Community-skeleton vs LiveChat
Community-skeleton and LiveChat are both help desk software. Community-skeleton is open source under OSL-3.0, with 20k GitHub stars. LiveChat is a commercial product from Text S.A.
Which to pick
- Pick Community-skeleton when
- You want a free PHP helpdesk and can live with a slower release pace.
- Pick LiveChat when
- An online shop or service business wants dedicated live chat on its website with staff answering in real time.
Side by side
UVdesk's open-source helpdesk: email ticketing, workflows, knowledge base and agent permissions on Symfony.
Website live chat software with an AI agent, canned responses, chat routing and sales tracking.
Releases are infrequent, community support is thin, and the vendor pushes its paid SaaS; star count overstates activity.
Per-agent pricing is high for a single channel.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
PHP, Symfony and MySQL
Not published
Open source, OSL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Text S.A.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
20k GitHub stars
522 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v1.1.8.
Not known
Other comparisons
More help desk and ticketing software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.