Top 5 Social SDKs for 2025 (And How to Choose One)

To meet these expectations without building from scratch, many developers turn to SDKs (Software Development Kits). These platforms offer pre-built social components like messaging, activity feeds, user profiles, moderation tools, and analytics – all designed to help you launch faster and scale confidently. Instead of diverting resources to develop and maintain custom infrastructure, founders can plug in proven, battle-tested features that enable vibrant in-app communities.

In this guide, we’ll spotlight 5 of the top social SDKs in 2025 that are powering mobile and cross-platform community experiences across the US and beyond.

social.plus

social.plus is a complete suite of social features built to turn your app into a growth engine. With AI-powered insights, built-in monetization, and flexible moderation, it’s designed for product teams and developers who need scalability and deep customization. It also provides UIKits that offer both quick configurations and open-source flexibility, making social.plus a strong choice for driving engagement and revenue.

• Broad Feature Set: social.plus provides modular features like activity feeds, groups/forums, profiles, stories, clips, and chat. This means you can let users post updates with comments and likes, join community groups, create personal profiles, and even share ephemeral “stories” similar to major social apps. All these social features work seamlessly together in one platform.
• In-App Chat & Notifications: The social.plus chat SDK supports rich messaging with features like reactions, mentions, unread counts, and various channel types (private 1-1 chats, group chats, broadcast channels for announcements). Push notifications are included to re-engage users when they get messages or feed updates.
• Moderation & Safety: social.plus has built-in AI moderation tools to keep your community safe. It also offers an AI-powered analytics and insights dashboard to help you monitor community health, understand user sentiments, and user activity in real time.
• Scalability & Compliance: This SDK is enterprise-ready, with scalable cloud infrastructure across multiple regions (USA, EU, Asia) and compliance certifications (GDPR, SOC2 Type II, ISO 27001) to meet privacy requirements.

Overall, social.plus offers one of the most feature-rich social SDKs available, designed for apps that want to turn engagement into a growth engine. With everything you need to build and scale an in-app community, it’s a strong fit for teams focused on driving retention, connection, and long-term value. For many app owners, social.plus strikes a great balance of speed, features, and safety to cultivate a thriving user community right inside their product.

CometChat

CometChat is another popular SDK for integrating chat into mobile and web apps. It caters especially to developers and startups by providing easy-to-use SDKs, UI kits, and a wide array of chat features, including voice and video capabilities. CometChat’s focus is on enabling meaningful user engagement through communication, while being developer-friendly in implementation.

• Chat + Voice & Video: With CometChat, you can quickly add text messaging, voice calling, and video calling to your app. It supports private chats, group chats (public or even password-protected channels), as well as one-to-one and group voice/video calls. This makes it a good one-stop solution for apps that need multiple modes of communication.
• Rich Messaging Features: CometChat comes with the rich chat features and also offers a suite of extensions to enhance conversations. These include additions like GIF/sticker integrations, as well as practical tools like in-chat polls, collaborative whiteboards, voice transcription for audio messages, and disappearing messages. End-to-end encryption is available for security-conscious applications.
• Developer Experience: One of CometChat’s strengths is its focus on developers. It provides UI kits and ready-to-use components for many frameworks (JavaScript, React, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, etc.), along with detailed documentation and tutorials. CometChat also maintains open-source example apps and even some source code on GitHub, which can be a helpful reference.
• Flexible Pricing: CometChat offers a free tier for small apps (up to 25 MAU) and then a range of paid plans that scale by user count and feature set. This can be cost-effective for startups in early stages. The higher-tier plans unlock more advanced features (like moderation tools, analytics, and certain extensions) as your needs grow. 

In summary, CometChat is a well-rounded chat SDK with voice/video extras, suitable for apps that need to get messaging up and running quickly. Its numerous extensions allow you to match the feature richness of big messaging apps without building it all yourself. For many app founders, CometChat hits a sweet spot of quick integration and broad functionality.

PubNub

PubNub is a real-time data stream network that provides the underpinnings for chat and other live features. Developers often choose PubNub when they need ultra-reliable, low-latency messaging infrastructure that can power not only chat, but also live updates, IoT messages, location tracking, and more. 

• Real-Time Messaging Core: PubNub offers publish messaging APIs that let you send and receive messages in real time to large numbers of subscribers. Using this, you can implement direct messaging, group chats, or live event chat in your app. PubNub’s network is globally distributed, meaning users around the world can exchange data with minimal delay.
• Event and Data Streams: PubNub isn’t limited to chat. It supports sending various data types, enabling features like location-based updates, real-time dashboards, or IoT device messaging. 
• Moderation and Add-Ons: PubNub provides content moderation filters and tools to ban or mute users at the channel level. PubNub also has extensions for chatbots, translation services, and reaction emojis that you can plug into your messaging flow.
• Scalability & Compliance: PubNub is known for handling massive scale due to its efficient network. It offers enterprise-grade security and compliance, supporting HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, CCPA, etc. PubNub offers reliability and can guarantee message delivery even in suboptimal network conditions, using a store-and-forward approach for offline users. 

If you’re a founder building features that require real-time updates at scale, PubNub is a proven solution. Many developers pair PubNub with their own custom UI to create chats, feeds, or presence features tailored to their app. Its strength lies in delivering reliable, low-latency infrastructure that supports a wide range of live user experiences.

