teams complete control over screens and flows while CometChat manages the real-time messaging infrastructure.
From MVP Experiments to Scalable Products
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So you can use patterns in many different ways. The same CometChat integration can be used in many ways:
- to power buyer-seller chat in a marketplace
- to power group rooms in e-learning
- to power secure messaging between doctors and patients in telehealth
- to power user communities inside a SaaS product.
You could start with a widget to check demand, then move to UI Kits as you improve the experience, and use SDKs for a very customised interface, all without changing to CometChat. Your team is always making the user experience better instead of starting from scratch with infrastructure.
Why CometChat Helps You Ship Faster With Less Risk
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By letting you choose how much you want to build yourself, CometChat reduces engineering overhead while keeping a solid real-time foundation in place. No code and low code options shorten prototyping cycles. UI Kits and SDKs remove many tricky edge cases around reliability, presence, and media handling.
In practice, that means faster go to market, more focused engineering, and a more stable, secure chat experience for your users.
Get Started With CometChat
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If you are thinking about using in-app chat for your product, choose the integration path that matches where you are now, then move on to more advanced options as your needs change.
Try CometChat for free and start using it in minutes.
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