15 Open-source Free Live-chat Widget Solutions To Boost Your Customer Engagement

Live chat widget is basically an embedded JavaScript widget that you add to your website to allow customers and website visitors to chat with site admins directly.

A live chat widget in your website help you increase your customer interaction, boost their satisfaction and improve your brand.

If you are looking for a self-hosted customer support and help desk systems, we can recommend this post for you.

While there are many commercial services that offer an embeddable chat widget to add in your website for a price, there are also many open-source free solutions that you can install and host on your server, then use at any website.

In this article we created you a list of the best open-source chat widget solutions, which vary in features, and options. We recommend going through the list and look through all of their features before making a final decision.

1-Papercups

Papercups is a feature-rich free open-source live customer chat widget. It has a simple interface and can be integrated directly with Slack.

Papercups is written in the Elixir programming language, and it comes with dozens of customization options and developer-friendly features.

Reply from email - use Papercups to answer support tickets via email

Reply from SMS - forward Twilio conversations and respond to SMS requests from Papercups
Custom chat widget - a customizable chat widget you can embed on your website to talk to your customers
React support - embed the chat widget as a React component, or a simple HTML snippet
React Native support - embed the chat widget in your React Native app
Flutter support - embed the chat widget in your Flutter app.

And many other features.

2- Live Helper Chat

Live Helper Chat is a simple yet powerful interactive chat widget that aims to increase customer/ visitors engagements at any website.

It comes with a fancy backend that allows site admins to communicate with many users at the same time, supports RTL languages, works seamlessly on mobile, and offers a voice, video, and screen-share support.

3- React Help Desk

Yet another open-source live chat support that can be integrated in any website. It comes with a simple responsive dashboard that allows multiple chat, built-in typing indicator support, SMS sending option, and support message archiving.

We have written a quick review about it here, exploring all of its features.

4- Chatwoot

Chatwoot is an open-source, self-hosted customer engagement suite. Chatwoot lets you view and manage your customer data, communicate with them irrespective of which medium they use, and re-engage them based on their profile.

It comes packed with dozens of enterprise-ready features which make it suitable for all types of companies, community websites, gaming websites, and NGO portals.

5- React-slack-chat

React Slack Chat is a Server-less Beautiful Gooey / 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.

This is a React chat widget project that aims to add an interactive simple text messaging widget to any React project in minutes.

7- Choosify

Choosify is a free chat widget solution that can be integrated in any website and work directly with Slack and Mattermost.

If you decided to manage it on the paid cloud service, the free tire allows 1,000 messages per month and unlimited team members. The paid tire is a bit cheap comparing to many other services as it starts from $2.50 per messages, which fit for small and medium-sized companies.

Choosify embedded code can be integrated easily in Node.js/JavaScript projects, as it can also be built as an embedded widget to run directly with any other website.

8- ChatKit

ChatKit is an Open Source library that lets you create a Chat Widget and connect it to any backend like Chatbot/NLP/Live Chat engine or messenger.

ChatKit is a free open-source project that is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

9- Chatty

Chatty is a free chat messaging that is created to look like the legacy IRC chatting systems. With some hacks it can be integrated as a live chat helper into any website.

It is a feature-rich system that supports group chat, channels, advanced moderation, streaming, and comes with a multi-languages interface.

10- Rocket-Chat

Rocket chat is an enterprise-grade open-source chat and messaging solution that is similar to Slack and Mattermost.

With few clicks the admin can generate an embedded chat widget that can be integrated in any website, and feed the messages directly into a channel specified for customer support.

Rocket chat allows all the team or certain members to interact and communicate directly with the customers. So, you can be assured that you have 24 hours watch.

11- Rasa-Webchat

Rasa Webchat is an open-source chat widget solution that is built to work on top of Rasa; the machine learning framework for messaging and conversations. It also works with the Botfront; the messaging GUI and bot manager for Rasa.

The app can be embedded as a JavaScript widget into any website, or directly within React projects using the NPM package.

Rasa is a highly customizable library as developers can customize the styles, add more features, or even extend its current features with more options.

Chat21-web-widget is a Free Live Chat Widget built on Firebase with Angular5 that lets you support and chat with visitors and customers on your website. More information about web widget here.

Features

Send a direct message to a preset user
Receive real-time support from your team
Form to enter the chat sentiment
Configure the widget with company logo and colors
Chat21 Web Widget is free and open source.

Live Chat Widget Adaptor is a collection of libraries in React, Vue, and Angular, to aid developers include interactive real-time chat widget in their projects.

The project is regularly updated and comes with a developer-friendly documentation that include instructions on how to install, use, customize and deploy.

This project is a flexibly styled chat-widget for your React apps. It was mainly created for integration with chatbots in messengers.

It comes with a detailed documentation on how to install, use, and deploy with a detailed chat widget API.

The project is an open-source project that is released under the MIT license.

15- Tiledesk Community Edition

Tiledesk is a real-time messaging solution for customers that allows companies and brands to interact with their customize momentarily as they use the website or the support portal.

Tiledesk comes in two editions; a community edition with all the messaging options and a full functional live chat widget, and an enterprise edition with more auditing, logging, and enterprise options.

If you know of any other free open-source live chat widget that we didn't mention here, let us know, and we will gladly add it to this list.

What is a live-chat widget?