Stream

Stream is a developer-friendly SDK platform offering high-performance chat and activity feeds. Known for performance and reliability, Stream gives teams full control over customization, along with moderation tools and flexible APIs. Its SDKs are widely used for apps that prioritize speed, uptime, and developer experience, making it a solid option for teams looking to integrate real-time social functionality with minimal friction.

• Activity Feeds: Stream provides a dedicated Activity Feed API that lets you build personalized, real-time feeds. Advanced capabilities include aggregation of similar activities, real-time updates, reactions & comments, hashtag and @mention support, and custom ranking algorithms. 
• Chat Messaging: Stream also offers a full-featured Chat SDK for in-app messaging. It supports direct 1-1 chats, group chats, and even large-scale channel chats. Key chat features include threads, typing indicators, read receipts, message reactions, and rich media attachment.
• Performance & Scale: Stream offers scalability and low-latency infrastructure. Stream runs on a global edge network and CDN architecture to ensure fast delivery of feed updates and chat messages worldwide. It’s built to handle high message volumes with an uptime SLA geared towards enterprise needs.
• Developer Experience: Stream provides extensive developer resources including documentation, tutorials, and support to simplify integration. It also offers strong security and compliance coverage, with support for standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC2. This makes it a strong choice for apps that prioritize privacy and reliability.

In short, Stream is ideal if you need high-performance feeds and a customizable chat experience. It offers flexible APIs and reliable infrastructure, with detailed documentation and responsive support making it a strong choice for developer teams. 

Agora

Agora is best known for powering real-time audio and video experiences, with SDKs used widely for live calls, broadcasts, and interactive streaming. It also offers a chat SDK that integrates well with its media services, making it a solid choice for apps that combine messaging with live interaction. With strong global infrastructure and low-latency performance, Agora supports high-quality, real-time user experiences across formats.

• Rich Chat Features: Agora offers Chat SDK including features like one-to-one chats or group chats along with rich content like text, emojis, images, and even GPS location sharing. Essential chat features such as offline message support, message history synchronization, read receipts, typing/presence indicators, and message recalls (deletion) are built-in. 
• Built-In Moderation & Translation: Agora includes content moderation tools out-of-the-box, automatically filtering profanity, spam, or even inappropriate images. Apps can enable Agora’s on-demand or automatic translation so users who speak different languages can chat seamlessly, each seeing messages in their own language. 
• Cross-Platform and Scalable: Agora’s technology is known for its global reach and low latency. The Chat SDK benefits from the same backbone, ensuring messages deliver quickly even alongside bandwidth-heavy audio/video streams. Agora’s infrastructure can scale from small rooms to massive event chats, and their pricing is usage-based with a free tier up to a certain number of users.
• Seamless with Video/Voice: The biggest reason to choose Agora is if you’re already using (or plan to use) Agora’s live audio/video SDKs. For example, if you have a live streaming app, the Chat SDK plugs right in so that users can text chat during a live video session without requiring a separate vendor.

In summary, if your application relies on real-time voice or video, Agora stands out as a strong option. Its Chat SDK complements the platform’s media services, making it easy to deliver a unified experience where users can message, talk, or stream without switching tools.

How to Choose the Right Social SDK for Your App

With so many capable SDKs available, how do you decide which one best fits your app’s needs? The right answer depends on your product goals, team resources, and future scale. Here are six key factors to consider:

• Feature Needs: Start by defining what kind of social experience you want to deliver. Is it simple 1-to-1 or group messaging, or a more complete in-app community with feeds, profiles, comments, and groups? Look for SDKs that support your must-haves.
• Integration and Customization: Consider your development resources and desired level of customization. Some platforms provide extensive SDKs with ready-made UI kits that help you launch fast with minimal dev work. Others provide powerful APIs and infrastructure, but expect your team to build more of the front-end. If visual control or UX is important, make sure the SDK supports theming or fully custom UI layers.
• Scalability & Performance: Think about the size of your user base and the volume of activity you expect. Some platforms are optimized for huge scale, others might be more cost-effective for small-to-mid scale but could get pricey or complex at very large scale. Uptime SLAs and latency guarantees are worth checking if real-time reliability is critical.
• Moderation and Safety: A healthy community needs moderation tools. If user-generated content is involved, ensure the SDK offers features like profanity filtering, content flagging, user bans/mutes, and possibly AI moderation for images/text. Also assess data privacy and security features like end-to-end encryption might be necessary for sensitive chats, and compliance with laws (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) might be non-negotiable depending on your industry.
• Cost and Pricing Model: Finally, align the pricing with your business model. SDK pricing can be MAU-based, message-based, or some combination. Forecast your user growth and engagement. Some platforms offer free tiers or flat-rate plans which can be great for startups, others are enterprise-focused with custom quotes. It’s wise to contact the provider for a detailed quote when in doubt, especially if you expect to scale quickly.

The “best” social SDK is the one that aligns with your product goals, team capacity, and growth plans. Some apps need to move fast with ready-made components. Others prioritize control and customization. Some teams need built-in moderation and analytics, while others want total flexibility on the front end. What matters most is finding a solution that fits how you build, scales as your user base grows, and supports the kind of experience you want your community to have.