Online video chat platforms allow developers to add 1 on 1 video call, chat, and conferencing features to their applications quickly and efficiently. These platforms offer video SDKs that can be embedded within applications to significantly enhance user interaction to offer video experiences right within the app's user interface, such as video in-app video calling and video based virtual collaboration. This guide covers the top CPaaS platforms supporting online video chat, their key features, and the essential considerations for choosing these platforms for various use cases.
What is an Online Video Chat Platform?
An online video chat platform provides the heavy lifting required to embed a real-time video communication facility within a software application. Software developers leverage the video SDKs provided by these platforms to integrate live video call and conference features within their applications, ensuring a seamless video collaboration experience built into the app without switching to external video calling apps. Additionally, these online video chat platforms support voice and chat functionality.
Getting Started with Online Video Chat Platforms
Getting started with online video chat platforms is straightforward. Developers can start by reviewing the documentation and sample apps provided by the platform. From there, developers can begin building their custom video experience, using the SDK’s libraries, video call APIs, and tools to create a unique and engaging video chat functionality. Video SDKs also provide quick start guides, sample apps, and a range of support and resources, including community forums and professional services, to help developers overcome any challenges they may encounter.
Video chat is one of the core product features of a full-stack CPaaS platform. The distinction among the top online video chat platforms lies in the reliability, feature richness, customization, integration, and scalability capabilities of their underlying CPaaS platforms.
Accordingly, this post lists the top CPaaS platforms chosen as per their core capability:
Sinch - Best for Reliability
Sinch stands out for its high quality of service, making it ideal for businesses that require a reliable video chat experience. Sinch’s SDK also offers unmatched flexibility, from controlling UI elements to ensuring cross-platform compatibility. This makes it particularly valuable in sectors like healthcare and finance, where tailored user experiences are paramount.
Sinch builds upon standard WebRTC architecture with adaptive configurations for resolution, latency, and codecs, ensuring consistent reliability even in challenging network conditions. Additionally, it offers several other adaptive reliability features for maintaining service uptime standards, such as proxy fallback to ensure smooth video calling even when peer-to-peer (P2P) connections are unavailable and adaptive resolution and HD image quality.
Sinch video chat capabilities are supported for iOS, Android, and JavaScript.
MirrorFly - Best for Comprehensive Features
MirrorFly provides an all-in-one solution that significantly enhances real-time communication. Its video-calling API supports both 1 on 1 video call and group video calls, making it versatile for various use cases. Users can share documents and files of any size and record sessions for later access, hosting them on their servers or private clouds.
MirrorFly lets you choose a bouquet of user-level features ranging from screen recording, call event integration, peer-to-peer connections, background effects, and more. This rich feature set makes MirrorFly a strong contender for businesses needing robust communication solutions. across both B2B and B2C segments.
MirrorFly video SDK supports iOS, Android, JavaScript, and a host of application frameworks such as React, Angular, and VueJS.
EnableX - Best for Customization
EnableX video SDK offers a range of customization features to tailor video applications according to specific needs. These features enhance user experience, branding, and functionality, making EnableX a versatile choice for businesses seeking customized video communication solutions.
Apart from UI and call experience customization, EnableX features many video-centric solutions such as video KYC, video-assisted employee onboarding, training, and live customer support. These capabilities make it the preferred choice for developing custom video-centric applications for companies that want to fully embrace video-driven, digital transformation across all their employee and customer touch points.
EnableX video SDK supports iOS, Android, Windows, and JavaScript, and their UI Kits are also supported in Flutter, React Native, and more.
Infobip - Best for Quick Integration
Infobip excels in connecting users worldwide, ensuring compliance with local regulations while maintaining a strong global infrastructure. The Infobip SDKs and video call APIs are tailored to facilitate seamless face-to-face communication with enhanced features for conferencing, interactive calls, and AV effects.
Infobip operates a highly redundant and scalable global infrastructure with data centers strategically located worldwide for disaster recovery and load balancing, ensuring low latency and high performance for real-time video applications, regardless of the user's location. The innovative "Call Link" feature of Infobip enables businesses to generate short URLs of instant video call APIs for initiating video meetings without requiring complex integrations.
Infobip offers a feature-rich WebRTC SDK library to architect and deploy online video chat solutions with support for iOS, Android, or JavaScript.
8x8 - Best for Scalability
The 8x8 platform supports high participant counts, accommodating thousands of attendees in large meetings and over 125 countries, enabling widespread accessibility and adoption for remote video-based collaboration and support. As a result, it is well suited for enterprises needing extensive international calling and large-scale video conferencing capabilities.
8x8 also offers instant video call APIs that are best suited for support agents and customer interaction in real time. Such use cases span remote support and customer engagement activities in many service-based industries, such as healthcare and insurance. For seamless remote assistance, 8x8 offers many augmented features such as photo capture, annotation, geolocation, remote camera control, and more.
8x8 video calling services, also known as "Jitsi as a Service" (JaaS) offering, is supported on multiple mobile and web platforms, ensuring cross-platform compatibility for developers and end-users.
