Switching to a new real-time video API can be daunting. Existing apps often already have an established user base and can’t afford any downtime. Plus, development teams probably already have a backlog of tasks to work on to maintain their app—the time and resources a migration might need can make switching to a better-suited API or service provider nontrivial.
We’ve heard this a lot from developers who’d love to try Daily's video SDKs, but are already using another provider and are wary of the effort involved. What’s more, you may not have even decided if you want to switch yet! What if you just want to evaluate Daily with real users and see how it performs in your production environment? What if you don’t like it (unlikely ;))—will you need to do a bunch of work to go back?
All of these potential points of friction is why we decided to make life a little easier for developers who might want to try Daily. We’re doing this by providing guides, demos, and videos that walk you through different migration options. In this post I'll review our resources around switching from Vonage OpenTok's video SDKs.
Some of OpenTok’s API paradigms can feel quite different from Daily. It’s an older API that has taken different approaches to certain parts of the video experience. Our migration resources point out parts of the API that are directly transferable to Daily as well as areas where we diverge. I’ll go through each resource and how it can help facilitate a smooth, efficient transition.
The goods
Here are the actual migration resources we’ll be discussing. Feel free to go ahead and check them out right away, or read below for a more detailed explanation of each.
- Two video walkthroughs about transitioning from OpenTok to Daily: a shim transition video and a full transition video.
- Vonage OpenTok client and server library shims is a guide that walks you through using our shim libraries as drop-in replacements for OpenTok. We’ve also provided a demo application showing an example of toggling between OpenTok and Daily with the help of these shims.
- Transitioning from Vonage OpenTok guides you through a full transition from OpenTok to Daily.
- Migrating a telehealth application to Daily from OpenTok in 1 week is a blog post that explains how Juan from WebRTC.ventures migrated their telehealth application to Daily.
We'll soon dig deeper into each of the above. But first, why are developers looking to switch to Daily in the first place? Let’s go through some of the common deciding factors that we’ve seen in developers we’ve spoken to.
Why are developers switching from OpenTok to Daily?
When speaking with developers who are currently using OpenTok and considering a switch to Daily, two primary points of interest are commonly mentioned.
Daily’s developer experience
Daily's and OpenTok's WebRTC implementations both date back to the early days of WebRTC. At Daily, we have continually updated our APIs as browsers, mobile devices, WebRTC, and development frameworks have all evolved. Developer experience is one of our two top priorities (along with call quality) and Daily's SDKs work well with modern tech stacks.
Daily’s call quality and infrastructure
Daily offers infrastructure and call quality features that are simply not available in OpenTok at this time.
For example, our Global Mesh Network enables the delivery of real-time video and audio at the highest possible quality all around the world. We also provide increasingly granular control to developers who want to optimize their applications for various call sizes, including calls with up to 100,000 participants with Interactive Live Streaming.
Daily supports automatic switching between peer-to-peer and server-routed video calls, allows low-level control of encoding and networking parameters, and delivers real-time quality-related events to application code.
Daily’s dedicated support
Daily’s Support and Solutions Engineering teams are passionate about providing responsive, hands-on support to our customers. We started Daily because we believe it should be simpler for every developer and company to build video, and we've invested in talking with every customer from day one. We offer free email and chat support to every developer using Daily, and our product engineers are active in our developer Discord community. We’re also always happy to schedule a video call to make sure you’re set up for success.
Now that we’ve gone through a few key reasons that OpenTok developers might consider a switch to Daily, let’s dig into those migration resources.
Video workshops on transitioning from OpenTok to Daily
We’ve produced two video workshops to help developers transition to Daily.
- Migrating from Vonage OpenTok to Daily using
daily-opentok-clientanddaily-opentok-nodeis all about our client and server-side OpenTok library shims. Following an overview of what the shims are, James from our Solutions Engineering team walks you through a demo implementation utilizing the shims to convert an OpenTok project to Daily. - In Transitioning from Vonage OpenTok to Daily, James guides you through implementing a full transition to Daily from OpenTok.
Not a video walkthrough person? Don’t worry—all of this information is also covered in the technical guides below.
Infrastructure migration with our Daily OpenTok shim libraries
Our Vonage OpenTok client and server shims are intended to be drop-in replacements that support basic features of OpenTok’s client-side and Node libraries. For the right project, they could be the perfect way to try out Daily’s infrastructure without committing to a full migration right away.
We’ve written an OpenTok library shim guide that walks through what these shims can (and can’t!) do, plus when and how to use them in your project.
The accompanying OpenTok shim conversion demo provides a real-life example of how you can use these shims to replace OpenTok infrastructure with Daily by changing an import and just a couple of lines of code. It utilizes both the server and client-side shim packages to switch an OpenTok demo to Daily.
Full migration guide
We’ve produced an in-depth technical guide to assist with step-by-step code migration. Transitioning from Vonage OpenTok covers all the nitty gritty details about the differences between OpenTok and Daily APIs and call state machine. It explains exactly how your application logic may need to change to use Daily instead, from how OpenTok sessions relate to Daily rooms, to security credentials, screen sharing implementation, and more.
A case study in migrating a telehealth application to Daily
In the SimplyDoc migration post, you’ll find a real-life example of how Juan from WebRTC.ventures went through the process of migrating their telehealth application, SimplyDoc, to Daily. It provides specific code examples of changes that were made, challenges they ran into, and things that went smoothly.
Conclusion
With this post, we’ve covered some of our many resources to help developers migrate to Daily from OpenTok. If you have any questions or would like any additional help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team or post to our Discord community.
And of course, if you’re currently developing with Vonage, I’d love to hear your feedback on what additional migration resources you would find helpful.
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