Best Open Source Chat and DB to Use?

Hello amazing web devs of the Internet world! I have a client who needs to build a fairly robust chat app within an Ionic framework. I see there are several good open source templates on the frontend side of things to make a chat app look like Whatsapp or something similar, however the backend code and how to do that the best way seems to be lacking from my perspective.

Could someone shed some light on what is the best database to choose for a chat section within an Ionic app - ie: Firebase real time messaging? or does it matter that much if we use Laravel PHP and MySQL very much. is one better suited for Ionic? Thoughts? @mhartington would love your thoughts specifically if you have time.

Also, are there open source Github repos that others have used for their Chat backend, and do you recommend them for others in the Ionic community to think about using? Any recommendations here?

This looks like a chat good repo I found called Chat 21 - GitHub - chat21/chat21-ionic: A ionic v5 and Angular 8 desktop and mobile chat - does anyone have experience with Chat 21 for Ionic?

Thank you for reading and would love your advice!

Sincerely, Jonathon Lunardi

Just some input

I don’t think using SQL based databases is a good thing here. I think noSQL is the way to go and if I were to develop a chat functionality that doesn’t require any cryptography or complex security measures today I would probably use firebase.

But I’m no expert in that are so maybe someone with I little more expertise can give you better advise

Thanks Jose! Appreciate it! I am looking into Supabase actually now. Any experience with it?

I would go for Firestore database :slight_smile:

Simon just did a video on Firebase alternatives covering Supabase - Firebase Alternatives: Supabase, Appwrite and Nhost - YouTube

I’ve never used superbase, but I heard is a great alternative to firebase. I’ve seen some people talking about mongodb for chats as well but again, I never played with it either.
But I will implement something like that in a near future for one of the apps I’m currently working on. I’ll create a public GitHub repo then to help in the future

Jonathon, hi
In the end, what technologies did you use? I’m in the same situation. I have an ionic-angular app and I have to implement a text and audio chat. Dont know too much about libraries for this