What is a Chat API?

Definition

A Chat API is a software interface that gives you access to a back-end chat service and its server infrastructure, so you can easily add its real-time messaging features into your apps and websites.

With a Chat API, Developers may drastically cut down on the time, expense, and effort required to create chat functionalities from scratch.

Plus for organizations, Chat API acts as the most affordable, and adaptable solution that may increase user engagement and open up new revenue options through a variety of interaction features.

What Are The Key Benefits Of Using A Chat API In The Current Market?

You can use a Chat API to drive unlimited messaging within your app. Plus, there are a number of benefits to using this pre-built solution, especially if you are running a business that aims at customer interactions.

What Can Chat API Do For Your Business?

• Keep Your Users Engaged: This is applicable to businesses that drive revenue based on the level of engagement between the app users. For example, integrating a Chat API into a Social or Community app can easily open a channel for users to interact on the same app, without leaving to a third-party app.
• Make Customer Support Highly Supportive: Do not let your customers search for help in different mediums on the internet, frustrated or post mean comments about your brand, without getting the help on time, easily. Rather connect your agents and users within your app, in just a few clicks and give the support they need, building trust and loyalty.
• Introduce Features Beyond Messaging: When you integrate a Chat API, the software not only adds chat features but comes with capabilities like video calling, video conferencing, audio calling and live streaming. And that’s a good enough reason to consider opting a Chat API.

Why Choose A Ready-Made Chat API?

• Saves You A Lot Of Time & Money: The biggest advantage of using a Chat API is that you’ll just get the API and add it to your app. There are no headaches of writing codes from scratch.
• Launch Your App Faster: Chat APIs come with pre-built messaging features. So you can add messaging capabilities to your app and take it to use for your customers within just a few minutes.
• Comes With Features Loaded: You need not write codes for each feature that you prefer to add to your app. Rather, a chat API comes with all the messaging essentials plus unique or signature features from the provider.

What Else Do Chat API Providers Offer?

• The Provider Can Host It For You: A few chat API providers take up the responsibility of hosting and managing the servers, so you don’t have to sweat it all.
• You’ll Get All The Tech Support With The Chat API: Since the API is a provider’s own product, you will receive sufficient support with integration as well as post-launch guidance.
• The Chat API Gets Regular Updates: Whenever the provider releases new features and security patches, the API in your app will get them automatically.

How Chat APIs Benefit Your Team?

• Less stress on your developers: With Chat APIs, your developers do not need to maintain complex chat infrastructure to add messaging features to your app.
• Reduced long-term costs: You’ll only pay the subscription fee for the Chat API and you can save a lot on your development costs.
• Easily Scale The App: Your user numbers will grow and the chat infrastructure will scale along with it, without the need for rebuilding your system.

In a nutshell, by choosing a Chat API, you're not just adding a feature, you're giving your users a native chat experience and potentially setting your business apart in a crowded market.

What Are Some Popular Industries That Use Chat API For Developing Apps?

Almost All. A Chat API can be used in any type of app that involves customer interactions and agent-customer interactions. Here are some of the popular use cases where Chat APIs are widely implemented in recent years.

• Healthcare: Patients can consult with doctors remotely
• Enterprises: Employees can communicate with their team members & clients
• Fintech: Bank employees and Financial organizations can support customers.
• Ridesharing: Passengers can chat with drivers for pick-up details
• Delivery services: Customers can message about their orders in real-time
• Online marketplaces: Buyers and sellers can negotiate directly
• Community platforms: Members can engage in group or private chats
• Education: Students can collaborate on projects or ask teachers questions
• Government: Organizations can support citizens for services
• Defense: Personnels can communicate internally for national security
• Social/ Dating: Users can socialize with others from within the app
• Astrology: Customers can consult with Astrologers
• Consultations: Clients can consult with Experts

With rising businesses and niches, the implementation of in-app messaging keeps the demand for Chat APIs always at a high note.

How To Integrate A Chat API Into Apps?

Using a Chat API is simple and easy when compared to other conventional ways of developing messaging features in your app. Here are the regular steps that developers need to follow when adding a messaging API.

• Sign Up and Get API Credentials: Sign into your account, go to your dashboard and get the API credentials like License Key.
• Read the Documentation: The Chat API will come with a Documentation instructing its use. Read through it and understand the available endpoints, request/response formats, and other important details.
• Set Up Your Development Environment: The Chat API provider will have a set of APIs in different programming languages. Choose the language and framework that suits your app and install the SDKs.
• Integrate the Chat API into Your App: Follow the documentation and install the libraries/ dependencies.
• Initialize the API: Using the License Key, authenticate the Chat API in your app.
• User Authentication: Set up user authentication to add all the messaging functionalities in your app.
• Send and Receive Messages: Implement capabilities to send and receive messages
• Test Thoroughly: Conduct comprehensive testing to ensure that the chat functionalities work correctly and handle various edge cases.
• Deploy and Monitor: Deploy the app to a production environment. This way, you can effectively integrate and use a Chat API to enable real-time communication within your app. Before that you need the best chat API, right?

Now, let us walk you through the steps to choose the perfect chat API for your business.

How To Select The Right Chat API Provider?

Among 100s of Chat APIs in the market, only a very few will meet your exact needs. So, how do you assess the providers?

You will need to consider few of the important factors like:

• Features that the Chat API includes
• Level of Customization the Chat API offers
• Platforms and Technologies the Chat API supports
• Ways you can host the Chat API

Let’s look into each factor, one by one

What Are The Key Features You Must Look For In A Chat API?

