Assembly Line

Bytedesk vs Tiledesk

Bytedesk and Tiledesk are both live chat software. Bytedesk is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 512 GitHub stars. Tiledesk is open source under MIT, with 323 GitHub stars.

Which to pick

Pick Bytedesk when
You want a self-hosted Intercom-style chat with AI agents and can operate a Java service.
Pick Tiledesk when
You want an open-source Voiceflow or Intercom-style setup with bot-to-human handoff on your own servers.

Side by side

What it does

Team chat plus omnichannel customer service with live chat, email, tickets and LLM-based chatbots using RAG.

Installation files (Helm and Docker Compose) for Tiledesk, a live chat platform with LLM chatbots that hand over to human agents across web and mobile.

Watch out

Chinese-first project and community, AGPL licence, and some features sit in a commercial edition.

Many containers to run; this repo is only the deployment wrapper, and the company's cloud is the easier route.

Ready for

Usable (both)

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)

Built with

Java and JavaScript

Node.js, Express, MongoDB and Kubernetes

Source code

Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)

Open source, MIT (permissive)

What the license allows

Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

How widely known

512 GitHub stars

323 GitHub stars

How established

Established: started 3 years ago, latest release v5.0.0.

Established: started 6 years ago, latest release 1.2.1.

Other comparisons

More live chat and customer messaging tools

Every live chat product and project, ranked

Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.