CometChat Review (2026)
The pricing cliff is the honest headline: from a 100-MAU free tier straight to ~$239/mo is a brutal jump for an early-stage app, and users report plan structures changing under them.
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 17 Aug 2026
Build is free for development: all features, up to 100 users and 25 concurrent connections, no card. Paid Chat plans are priced by monthly active users. Billed yearly, shown as a monthly equivalent: at 1,000 MAU Basic is $239 and Advanced $359; at 10,000 MAU Basic $299, Advanced $399 and Enterprise $999; at 25,000 MAU $699 and $949; at 50,000 MAU $1,349 and $1,649.
Paying monthly costs about 20% more — $298.75 and $448.75 at 1,000 MAU. Above 50,000 MAU everything is quote-only. Concurrency is included at 5% of your MAU on Basic and Advanced and 10% on Enterprise. On overage CometChat charges $0.10 per extra MAU (falling at higher tiers) or $1 per extra concurrent connection — and where both are exceeded it bills the higher of the two, not both.
Enterprise has no listed overage; usage above the plan is upgraded to the appropriate plan instead. Messages and storage are unlimited on every plan, and message retention is 6 months across the board, extendable at extra cost. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Correction after re-checking: Chat & Messaging list prices are published rather than quote-only: at 1,000 MAU, Basic is $239/month and Advanced $359/month on yearly billing ($298.75 and $448.75 on monthly billing). Those rise to $1,349 and $1,649 per month at 50,000 MAU on yearly billing, and Enterprise starts from 10,000 MAU at $999/month yearly. Only 100,000 MAU and above is "Get in touch". Overages are $0.10 per MAU and $1 per concurrent connection, and when both allowances are exceeded CometChat bills the higher of the two, not both. (re-verified 2026-07-31)
What the price did
We capture CometChat’s own pricing page every month and keep the figures, so this is our record of the page — not a forecast, and not someone else’s summary.
The overage rates are the part of CometChat's pricing that has stayed put: $0.10 per monthly active user and $1 per concurrent connection appear identically in our July and August 2026 captures and again in the machine-readable reference we read on 17 August 2026. What changed in that window is disclosure rather than price — the plan ladder that used to sit behind a slider is now published as a full MAU-by-tier table, which is why this page can quote figures earlier reviews could not.
What the pricing page doesn’t say
Model your MAU growth curve and the overage math before you architect around it. Chat infrastructure is sticky by nature; the time to compare vendors is before launch, not after.
What CometChat does
In-app text, voice and video chat infrastructure to embed into your own software — secure and scalable, with a free developer plan and, via the new Air release, fully on-prem or air-gapped deployment for regulated enterprises.
What buyers report about CometChat
Recurring themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run CometChat ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Developers rate the API highly — WebSockets and webhooks that behave, pre-built UI kits, SDKs across languages and documentation that holds up. Around 4.6 on G2 across 110 reviews.
- • Support replies in 20 to 30 minutes, which reviewers name specifically.
- • Monthly active users above your tier are billed at $0.10 each with no hard cap and no alerting. One reviewer was charged over $2,000 before their product had even launched; a COO watched the bill rise fivefold. Set your own monitoring — the platform will not warn you.
- • There is nothing between the 100-MAU free tier and the first paid plan at 1,000 MAU, which third-party sources put at roughly $239-$299 a month.
- • Pricing sits behind a slider rather than a published table, so you cannot budget without asking.
- • The interface needs work by reviewers' account, and adapting it costs development time.
When the paid plan is worth it
CometChat's Build plan is free and includes up to 100 users and 25 concurrent connections, with 10,000 voice and video minutes to test; the vendor's FAQ says you must subscribe to a paid plan to go live. At 1,000 MAU, Basic is $239/month on yearly billing ($298.75 monthly) and Advanced $359/month yearly ($448.75 monthly). CometChat's own plan comparison marks Basic "No" for message translation and AI powered moderation, where Build and Advanced read a bare "Yes".
Basic is also "No" for conversation search, email and SMS notifications, but the yes there is qualified: search reads "Yes (Indexing of your latest messages, up to 25 times your MAU)" on Advanced, 50 times on Enterprise. Email needs an active SendGrid account and SMS an active Twilio account. Multi-tenancy, user and group insights and HIPAA with BAA are missing from Basic too. Upgrading does not fix three things. Message retention stays 6 months on every Chat plan, extendable only at additional cost; the AI Copilot rows need your own OpenAI subscription; and the 99.999% uptime SLA, custom white-label domain and on-premise deployment stay paid add-ons, the last on Enterprise only.
