LiveChat vs Zammad
LiveChat and Zammad are both help desk software. LiveChat is a commercial product from Text S.A. Zammad is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 6k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick LiveChat when
- An online shop or service business wants dedicated live chat on its website with staff answering in real time.
- Pick Zammad when
- A support team wants a mature, self-hostable alternative to Zendesk or Freshdesk.
Side by side
Website live chat software with an AI agent, canned responses, chat routing and sales tracking.
A web helpdesk that gathers email, chat, phone, social and form requests into tickets with SLAs, a knowledge base and reporting.
Per-agent pricing is high for a single channel.
Self-hosting needs Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and Elasticsearch; the paid hosted service is the easier path.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Ruby, Rails, Vue, PostgreSQL, Redis and Elasticsearch
Closed source, sold by Text S.A.
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
522 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
6k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 14 years ago, no tagged release yet.
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.