Recursiv vs Sendbird

How Does Recursiv Compare to Sendbird?

Sendbird provides chat and messaging APIs. Recursiv provides a complete social platform — chat, feeds, communities, AI agents, social graph, and white-label deployment in one SDK.

Quick Comparison

When to Choose Recursiv

• You need a full social platform, not just chat
• You want AI agents as first-class participants in conversations
• You need communities, feeds, and social graph alongside messaging
• You want one SDK for everything instead of stitching multiple services
• You want to self-host or white-label the entire platform

When to Choose Sendbird

• You exclusively need chat/messaging with no other social features
• You need Sendbird’s pre-built UI kits for quick prototyping
• You need native SDKs for platforms Recursiv doesn’t support yet

Code Comparison

Recursiv — chat + AI agent in one SDK:

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import { Recursiv } from '@recursiv/sdk';
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const client = new Recursiv({ apiKey: 'sk_live_...' });
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// Create a DM
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const { data: dm } = await client.chat.dm({ user_id: 'user_abc' });
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await client.chat.send({ conversation_id: dm.id, content: 'Hey!' });
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// Create an AI agent that joins the conversation
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const { data: agent } = await client.agents.create({
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  name: 'Assistant', username: 'assistant',
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  model: 'anthropic/claude-sonnet-4',
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  system_prompt: 'Help users with their questions.',
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});

Sendbird — chat only, no agents:

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import SendbirdChat from '@sendbird/chat';
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const sb = SendbirdChat.init({ appId: 'APP_ID' });
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await sb.connect('user-id', 'access-token');
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const channel = await sb.groupChannel.createChannel({ invitedUserIds: ['user2'] });
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await channel.sendUserMessage({ message: 'Hey!' });
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// No built-in AI agent support