Agora Chat Overview

Agora Chat is a highly reliable global communication platform where your users can chat one-to-one, in groups or in chat rooms. Users communicate with text messages, they can share images, audio, video, files, emojis, and locations. Agora Chat supplies typing indicators out-of-the-box.

The Agora platform supplies a low-latency, high-concurrency, and secure cloud service for your user conversations. It is asynchronous and stateless; it supports cluster service, horizontal scaling and peak traffic handling.

Stop reinventing the wheel and spending valuable engineering resources on building a chat infrastructure yourself; Agora Chat has your in-app chat system covered. The Web, Android, and iOS SDKs plus the REST API enable you to easily integrate Agora Chat into your client apps. This leaves you free to focus on building and optimizing your business logic.

Feel like putting Agora Chat to work for you? Refer to the Quickstart Guides to rapidly integrate Agora Chat into your app.

App features

Agora Chat delivers a wide range of valuable features.

Rich message types

Agora Chat supports the following message types in one-to-one and group chat:

• Text: Users can send simple text messaging, including hyperlinks and emojis.
• Image: Thumbnails are downloaded automatically by the receiver app.
• Audio: Audio is downloaded automatically by the receiver app.
• Video: Video thumbnails are downloaded automatically by the receiver app.
• File: Users can download a file.
• Location: Users can send geographical coordinates and addresses.
• CMD: Users can send a signalling message. A CMD is stored in the local database. It is not displayed in a conversation and cannot be sent as a push notification when the receiver is offline.
• Custom: The custom message type lets you create a message type that is unique to your product.

One-to-one chat

Agora Chat provides online and offline messages in conversations. This entire message history can be downloaded. Users can acknowledge message receipt and recall and delete messages. They can also customize the name of the other participant in the conversation.

Multi-device login

One account logs your users in to Agora Chat on multiple devices concurrently. All messages are synchronized between all devices.

User management

Each user manages their own account, as follows:

• Profile: Add a personal avatar, nickname, mail address, birthday, signature, and custom properties.
• Contacts: Invite, add, and remove friends. Control a block list that prevents users in the list from adding you as a contact or sending you messages.
• Group memberships: Accept and decline group invitations. Join and leave groups.

Groups and chat rooms

Apart from one-to-one-chat, the Agora Chat SDK provides group and chat room support as well. This includes the following features:

• Lifecycle: Create and delete groups, and update the group name, description and subject.
• Membership: set a group to be invitation only, or open to everyone. Add users to or remove them from a group, and stop unwanted users from joining the group.
• Roles: Each user in a group is either a member, an admin, or an owner. Permissions differ by role.
• Announcements: Publishing announcements to the group or chat room.
• Block list: Block users in a group.

When a member of the group is offline, new messages to the group are sent to the offline member using push notifications.

Message recall

Agora Chat enables users to recall a message from one-to-one, chat room, and group conversations.

Push notifications

When your app is either running in the background or the process has terminated, or the user is offline, incoming messages are forwarded to a third-party push server. As soon as the user comes back online, all undelivered messages are pushed to mobile devices the app is installed on.

Push notifications for Android are implemented using Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM); iOS notifications are sent using the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).

Message synchronization between multiple devices

All messages are stored in Agora Chat servers. Messages sent and received from multiple devices that use the same account are completely synchronized.

Platform advantages

As well as the rich features supplied by the Agora Chat SDK, the Agora platform gives your app the following advantages.

Ultra low latency

With the engine and algorithms developed by Agora, Agora Chat reduces the transmission of redundant data and delivers latency as low as 100 ms. This enables smooth real-time communication that uses less bandwidth. Agora Chat is deployed across the globe. Strategies such as proximity access and smart routing ensure a guaranteed user experience for all regions.

Stability and reliability

Agora Chat's globally distributed and clustered server system, and backup and disaster recovery plans work together to guarantee the high availability of the Agora Chat service.

Multi-platform support and easy integration

Agora Chat supports the following major platforms: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Unity, Flutter, and React Native.

Pricing

Agora Chat offers four competitive pricing tiers and transparent billing. You enjoy a generous amount of cost-free usage every month; if your usage exceeds this threshold, you can pay as you go. The more you use, the larger your discount. See Pricing for details.

Supported platforms

Agora Chat is supported on major platforms such as Android, iOS, and Web, and it allows for cross-platform connections. The minimum version requirements are as follows:

RTM and Chat comparison

The following table compares Real-time Messaging (RTM) and Chat:

In a nutshell, RTM is widely used in multiple scenarios, whereas Chat targets the instant messaging scenario by providing mature SDK integration and versatile user experience.

In addition to the applicable scenarios stated above, RTM and Chat functionalities overlap in certain scenarios, such as bullet screen. Whether to use RTM or Chat requires a comprehensive evaluation according to your business demands and subsequent extensions.