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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Ably Chat

Hey HN, Staff Engineer at Ably here. Over the past few months I've been speaking to engineers building AI assistants, copilots, and agentic workflows (over 40 companies at this point), with particular focus on cloud-hosted agents. I expected the hard problems to be in model selection, prompt engineering, and orchestration. Instead, the same infrastructure challenges kept coming up: realtime sync between agents and end clients is surprisingly painful to get right. - Managing and scaling WebSocket or SSE connections between agents and clients - Buffering messages server-side and implementing…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Build, code and ship in app messaging in a few hours

    2019 · getstream.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    AgentSea▲439

    Today we’re excited to introduce AgentSea, a private AI chat built for sensitive work. When you use closed-source AI models, your data can: – be stored – pulled into training pipelines – shared with third parties That might be fine if you’re making memes or drafting LinkedIn posts. But it becomes a serious risk when you’re pasting contracts, health info, financial data, or business secrets. That’s why we built AgentSea. In Secure Mode, all chats run on open-source models or models hosted on our own servers. Your data never leaves, is never used for training, and is never leaked. Agentsea…

    2025 · agentsea.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Bridgely▲183

    The fastest way to chat in 60+ languages across web & apps

    2025 · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Chatfully▲145

    All-in-one chat tool for teams: texting, web chat, & more

    2021 · trychatfully.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Chat drops into Unreal like it was always there

    Jul 2026 · cometchat.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Collaboration platform where teams work with AI together

    May 2026 · mantle.chat · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Agentlyfree tier, from $33/mo▲336

    Agently is an AI Work OS where documents, tasks, team chat, and integrations are fully interconnected, and AI employees operate inside that shared workspace. Instead of prompting AI in isolation, agents can read project context, turn strategy docs into tasks, coordinate with teammates, run research/outreach/content workflows, update boards, and push results back into the system or external tools. The workspace acts as persistent memory, so work continues instead of resetting every prompt. Happy to answer any questions

    Jul 2026 · agently.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Glue▲291

    Glue is team chat optimized for AI. Today we're releasing support for MCP tools right in your Glue team conversations. Just like MCP in Cursor or Windsurf, you can now use any tool in a private AI chat or any Glue team thread while pulling in its full context to help. Using team chat context for MCP is kind of game-changing, letting you do anything from creating a calendar event or Linear issue to looking up data from an internal system. Our team has been using MCP tools as part of core team workflows for a few weeks now, and it's fantastic. We're particularly fans of remote-hosted MCP…

    2025 · glue.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Bindly▲76

    Hi HN, I’m a product designer by background, not a traditional software engineer. Over the last year, tools like Claude and ChatGPT completely changed how I work. I started with small internal tools, and now I’m “vibe coding” multiple highly personalized apps. As I iterated between Claude Code (implementation) and ChatGPT (ideation / thinking), I kept running into the same problem. To think clearly, I had to repeatedly re-explain: - what the code currently does, - what changed recently, - and why certain decisions were made. That re-summarization step became a real bottleneck. So I…

    2016 · bind.ly · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    TalkJS▲219

    Build full-featured chat into your websites and mobile apps

    2017 · talkjs.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Business conversation platform integrated with messengers

    2022 · dashly.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    GitHub for LLMs

    2025 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey, I'm Marc one of the co-founders of Fabi! We've all seen the "chat with your data" or the "AI-as-an-assistant" when building reports, but we felt like this wasn't quite right. So we decided to build a system that allowed users to: * Connect any data source to the AI * Purely chat with the AI and their data (so we show the output right in the chat before you even apply the changes) * Convert that chat to a repeatable analysis with a data app or workflow * Toggle back to chat mode without missing a beat Basically this means that if you're a data person, you don't have to go through these…

    2025 · fabi.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Easiest way to manage Facebook Messenger chats

    2018 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Build & Scale In-app Chat & Livestream features effortlessly

    2024 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I got frustrated with Claude's official platform limitations - conversations disappearing, no customization options, and clunky file handling. So I built my own interface over a weekend! GitHub: https://github.com/chihebnabil/claude-ui What it does: - Saves all conversations locally (SQLite + Drizzle ORM) - Lets you customize Claude's personality per chat - Handles file attachments properly + caching input tokens - Dark/light mode - No conversation limits - Markdown & code syntax highlighting Tech stack is pretty simple: - Nuxt 3 for the frontend - Anthropic's SDK…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN, I built a location-based chatroom with Discord-like servers. This started as a portfolio project to learn WebSockets but has spiraled into something else entirely. There are two features right now: Drop - Single chatrooms that can only be seen within a specified radius and only last for a time less than 48 hours chosen by the user. Hubs - Geofenced servers modeled after Discord. These are not time restricted. They can be created by anyone and the creator becomes the admin able to add channels and set rules. When a user enters the location’s area, they can join the hub and continue…

    Nov 2025 · vicinity.social · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Visual chatbot builder with the help of AI

    2019 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    TalkJS chat API and SDKs power private, group, and AI-ready messaging with pre-built customizable UI, serving 130M+ monthly messages across 90+ countries.

    2017 · talkjs.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Deploy real apps from ChatGPT or Claude in seconds

    Apr 2026 · appdeploy.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Send cross-platform push notifications with our simple APIs for Android, iOS and web - chat, news alerts, updates and more.

    2019 · ably.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A serverless chat backend - built on Firebase Cloud Functions - abiglobalhealth/chatfireServerless

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    We were spending a lot of time re-writing the same primitives in projects we were doing getting claude + codex + other harnesses communicating in real time. Many other projects forced us into using their framework or harness or into a specific stack. So we open sourced an SDK that acts as the messaging layer without the rest of it. Still early, but we've been working on it and found it useful.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24
    LiveTok▲22

    A few months ago, WhatsApp released a calling API. I’d been experimenting with conversational interfaces for a while, and it seemed like a good chance to build something that could let businesses create voice-based agents without much setup. I’ve been working on this over the past few months, and the beta is now publicly available. The idea is simple: you point the platform to your website URL, and it automatically configures a voice + messaging agent that customers can call or message. No code required. My expectation is that many businesses will eventually offer some form of conversational…

    Dec 2025 · livetok.ai · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →