We’re looking for a chat system for our Client Portal. We tried the app that Softr integrated for communities before, but it was complicated to setup and has since been removed from the integration list.
I know there is Drift, Crisp, and Intercom integrations, but none of those solutions work well for a B2B client portal. My team usually talks to the client’s team, so a group chat may have 10 people in it. (We’re using Slack Connect for now, but need a solution for companies who don’t use Slack)
We also looked at this solution - https://www.amity.co/ - but it seems a bit much, and it’s expensive @ $500/mo.
Having a built-in chat function to a platform for communities, client portals, and employee portals seems like a requirement, so I hope there is a solution out there!
I am wondering if there is an outside-the-box solution here.
The reason I say this is that, even if you could integrate a really great chat service into your Softr app, and it all worked perfectly and was free, there’d be another problem waiting for you around that corner. That problem is that everyone already has too many ways to chat.
Speaking as someone who uses a lot of portals, it definitely does not scale to have to go to each portal to find the right chat interface to talk with the people I want to talk with. One way it doesn’t scale is the friction associated with having to go to the right portal. Another way is that each portal may have its own different way of doing chat that might or might not work on my phone. And a third is that no chat solution integrated with Softr is going to be as good an experience as a dedicated app like Slack.
I actually think that Slack Connect would be an excellent solution if you could make it work for everyone. I’m guessing that the real obstacle here is not “companies who don’t use Slack” but the fact that Slack Connect is not available on free plans. (If in fact it’s not – I am unsure about this detail.)
But maybe I’m not seeing something important here. What are the specific ways in which having chat integrated into your Softr app benefits the teams that are working together?
Yes, we tried it briefly but had message delivery issues alongside grouping and permission issues with Softr. This was the app I mentioned in my post that was a built-in integration and now I cannot find it on the list.
Regarding too many chat options, if a company signs up with us (we’re a web dev agency), and they get access to a client portal that has their projects, billing, and the only way to chat with their service provider in one place, it will make adoption easier. It will be our only communication channel with clients, so the idea is if anyone on their team wants to talk to us, they must do it in their client portal.
If everything needed for a successful project is in the client portal, I don’t see a scalability issue with having all our clients in one communication channel. Softr currently encompasses everything the client needs and, therefore, will not have multiple portals to find the right piece of info.
Slack Connect is an excellent solution; we use it now. You’re right about it not being available on free plans though, which is why it doesn’t work. We’re getting new sales with teams using MS Teams, Upwork messenger, etc. This is why we need a chat solution built into our client portal, so we can force everyone to use that and make it simple. Sales > Email flow to welcome them to the portal > they sign in and see their projects, billing, and chat in one spot - accessible, scalable, and all-in-one.
I hope that explains my reasoning here. You’re right about the third point, though. I don’t see any integratable solution that will be nearly as smooth as Slack. Thanks for your time.
TalkJS is expensive too though. An other solution would be to use fastcomments.com. Primarly a comments component but they have a 1-1 chat too.
Maybe not the perfect solution but give it a look.
I’ve read through the FastComments documentation, and it wouldn’t work well for our use case. Yes, talkJS is expensive, but it appears as if any full-featured chat solution is going to be several hundred dollars per month.
We need very granular control over who can chat with who, when that connection is made and revoked, how the inbox appears and functions, and pushing SMS and email notifications based on specific events. FastComments isn’t really built for true chat the way something like talkJS is.
I had a sales call with amity last week, it was pretty short since the guy told me it usually takes a full week for a full-time developer to get the system up and running.
I spent so much time over the past couple of weeks finding an upgrade to our current atomchat one. It seems like it’s gonna be cometchat. (Also, I still don’t understand the relationship between these two companies.)
Thanks for info. I’m with you Amity, I asked about the Softr integration to which they told me “their app integrates with any user API” so that means the setup would require a developer to read through all the documentation(s) and figure it out essentially.
Unfortunately, it sounds like this is also the case with Cometchat, where nothing is built out of the box.
@StevenS - what’s wrong with your Atomchat setup that your trying to migrate away from it?
I am looking to add sms notifications and potentially some other webhooks on message send which doesn’t seem like an easy thing to do in atomchat (if possible at all). Second, the design of the chat is not the best, and finally, we had some (minor) problems with message synchronization as you mentionned.
We’re currently using a modified version of the comments block for 1 to 1 chats, with Zap to notify users via email. Trying to update to the newer comment block released last week to allow replies via email to update the comment block and keep it frictionless for users (since it’s B2B and they’re already in their inboxes all day). Unfortunately we’re still trouble shooting the new comment block.
We’re in talks with Commetchat about implementing their software for a group-to-group chat solution. We will follow up this week once we find out how difficult it is.
We chatted with the Cometchat team, who is very helpful, and everything seemed fairly simple on their end. Use their code, plug in the API endpoints for user and group IDs, and you’re good to go - in theory.
Great! So we checked the Softr API only to find out that it only supports user creation and deletion - nothing more. But we need it to grab user IDs… I suppose we could use Airtable API to grab a field containing a group/user ID, but I’m unsure how this would play with Softr. Does anyone with Airtable API experience have thoughts on this?
I’m not sure what “grab user ids” means. If what you need to do is access the user id from custom code running in the page, you can find it in the window.logged_in_user object.
