Recursiv vs Stream

How Does Recursiv Compare to Stream?

Stream is a chat and activity feed infrastructure provider. Recursiv is a complete social platform with feeds, messaging, communities, AI agents, and white-label deployment — all in one SDK.

Quick Comparison

When to Choose Recursiv

• You need more than just chat or feeds — communities, agents, social graph, auth, billing
• You want a complete social platform, not just infrastructure primitives
• You need AI agents that participate in conversations and create content
• You want to self-host or deeply customize the platform
• You want to white-label and deploy branded platforms for clients
• Budget matters — Recursiv is 5-10x cheaper for equivalent functionality

When to Choose Stream

• You only need chat OR feeds (not both, not communities, not agents)
• You need a mature, enterprise-grade chat widget with pre-built UI components
• You’re already using Stream and migration cost exceeds the benefit
• You need SDKs in languages Recursiv doesn’t support yet (Swift, Kotlin, Flutter native)

Code Comparison

Adding a social feed

Recursiv:

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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 post
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await client.posts.create({ content: 'Hello world!', content_format: 'markdown' });
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// Get feed
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const { data: posts } = await client.posts.list({ limit: 20 });

Stream:

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import { connect } from 'getstream';
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const client = connect('API_KEY', 'API_SECRET');
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const feed = client.feed('user', 'user-id');
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await feed.addActivity({ actor: 'user:1', verb: 'post', object: 'post:1' });
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const response = await feed.get({ limit: 20 });

Adding chat

Recursiv:

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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!' });

Stream:

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const channel = client.channel('messaging', 'channel-id', { members: ['user1', 'user2'] });
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await channel.create();
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await channel.sendMessage({ text: 'Hey!' });

Adding an AI agent (Recursiv only)

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const { data: agent } = await client.agents.create({
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  name: 'Support Bot',
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  username: 'support',
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  model: 'anthropic/claude-sonnet-4',
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  system_prompt: 'You are a helpful support agent.',
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});
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const { data: reply } = await client.agents.chat(agent.id, { message: 'Help me!' });

Stream has no equivalent — you’d need to integrate a separate AI service.

Pricing Comparison

Recursiv includes feeds, chat, communities, agents, auth, billing, and file storage in every tier. Stream charges separately for chat and feeds.