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Cord SDK

React Chat Library

Jackson Gabbard, Senior Frontend Engineer and Co-founder of CordJackson Gabbard
  • Engineering

In a world of AI agents and real-time collaborative software like Figma and Notion, there's never been more reason to get live chat and commenting experiences into your application. The Cord SDK is an excellent choice for building from nothing to a 10/10 chat experience.

Blog cover graphic showing a chat interface powered by React components

How we built the Cord SDK for React

  1. Compatibility and Integration: Cord offers a React library that's easy to integrate into your existing project. Our components are powered by React Hooks and a lower-level JavaScript SDK so you can build exactly the integration you need.
  2. Customizability and Extensibility: Cord offers a very high level of customization and extensibility, allowing you to tailor the chat interface to meet the specific needs and branding of your product. Our components are built with vanilla CSS and static classnames, allowing you to match your UI and brand 100%.
  3. Ease of Use: Cord's React components have a straightforward and intuitive API. Ease of use is crucial for rapid development and can significantly reduce the learning curve for new team members.
  4. Feature-Rich: Cord's SDK offers a wide range of features out of the box. Cord's SDK gives you conversation threads and threaded comments, real-time presence/avatars, @-mentions, multimedia sharing, typing indicators, read receipts, and emoji support, Reactions, resolved status, Slack integration, notifications, and so much more.
  5. Documentation and Implementation Support: All of Cord's React components, APIs, and SDK functions are well documented. We also create a private Slack support channel for each of our customers. Our average response time to developer requests is less than 10 minutes.
  6. Security and Privacy: Cord's SDK, real-time infrastructure, and engineering practices have met the bar for SOC2 auditors two years running. We've based both audits with zero exceptions.
  7. Scalability: Over the course of our existence, we've had customers send us 1000x our existing level of traffic overnight with no warning. And Cord's backend scaled to meet this load with zero downtime. Our uptime and reliability numbers are publicly available.
  8. Licensing and Cost: We want our customers to think of Cord as React library that offers an absurd amount of value for the money. So, our pricing model is based on the teams of users using Cord, rather than individual users. If you have 10 teams of 10 users or 10 teams of 100 users, you pay the same price for Cord. Our pricing model is designed to help you grow your user base and expand your customer accounts -- without constantly paying more for Cord.

UI Component Library

Among Cord's many UI components, you'll find everything from a simple conversation thread to threaded comments. Reactions. Notifications.

With our SDK and React components, you can jump straight to industry-grade chat and commenting. In the video below, you can see Cord's <Thread /> component used to give life to a GPT-4 powered AI assistant.