React

20 Open-source Free Chat and Messaging UI Components Libraries for React and React Native

Hazem Abbas

Nov 1, 2023 — 16 min read

React Native Chat UI and React.js chat and messaging UI components and libraries are frameworks, libraries, and tools that provide pre-built user interface components and functionality for integrating chat and messaging features into mobile and web applications.

They can help developers save time and effort by providing ready-made components and functionality, allowing them to quickly build chat and messaging apps or add messaging features to existing applications.

Advantages of using these components and libraries include:

Save time: These components and libraries offer pre-built and customizable UI components, reducing the time needed to develop chat and messaging features from scratch.
Build chat and messaging app: They provide the necessary tools and functionality to build chat and messaging applications, including real-time messaging, user management, and chat room features.
Add messaging features to your app: Developers can easily incorporate messaging features into their existing applications, enhancing user engagement and communication.
Productivity: By leveraging these components and libraries, developers can focus on building their specific application logic and features, rather than spending time on low-level chat and messaging implementation details.
Clean code: These components and libraries offer well-structured and reusable code, promoting clean and maintainable application development.

Using React and React Native Chat UI and messaging components and libraries, can significantly streamline the development process and empower developers to create feature-rich chat and messaging applications with ease.

But hey, if you're working on a project that needs some fancy data visualization or charting library, you might dig this article: 30+ React Data Visualization and Chart Libraries.

You may also need to check our collection about the best 16 Free React Map Libraries for Google Maps, Leaflet, and SVG Maps.

In this blog, we have covered numerous topics about React open-source projects, libraries, and tools that benefit React developers. You might find the following list useful:

The following list include the best open-source and free Chat UI and messaging app components that any developer can download, and use in their own applications.

1- Chat UI Kit

This is an open-source library that allows you to build your own chat applications as it offers a full features-rich Chat UI components.

Features

43 reusable React components
fully responsive
elastic and customizable
almost 400 SCSS variables
themeable by SCSS
tree shaking ready
accessible, a11y ready
CSS framework independent - use it with Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Material, or any other favorite CSS framework
can be used to build full chat applications, live chat widgets, chatbot interface, chat in games, intranet systems, call center agents applications, helpdesk chat, e-learning, and more...
Not only for chat, but also useful for any feeds, article comments, and social media posts comments, real time streaming comments, sms/text conversations etc.
Each component can be used separately
high quality code
developed by a team experienced in creating chat solutions

2- Gifted Chat (React Native)

GiftedChat is a free and open-source chat UI package that enables React Native developers to build a reactive chat applications in almost no time.

Features

🎉 react-native-webable (since 0.10.0) web configuration
Write with TypeScript (since 0.8.0)
Fully customizable components
Composer actions (to attach photos, etc.)
Load earlier messages
Copy messages to clipboard
Touchable links using react-native-parsed-text
Avatar as user's initials
Localized dates
Multiline TextInput
InputToolbar avoiding keyboard
Redux support
System message
Quick Reply messages (bot)
Typing indicator react-native-typing-animation

3- Stream Chat (React Native)

💬 React-Native Chat SDK ➜ Stream Chat. Includes a tutorial on building your own chat app experience using React-Native, React-Navigation and Stream.

4- React Chat Components

PubNub Chat Components for React and React Native are the fastest way to add chat features like direct and group messaging, typing indicators, or reactions, without going through the complexity of the low-level architecture of real-time networks.

Reduced Implementation Time: Develop proof-of-concept and production-ready apps faster using predefined components.
Fast and Simple Extensibility: Add rich features, like typing indicators, read receipts, or reactions, without writing complex code.
Flexible and Customizable Components: Customize component design and add custom components to extend functionality.
High Scalability: Let PubNub take care of scaling and reliability as you grow your app.
Easy Theming: Use the built-in light and dark themes or create custom ones for various use cases: group, support, and event chats.
Strong Typing: Utilize the power of TypeScript to develop your application.

Features

User and Channel Metadata: Add additional information about the users, channels, and their memberships from PubNub Objects storage using custom hooks
Subscriptions: Subscribe to user channels automatically
Messages: Publish and display new and historical text messages
Presence: Get currently active users, observe their state, and notify them about changes
Typing Indicators: Display notifications that users are typing
Message Reactions: Publish and add emojis to messages

5- ChatKit

ChatKit is an open-source free library that lets you create a live chat widget and connect it to any backend like Chatbot/ NLP/ Live Chat engine or messenger.

