What's the simplest way to add some type of user to user messaging system on my nodejs webapp?

Are we talking about long lived chat or just ephemeral chat? If you want something quick and ephemeral socket.io for websocket communication is a battle tested way to do instantaneous p2p chat.

if you're not technical, i think that can help you : https://graphjs.com/

If you're technical, use directly https://github.com/phonetworks/graphjs-server
I installed it 1 week ago. Very easy to configure

Good luck!

Firebase would make this really easy I think and would likely be free to run for a long time. There's tutorials at a minimum that walk you through this.

Previously I was on the free plan of ably.io . It was not too hard to use their API.

Here are some options:

• https://sendbird.com/pricing
• https://quickblox.com/
• https://www.mirrorfly.com/
• https://www.cometchat.com/
• https://www.contus.com/messaging-solutions.php
• https://talkjs.com/

Good luck! Let us know what you decide!

Btw, it'd be easier to answer this if you provided more details, like:

• Budget
• Features needed (video chat support? sending pictures? etc.)
• What it'll be used for
• Your target customer