FAQs
Online video chat platforms offer a playground for developers, giving them the essential tools to add real-time video features such as calls and chat to their apps. It makes integrating video communication within software applications a breeze. The video SDKs from these platforms offer frontend widgets for integrating video calls and control features in a UI, rendered within web or mobile apps. Apart from that, these platforms are supported by a backend infrastructure to host the real-time communication channels that connect two applications via video calls. In most cases, this infrastructure is part of CPaaS, which also hooks it to the global telecommunication network.
Online video chat platforms are great for customer service, virtual healthcare consultations, online learning in education, and facilitating identity verification and onboarding in businesses. They enhance communication and streamline processes across various industries. Apart from that, these platforms add value to any business process that mandates video-based communication, such as video KYC for bank customer verification, interviewing process for recruitment, and video-based evidence and monitoring for field assets.
To choose the right platform, prioritize reliability, feature set, customizability, ease of integration, and scalability. Sinch is one of the most reliable platforms for supporting video calls. In terms of feature sets, MirrorFly offers a range of features for enhanced user experience. EnableX provides great customizability and offers a suite of pre-built video solutions for specific business scenarios. For quick integration, Infobip is the ideal choice with its video call embedding features. For large video meetings with thousands of participants, 8x8 offers a robust and scalable infrastructure. While choosing any video SDK, don't forget to evaluate security and pricing models and test the service through a free or limited trial to ensure it meets your needs.
Choosing the Right Online Video Chat Platform
Choosing the right platform boils down to the best tradeoff among reliability, customizability, integration, and scalability parameters, along with application-level features. Let’s address each of these factors in detail.
Reliability
Delivering great video experience using online video chat platforms depends on several key reliability parameters to ensure consistent performance, high-quality communication, and adaptability to varying network conditions. Here are the most critical reliability factors:
- 1Fallback mechanism - This refers to uninterrupted video call sessions even when peer-to-peer connections fail due to network outages. The efficiency of this mechanism depends on the network resilience, number of global points of presence, and automatic reconnection mechanisms.
- 2Adaptive streaming - Facilitation of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) to generate video streams at different encoding configurations as per bandwidth availability and different resolutions, enabling devices to select the optimal stream based on their capabilities and network conditions.
- 3Bandwidth optimization - Use of advanced codecs to optimize bandwidth usage while preserving video quality, even in low-bandwidth environments, and AI-driven bandwidth management to dynamically adjust video resolution and frame rates to match network conditions.
- 4Low latency communication - Efficient routing mechanisms for minimizing latency, ensuring real-time interaction even in geographically distributed meetings.
Customizability
- 1Application level customization - This includes UI/UX-related customization for video playback and configuration, custom controls, accessibility, UI placement, and UX flows.
- 2Video call session-related customization - This includes call session control and modification for one-to-one and conference calls and associated video parameters such as resolution and frame rate, extendability options for streaming, and recording for different use cases.
- 3Personalization and branding customization - This includes custom theme templates and configurations for matching with brand guidelines, and dynamic UI layout.
- 4Collaboration customization - This includes add-on collaboration features, such as screen sharing, annotations, and overlays, and integration of real-time graphics, text, images, and animations into live streams for personalized content delivery.
Integration Capabilities
- 1Multi-platform support - Support for multiple application platforms including web (JavaScript), mobile (iOS and Android), and desktop.
- 2Multi-framework support - Support for direct integration with frameworks such as React Native, Angular, and Electron, simplifying development for specific ecosystems.
- 3Ease of integration - Pre-built components for UI and backend video service integration, with quick start options and low code/no code components, allowing developers to start building and scaling their video solutions using video SDK features.
- 4Third-party service integration - This includes third-party CRM, analytics, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) platforms for extended functionality.
Scalability
- 1Multi-party calling - Enabling high-capacity multiparty calls with efficient resource management and support for hundreds or thousands of participants in a video conference call without degrading quality. Additionally, offering users with easy options to join group calls and collaborative initiatives to ensures seamless participation.
- 2Auto-scaling - Using historical data and user behavior patterns to anticipate demand and scale resources proactively through efficient traffic distribution at the video service backend.
Additional Considerations
Video call analytics
Analytics and performance tracking are necessary requirements to track user behavior, engagement metrics, and content performance in real time. These metrics are usually provided in the form of APIs, apart from the video call APIs. Additional metrics are also provided for detailed insights into video quality parameters like frame drops, jitter, and bandwidth usage.
Security of video sessions
Security of video sessions entails content protection via Digital Rights Management (DRM) mechanisms to protect premium content from unauthorized access, and end-to-end encryption to ensure privacy and secure communication across all participants in the video call.
Call billing and cost considerations
The most common billing model for video calls is based on the number of participant minutes wherein a CPaaS provider charges a fixed rate per minute per participant for video calls. Higher charges apply for higher resolutions and enhanced features. Moreover, the cost of extra services such as recording, transcoding, security, and scalability is an additional consideration that may incur significantly high billing for large-scale deployment.
Your Turn to Select the Best Online Video Chat Platform
Video calling platforms are indispensable for enabling real-time communication in various applications. From Sinch’s high reliability to MirrorFly’s comprehensive features, EnableX’s customization, Infobip’s integration capabilities, and 8x8’s scalability, there is a solution for every need. By focusing on these key capabilities, along with analytics, security, and cost considerations, you get a broad guideline to arrive at the best trade-off for selecting the right online video chat platform for developing your use cases.
