Why Hio Switched From Sendbird to Stream Chat

Jason Craparo, co-founder and CEO of the B2B networking app Hio, required an in-app chat solution for the company's new product, Hovr. Initially, Hio's engineering team integrated Sendbird's Chat API to power messaging functionality — but there were issues.

In this audio interview, Jason explains why Hio transitioned from Sendbird to Stream Chat, and how the in-app messaging API is working today to boost engagement and drive revenue.

Read the whole case study with Hio: https://getstream.io/blog/hio-switche...

Transcript

“Sendbird was really easy to get started. Our team looked at probably 15 different solutions. We used Sendbird for our live chat at events — so live event chat, and the direct messages in our networking app. But when it came to building Hovr, the core piece we needed that [Sendbird] didn't have was the ability to have threads. [Threading] is table stakes. You have to have threads right now. It was on Sendbird’s roadmap, but their roadmap just kept getting pushed. So they're like, December 15, it's gonna come out. But December 15 comes and goes and it’s not out. We just didn't have any confidence that Sendbird was going to be able to get it out. This functionality was out of the box with Stream. It wasn't like a promise, it was like, we have that. It's ready to go.

It was equally as easy to integrate with Stream. Our team absolutely loved all of the documentation and that [the Stream API] was trusted by a ton of larger clients who were doing more volume than we were ever going to do. If Stream could handle their traffic, they could handle our traffic.

Sendbird’s inability to handle chat threads was the main reason we switched to Stream. When we saw all the bells and whistles Stream supported such as AI moderation and image profanity blocking, and the price, switching to Stream was a no brainer.”
–Jason Craparo, co-founder & CEO, Hio