Live chat and customer messaging tools in 2026
5 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, LiveChat has the most readers, about 522 a month. 12 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. LibreDesk leads with 3.1k stars, ahead of Bytedesk. 6 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (6), Apache-2.0 (3) and AGPL-3.0 (2).
Commercial live chat and customer messaging tools
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1
LiveChat Text S.A.
Text is live chat software for your website with an AI Agent that answers 24/7. Qualify leads and track sales from chats. Start your free 14-day trial.
Complete system Production-ready An online shop or service business wants dedicated live chat on its website with staff answering in real time.
522 readers a month Since 2002 Commercial -
2
Intercom Intercom, Inc.
Complete system Production-ready A SaaS or app business wants in-product chat and AI-first support with handoff to human agents.
Commercial -
3
Tidio Tidio
See what your customer conversations earn. Lyro resolves questions instantly and turns the rest into sales, leads, and bookings you can attribute.
Complete system Production-ready A small e-commerce store wants a cheap chat widget that answers common questions automatically.
Commercial -
4
Crisp Crisp IM
Complete system Production-ready A small startup wants chat and shared inbox for the whole team without per-seat pricing.
Commercial -
5
tawk.to tawk.to
One free inbox for all your customer channels. Live chat, ticketing, knowledge base, AI assist, and CRM — all in one place. Trusted by 6M+ businesses.
Complete system Production-ready A small business wants website chat at no cost and can live with tawk.to branding.
Commercial
Open-source live chat and customer messaging tools
Complete systems you can adopt 7
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1
LibreDesk abhinavxd
Open-source, self-hosted customer support desk in a single binary. A lightweight alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Chatwoot.
Complete system Usable A small team wants a lightweight self-hosted Intercom or Zendesk replacement that is easy to deploy.
★ 3.1k AGPL-3.0 Go Active, pushed 7 days ago -
2
Bytedesk Bytedesk
Open Souce IM with AI powered live-chat, email, ticket support, omni-channel customer service，alternative to slack + zendesk/intercom/hubspot/ada/decagon/sierra
Complete system Usable You want a self-hosted Intercom-style chat with AI agents and can operate a Java service.
★ 512 AGPL-3.0 JavaScript Active, pushed 11 days ago -
3
Tiledesk Tiledesk
Install Tiledesk on your server using Helm for Kubernetes orchestration and Docker Compose for running multi-container Docker applications. Tiledesk provides an open-source solution comparable to Voiceflow, empowering you to create sophisticated LLM-enabled chatbots that seamlessly transition interactions to human agents when needed.
Complete system Usable You want an open-source Voiceflow or Intercom-style setup with bot-to-human handoff on your own servers.
★ 323 MIT Mustache Active, pushed 21 days ago -
4
AgentDesk huabeitech
Open-source AI customer support system. AI-first support, human-ready operations.
Complete system Experimental You want a self-hosted AI-first support desk in Go and are comfortable with a young project.
★ 278 Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed 27 days ago -
5
Papercups papercups-io
Open-source live customer chat
Complete system Usable You already run it and it covers your needs.
★ 6.1k MIT Elixir Quiet, pushed 3 years ago -
6
Chattermate.chat chattermate
Open-source AI customer support platform — AI chatbot with human handoff, Shopify & Slack integrations, visual workflow builder. Self-hosted alternative to Intercom & Zendesk. Apache-2.0.
Complete system Usable A small company wants a self-hosted Intercom or Chatbase alternative using its own LLM key.
★ 129 Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed 24 days ago -
7
Goflylivechat taoshihan1991
开源在线客服系统GO语言开发GO-FLY,免费在线客服系统/GOFLY LIVE CHAT: open source self-hosted private cloud customer support live chat software by golang
Complete system Usable You want a minimal self-hosted chat widget and can read Chinese documentation.
★ 2.6k Apache-2.0 HTML Quiet, pushed 14 months ago
Building blocks for your own system 1
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1
Goch ribice
Self hosted live chat server written in Go
Building block Experimental You want a small Go chat backend to study or embed.
★ 199 MIT Go Quiet, pushed 2 years ago
Integrations 2
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1
Node-crisp-api crisp-im
:zap: Crisp API Node Wrapper
Integration Production-ready Your business uses Crisp and you want to automate it from JavaScript.
★ 113 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 8 days ago -
2
Intergram idoco
Free live chat widget linked to your Telegram messenger
Integration Experimental You run a small site and want free live chat answered from Telegram.
★ 1.4k MPL-2.0 JavaScript Quiet, pushed 3 years ago
Compared head to head
Also under help desk and ticketing software
Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 9. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 2. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
Languages
Go 3, JavaScript 2, TypeScript 2, Mustache 1, Elixir 1, Python 1, HTML 1 and CSS 1.
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