Live Helper Chat

What Live Helper Chat does

Live Helper Chat is a live chat platform for websites. You add a widget to your pages, either floating or embedded, and operators answer visitors in real time. Chats are routed by department and priority, can be transferred between operators or moved automatically to another department, and are archived with statistics and agent performance reports. Canned messages, an auto responder and work hours cover the routine parts.

It also has several tools for proactive selling and support. Operators can see who is browsing the site and roughly where they are, send invitations to chat, watch what a visitor is typing before the message is sent, and ask for a screenshot of the visitor’s page. A built-in mail module adds email tickets from several mailboxes, so simple email support can sit next to chat.

Bots and channels

The bot builder can run scripted flows or call an external service: ChatGPT, Gemini, a local Ollama model, Rasa, Dialogflow or any REST API. Extensions published as separate repositories add Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber and SMS through Twilio, as well as voice and video calls through Jitsi or Agora. Agora is a paid third-party service, while Jitsi is free. A REST API and webhooks connect it to other systems, and the documentation describes an MCP setup for using it from Claude or ChatGPT.

Operators can answer from the web interface or from apps for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and macOS.

Self-hosting Live Helper Chat

Live Helper Chat is written in PHP, with JavaScript and React in the front end, and stores data in MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.2.3 or later (JSON functions are required). It needs PHP 8.2 or later and Apache or Nginx. You can install it from a release archive with a web installer, from Git with Composer, with Docker using the project’s standalone Docker repository, through Softaculous, or from the DigitalOcean Marketplace. For high traffic the documentation describes optional Redis, Elasticsearch, a Node.js helper and a PHP-Resque worker. The README cites production installations handling more than 10,000 chats a day.

The code is under the Apache-2.0 license, which allows modification and commercial use with few conditions.

Hosted version

The developer hosts instances on livehelperchat.com subdomains. A free plan is available for evaluation, and paid plans are sized by traffic. The project states that the hosted version and the GitHub version have the same features. Paid support for self-hosted installations is also offered.

Limitations

Messaging channels and several other features come from separate extension repositories that you install and update yourself. The product is centered on chat, and email ticketing is an add-on module rather than a full help desk. The free hosted plan is meant for evaluation only.

Who it suits

Live Helper Chat suits websites and online shops that want detailed live chat with visitor tracking, invitations and bots, under a permissive license and on ordinary PHP hosting. Teams that mainly handle email tickets should look at a help desk such as Zammad or FreeScout. Those that want chat and messaging in a shared inbox can compare Chatwoot.