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Dev tools · April 13, 2026

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…

Ably Chat launched on April 13, 2026 with 73 votes, #714 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.

Visit ably.com ↗Ably Chat alternativestop 3% of April 2026

What it does

Ship chat that actually scales. Ably Chat gives developers a purpose-built API for adding realtime messaging to any app - livestreams, in-game comms, customer support, or group chat. SDKs for JS, React, Swift, and Kotlin. Features include typing indicators, presence, reactions, message edit/delete, read receipts, UI kits, and moderation. Built on infrastructure trusted by HubSpot and 17Live, with guaranteed message ordering, 99.999% uptime, and a global edge network. Scale with confidence.

Build custom chat applications, with chat APIs and SDKs your team will love, on a platform you can trust.

Build chat applications, with chat APIs and SDKs your team will love, on a platform you can trust. With AI Transport users can stop, start and switch, but the session persists. Build any chat experience, at any scale, with Ably Chat. Effortlessly handle conversations whether they are one:one or many:many. Enable realtime interaction alongside streaming content. Handle millions of concurrent users chatting and reacting with a simple chat API. Customer service chat Streamline live one:one support chat - whether it's customer service, tech support, patient care, or student help. Roll-out globally without fear of service disruption. Community in-app chat Keep users on platform and engaged with…from ably.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

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