(Update 2024) However, it did not receive any update for years and its source-code was removed from Github.

6- Flyer React Native Chat UI

Flyer React Native Chat UI is a popular chat user interface for mobile applications. It offers seamless chatting experience, integrates with Firebase BaaS for real-time messaging, and provides tools for building customizable chat interfaces.

It is recommended for social media apps, customer support platforms, and other applications that require chat functionality.

Features

Free, open-source and community-driven. We offer no paid plugins and strive to create an easy-to-use, almost drop-in chat experience for any application.
Backend agnostic. You can choose the backend you prefer. But if you don't have one, we provide our own free and open-source Firebase implementation, which can be used to create a working chat in minutes. We are also working on our more advanced SaaS and self-hosted solutions.
Customizable. Supports custom themes, locales and more.
Minimum dependencies. Our packages are lightweight. Use your favorite packages for selecting images, opening files etc.

7- MinChat (React)

Chat UI Kit from MinChat is an open source UI toolkit for developing web chat applications.

8- React Chat UI

React Chat UI is an open-source (MIT Licensed) React components for building a chat and messaging apps.

9- React Chat Elements

This is an open-source React.js chat elements chat UI, react chat components.

10- React Slack Chat

This is an open-source serverless Material Design Slack Chat Web Integrating Widget. This widget can be integrated as a Live Chat / Help Desk / Discussions for Special Interest Sites in Solo Single Customer Mode (1:1) or Community Chat (Shoutbox) Mode.

Give your users the Perfect Support / Engagement experience, with the comfort of Slack.

11- Team Chat Reference Application for PubNub Chat With React, Redux and TypeScript

The team chat app is a feature-rich chat and team collaboration application built using PubNub Chat. It covers managing users, joining chat rooms, sending messages, and implementing advanced features like profanity filtering, gifs, and link previews.

The project can be downloaded and explored to understand the implementation details.

Build software better, together

GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 330 million projects.

GitHub

12- Anomly

Anomaly is an innovative chat application that allows users to engage in anonymous conversations and create unlimited chat rooms.

Powered by Next.js, Socket.io, and React, Anomaly provides a secure and private environment for open communication and idea exchange without revealing personal information.

13- ysChat

This is an open-source self-hosted web chat application developed with Express.js, Socket.IO and ReactJS, Bulma.

14- React Chat App

This chat app has basic functionalities such as login, register, reset password, chat, conversation, group call, contact, starred messages, media, files and links, settings, profile, edit profile, and emoji pickers.

It can be implemented using React, Material UI, React Context API, Redux, Faker.js, phosphor-react, Emoji Mart, React Hook Form, Yup.js, and more.

13- Another React Chat App

This is a JavaScript React chat app built with React.js, Socket.io, and Node.js. It uses Material UI for the layout and does not require a database.

Key features include showing online users, sorting users based on online status, dividing users by company, restricting chat between users of different companies, and handling multiple tabs for the same user.

14- MirrorFly React Sample

MirrorFly React Chat SDK + UI Kit is an open-source React chat SDK that provides over 150 messaging and calling features, along with more than 100 UI components.

With its low code React SDK, you can easily integrate communication capabilities into your app in under 20 minutes.

15- Simple Chat App with React and Redux

16- Chat UI React

The chat-ui-react is an NPM package that provides a React component for building conversational web UIs. It includes a chat message component, a message input form, and a class for controlling component display.

It can be used for online chats and chatbots, and supports customization with different UI frameworks.

17- React Sample App with Chat and users Management

18- React Native Chatty

19- React Chat

This is an open-source full-featured high performance chat UI for React Native.

Features

Built with TypeScript
🚀 Using recyclerlistview for rendering messages
Fully customizable components
Loading earlier messages support
Typing animation using react-native-lottie other ways use your own animation
Swipe to reply
Scroll to bottom
Haptic feedback on new message
Hashtag, mention and URL is parsed optionally, or even use your own logic.
Actions via iOS context menu(fallback to action sheet if not available)
Mention directly from input by typing @mention
Upload/ View image support.

react-chat-window provides an intercom-like chat window that can be included easily in any project for free. It provides no messaging facilities, only the view component.