When you choose a Chat API, you must look out for features including,

You will need to consider few of the important factors like:

MirrorFly: One Solution, with the widest collection of messaging features. As much as you love to add these features to your app, MirrorFly offers them all + a 1000 more features for building interaction-rich experiences on your messaging apps.

How Customizable Must Your Chat API Be?

When it comes to customization, only a few APIs in the market meet the expectations of the developers. How much you can customize each part of the API totally depends on how the API has been built to be flexible for changes.

This includes the ability to customize elements such as colors, themes, typefaces and custom UI components to give a branded look to the chat widget in your app.

Furthermore, the chat API you choose must be compatible with web, mobile, and cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Flutter.

This gives you full control over the chat UI and user experience, enabling you to build highly customized in-app chat experiences.

Additionally, the chat API must support basic to unique features like topic-based chat, chatbots and profanity filters all of which can be selectively enabled or customized to meet the specific needs of the application.

Some chat APIs, like MirrorFly, even offer both SaaS and self-hosted deployment models, giving businesses the flexibility to host the chat infrastructure as per their requirements.

MirrorFly: The 100% Customizable Chat API Every business is unique. Understanding this, MirrorFly offers unlimited customization to let brands build the exact app that fits the needs of their users perfectly.

What Are The Hosting Options Available In The Market?

There are 5 ways you can host a chat API, in general.

• 1. Cloud-based Solutions

  Cloud-based hosting is a popular choice for many businesses that implement chat solutions for user interactions.

  This method involves using remote servers managed by a third-party provider to run your chat app.

  The biggest advantage of using a cloud-based solution is that you'll spend only a low upfront cost, as you don't need to invest in hardware or infrastructure.

  The provider handles all maintenance and updates, reducing the burden on your IT team.

  In terms of scalability and flexibility, this hosting lets you easily adjust your resources based on user demand, however, the customization options may be limited when compared to on-premise solutions.

  Cloud hosting is ideal for startups, small to medium businesses, or any company with fluctuating user numbers.

• 2. On-premise Solution

  On-premises hosting involves running your chat solution on your own servers, data centers and infrastructure.

  Hosting on-premises gives you complete control over your data, security and systems, making it attractive for large-scale enterprises and organizations with strict security requirements or specific customisation needs.

  With on-premises hosting, you're not paying ongoing subscription fees to a third-party provider. However, this method requires significant upfront investment in hardware and software.

  This is a reliable option if you already have in-house IT expertise to manage, maintain, and update the system.

• 3. Hybrid Deployment

  Hybrid hosting combines elements of both cloud-based and on-premises solutions, offering the perks of both solutions.

  In this model, you might host sensitive data on-premises while using cloud services for less critical functions or to handle traffic spikes.

  The only drawback with this solution is, hybrid systems can be complex to set up and manage, and demands careful planning to perfectly connect your on-prem solution with the cloud servers.

  This solution is ideal for companies with varying levels of data sensitivity or those looking to balance control with ease of use.

• 4. Serverless Hosting

  Serverless hosting is a cloud computing model where a cloud provider dynamically allocates machine resources to manage your application.

  You only pay for the resources you consume, rather than pre-paying for the full capacity of servers.

  This is a good option for enterprises handling unprecedented workloads.

  What you'll miss in this solution is, you'll not have full control over the underlying infrastructure, and this is why serverless architecture may not suit types of businesses.

  There's also a chance that you may need to pay for unpredictable costs if usage spikes on your app unexpectedly.

• 4. Managed Hosting

  Managed hosting is a service where a third-party provider takes care of the day-to-day management of your chat solution's hardware, software, and infrastructure.

  While it typically costs more than some other options, it can be the right option for you if you do not have sufficient in-house IT resources to manage it all.

  You'll have very less direct control over the infrastructure compared to on-premises hosting, but the providers will take care of the infrastructure with round-the-clock support.

Host On-premise or on MirrorFly multi-tenant Cloud Hosting is a serious responsibility. You can self-host your app on your own data centers or privacy cloud, or on MirrorFly’s highly secure multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. The choice is yours, MirrorFly supports them all.

For Which Platforms & Technologies Chat APIs Are Available?

Platforms

Programming Languages

Frontend Frameworks

Backend Frameworks

Database Technologies

Communication Protocols

MirrorFly Chat API: A Solution Flexible For Any Platform, Any Device The unlimited customization option makes MirrorFly’s in-app messaging APIs compatible for any platform and technology you prefer. You’d love to build it on a specific tech stack, we got you. Just tell us your requirements and we’ll build them all for you.

MirrorFly: The Best Chat API For Mobile Apps & Websites

Chat is becoming a key feature that customers expect from almost every app they use these days. In fact, in-app messaging is a strategy how popular enterprises have built customer interaction and brand awareness, right within their platform. For user-to-user interaction to agent-support, every application demands for a channel for interaction and messaging features serves the purpose well.

A Chat API, like MirrorFly, gives you the complete infrastructure, features and tools to build a native web/ mobile/ desktop chat platform that your app users will love to use.

The API comes with 1000+ unique features like topic-based chat, huge file uploads and chatbots, and is compatible with almost all the technology that you prefer to build it on.

Above this, you have the full freedom to customize the APIs, get access to source code, white-label your app with your own company logo and brand colors, and host it on your own premise/ on MirrorFly's cloud servers.

Fascinating, right?

If you'd like to know more about our Chat API, our team would be more than happy to hop into a quick call with you.

Get ready to drive unlimited user interactions on your app!