Our monthly capture read this vendor's pricing page in July 2026 and again in August 2026, and the amounts were the same both times. We keep watching — the registry records what moves.
How to actually use CometChat
The vendor's React guide summarises the route as "Add CometChat to a React.js app in 4 steps: create project, install, init + login, render"; App ID, Auth Key and Region are prerequisites, not a step. The install command pulls @cometchat/chat-uikit-react, @cometchat/chat-sdk-javascript and dompurify. Node.js 18+ and React 18+ are required, and CometChat ships pre-created test UIDs (cometchat-uid-1 through cometchat-uid-5), so a two-panel chat runs before any signup flow exists. The guide's quick reference warns that breaking the init() to login() to render order gives a blank screen.
The troubleshooting page adds that CometChatProvider relies on WebSocket connections, window and localStorage, so Next.js, Remix and Astro raise hydration mismatches unless that boundary is client-only. It also notes that custom hooks attaching SDK listeners leave duplicate listeners during development under StrictMode unless they return a cleanup function. All v7 hooks handle cleanup automatically. Auth Key is development-only; production needs server-generated Auth Tokens via the REST API. The repository has two open issues: the composer freezing on pasted long formatted text (#106, 3 April 2026) and rich text breaking links (#107, 8 April 2026).
Distilled from CometChat pricing page, opened live in this session (https://www.cometchat.com/pricing, read 2026-07-31); CometChat's own machine-readable pricing file, which carries the monthly and yearly MAU price ladders, the usage and overage notes, the FAQ and the full plan comparison table (https://www.cometchat.com/pricing.md, read 2026-07-31); CometChat React UI Kit integration guide (https://www.cometchat.com/docs/ui-kit/react/integration-react.md, read 2026-07-31); CometChat React UI Kit troubleshooting page (https://www.cometchat.com/docs/ui-kit/react/troubleshooting.md, read 2026-07-31); public issue tracker of the official React UI Kit repository (https://github.com/cometchat/cometchat-uikit-react/issues, read 2026-07-31). All pricing and feature-tier statements come from CometChat's own pages; the GitHub issues are public user reports, not independent reviews.
The natural comparison is Stream or Sendbird — the premium chat-SDK peers — all three are MAU-priced; compare at YOUR projected MAU including overages, not at the entry tier.
More on CometChat
Everything we publish about CometChat links back here — the review stays the honest hub:
The ex-banker filter — the same yardstick on every review (how we review): My ex-banker filter is simple: does CometChat remove a real cost — time, errors, missed revenue — bigger than what it charges? If the job above is genuinely yours, it's worth a look. We never publish fake or “exclusive” prices, so always confirm the current plan on their site.
Frequently asked questions
What does CometChat cost at my user count?
It is priced per monthly active user, so the answer moves with your scale. Billed yearly, at 1,000 MAU Basic is $239 a month and Advanced $359; at 10,000 those are $299 and $399, with Enterprise entering at $999; at 25,000 they are $699 and $949; at 50,000 $1,349 and $1,649. Monthly billing adds about 20%. Read on 17 August 2026 from CometChat's own machine-readable pricing reference.
Can an overage surprise me the way earlier reviewers describe?
The mechanism is real but narrower than it is often described. Included concurrency is 5% of your MAU on Basic and Advanced, and beyond your allowance CometChat charges $0.10 per extra monthly active user or $1 per extra concurrent connection — and when both are exceeded it bills the higher of the two rather than adding them together. Enterprise carries no listed overage at all; usage above the plan triggers an upgrade instead. There is still no hard cap on Basic and Advanced, so set your own alerting.
How does it compare with Twilio for chat?
The comparison people actually search for, and the split is in the pricing model rather than the feature list. CometChat charges for the users who show up (per MAU, with unlimited messages and storage on every plan, and 6 months of message retention) while Twilio's conversational products meter the traffic itself. If your users are chatty, a per-MAU plan with unlimited messages is predictable in the way per-message billing is not; if you have a large but quiet user base, the same structure works against you.
What should I weigh before buying Communication & Voice software?
Generally yes, since this category is built for it, but the details that bite are timezone handling, how per-seat cost scales as the team spreads, and whether numbers, routing or coverage exist in the countries your people actually sit in. Availability varies far more by country than the marketing pages suggest, so check your specific regions before committing.
Is this a hands-on review of CometChat?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is genuinely good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Trustpilot and developer write-ups, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 2026-08-17 against CometChat's own machine-readable pricing reference, which they publish for AI agents and last verified themselves on 2026-05-20; USD.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
We list our sources because most review sites do not. How we review →
Others in this category
The communication & voice tools closest to CometChat that we have also reviewed. They overlap rather than match:
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