If you're looking for a service that offers APIs and tools for collaborative apps with presence and broadcasting, Liveblocks is a good choice. It lets developers add fast, high-performance collaboration abilities to their products, including real-time presence, broadcasting, comments and document collaboration. The service is tightly integrated with many frontend frameworks and has a variety of pricing tiers, including a free starter plan with up to 100 MAU.
Another good option is Ably, a real-time digital experience platform that offers a range of APIs for building and delivering rich applications. Ably supports live chat, data broadcasting, data synchronization and multiplayer collaboration with a publish/subscribe messaging pattern over WebSocket connections. It also offers a free tier with generous capacity and flexible pricing tiers for different use cases.
Dyte is another powerful foundation for building live, immersive experiences. It offers SDKs for audio/video conferencing, live streaming and interactive chat, with features like screen sharing and AI-powered chat. The service scales and is designed to be reliable, with support for major security standards, and it offers a generous free tier with pay-as-you-go pricing after.
If you want a more complete foundation for building social networks, activity feeds and chat apps, check out Stream. It offers APIs for chat messaging, activity feeds and video/audio streaming, with a solid foundation for scaling and reliability. Stream offers a variety of pricing tiers, including a free tier, and offers extensive documentation and tutorials to help you integrate and customize.