Top 10 real-time communication packages for flutter

3 min readJan 24, 2022

Real-time communications (RTC) are the near simultaneous exchange of information over any type of telecommunications service from the sender to the receiver in a connection with negligible latency, according to Search Unified Communications. Examples of real-time communications include:

Voice over landlines and mobile phones
VoIP
Instant messaging (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger)
Video and teleconferencing
Robotic telepresence

Real-time communications can take place in half-duplex or full-duplex modes:

Half-duplex RTC. Data transmission can happen in both directions on a single carrier or circuit but not at the same time.
Full-duplex RTC. Data transmission can occur in both directions simultaneously on a single carrier or circuit.

Knowing these basic details, let’s list the 10 most popular Flutter libraries about RTC:

1. socket_io_client

Port of awesome JavaScript Node.js library Socket.io-client v2.0.1~v3.0.3 in Dart

See it on pub.dev

2. flutter_webrtc

Flutter WebRTC plugin for iOS/Android/Destkop/Web, based on GoogleWebRTC.

See it on pub.dev

3. web_socket_channel

StreamChannel wrappers for WebSockets. Provides a cross-platform WebSocketChannel API, a cross-platform implementation of that API that communicates over an underlying StreamChannel.

See it on pub.dev

4. agora_rtc_engine

Flutter plugin to simply integrate Agora Video Calling or Live Video Streaming to your app with just a few lines of code.

See it on pub.dev

5. jitsi_meet

Jitsi Meet Plugin — A plugin for integrating open source Jitsi Meet API in flutter. Jitsi Meet is secure, fully-featured and allows completely free video conferencing made with https://jitsi.org

See it on pub.dev

6. agora_uikit