What is Layer and what are its top alternatives?
Layer is a messaging platform that enables businesses to easily add messaging capabilities to their apps. Its key features include real-time messaging, push notifications, file attachments, user authentication, and customizable UI components. However, some limitations of Layer include limited scalability, pricing concerns for larger organizations, and dependency on third-party integrations for certain features.
- Twilio Chat: Twilio Chat is a flexible and scalable messaging API that allows developers to add chat functionality to their applications. Key features include multi-platform support, message editing/deletion, rich media messages, and user typing indicators. Pros include extensive documentation and reliable infrastructure, while cons include potentially complex pricing and less customization compared to Layer.
- Firebase Cloud Messaging: Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) provides reliable and scalable messaging services for Android, iOS, and web applications. Key features include message targeting, analytics, notification delivery, and cross-platform support. Pros include seamless integration with other Firebase services, while cons include limited customization options for advanced messaging features.
- SendBird: SendBird is a feature-rich messaging platform that offers real-time chat, voice, and video messaging capabilities. Key features include chat moderation tools, message search, push notifications, and integration with various platforms. Pros include extensive customization options and reliable infrastructure, while cons include potentially higher pricing for large-scale implementations.
- Pusher: Pusher is a real-time messaging platform that offers scalable and reliable messaging solutions for web and mobile applications. Key features include channels, event triggers, presence detection, and integrations with various frameworks. Pros include easy setup and extensive documentation, while cons include potential concerns around scalability for very large user bases.
- Stream Chat: Stream Chat provides a fully managed chat API and SDK that offers features like message threading, reactions, typing indicators, and user presence. Pros include easy integration and customization options, while cons include potential limitations in handling very large volumes of concurrent users.
- PubNub: PubNub is a real-time messaging platform that offers scalable and reliable messaging services for IoT, mobile, and web applications. Key features include presence detection, message history, push notifications, and encryption. Pros include global infrastructure and extensive SDK support, while cons include potential complexity in setup and pricing considerations for large-scale implementations.
- WebSockets: WebSockets is a protocol that enables real-time communication between client and server applications. Key features include bi-directional communication, low latency, and support for various programming languages. Pros include simplicity and efficiency in real-time messaging, while cons include the need for server-side implementation and potentially limited scalability.
- Socket.io: Socket.io is a JavaScript library that enables real-time, bidirectional and event-based communication between client and server applications. Key features include auto reconnection, broadcasting, and room support. Pros include cross-browser compatibility and ease of use, while cons include potential overhead for very large messaging volumes.
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub: Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully managed real-time messaging service that allows for asynchronous messaging between applications. Key features include message ordering, push and pull delivery, and scalability. Pros include seamless integration with other Google Cloud services, while cons include potential pricing considerations based on messaging volume.
- Ably: Ably is a real-time data platform that offers messaging, streaming, and presence capabilities for building scalable and reliable applications. Key features include message history, message queuing, connection state recovery, and geo-distributed infrastructure. Pros include extensive documentation and high reliability, while cons include potential complexity in setup and pricing concerns for larger implementations.
Top Alternatives to Layer
LayersLayers is a WordPress Theme framework focused on extending the WordPress core functionality to include layout building through the WordPress Visual Customizer. A lightweight set of base options, widgets and theme templates provide a user-friendly, extensible tool for creating beautiful, WordPress-faithful websites. ...
ApigeeAPI management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world. ...
TwilioTwilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. ...
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's. ...
Amazon SESAmazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. ...
MailgunMailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly. ...
MandrillMandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp. ...
Amazon SNSAmazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint. ...
Layer alternatives & related posts
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Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.
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We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.
What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.
Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...
Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.
Searching for options for SMS that integrates with SiteLink and will allow personalization of text and tracking of both incoming/outgoing messages with reporting (Time, date, call#, etc) Have been looking at Twilio, and seems most leaning toward this. Are there any other options known that integrate into SiteLink? Also looked at Clickatell.
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At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.
We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail
Nexmo vs Twilio ?
Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.
When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.
Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.
Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.
Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.
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I would like to know how I can implement a transactional email, or if it is possible to do so, like Mailchimp, using Amazon SES. I want to have the flexibility of creating emails like MailChimp, with a bulk email sending capability. Is it as simple with AWS SES as it is with MailChimp? If so, then how can I implement that for my own product? Thanks!
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Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.
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We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.
However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.
Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.
Hi, I've noticed my Mandrill emails are being received fine but my Mailchimp emails, about 75% are going into junk mail. I was wondering is it possible I have missed some sort of integration or can I send my Mailchimp marketing emails via mandrill?
Need help to somehow reduce the number of my emails going into junk mail, can someone help?
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We decided to use AWS Lambda for several serverless tasks such as
- Managing AWS backups
- Processing emails received on Amazon SES and stored to Amazon S3 and notified via Amazon SNS, so as to push a message on our Redis so our Sidekiq Rails workers can process inbound emails
- Pushing some relevant Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to Slack
Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.
We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.
We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.
What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.
Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...
Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.