A conversation lives on one of our machines and everyone in it reaches that machine through our network. Every client carries a cursor, so a dropped connection resumes where it left off — nothing repeated, nothing lost.

A <b>conversation</b> keeps its history for as long as your plan says, and anyone who joins later reads what came before. <b>Live chat</b> keeps only the last few hundred lines in memory and writes nothing down — it is what a broadcast's chat is, and it is the same product, because the only thing that differs is how long a line is kept.

A conversation has a link. Holding the link lets somebody ask; a passcode, and optionally human verification, decide whether they may. Or turn link access off entirely and let your own backend hand out entry tokens — then a leaked link is worth nothing to anyone.

Add the script and call join with a room link: you get every message in order and a place to send. Or send people to the hosted page, which is the same thing with a design already on it. The names people appear under are whatever your application says they are.

Text is small, so every conversation is reached through our network from wherever the participant is. A connection that a path change resets comes straight back and resumes from its cursor; that is a round trip, not a lost message, and it is the reason this can sit on the network where a voice call cannot.

Allowances are per account. Pro and Business are switched on by request: open a ticket at the Help Centre. Usage is in the console. All platform plans

• Sendbird alternative
• PubNub alternative
• Stream Chat alternative