Open source chat apps help teams to collaborate with each other in real time. These can be used for lead generation, customer support, and team communication.
Overview
A huge number of customers users on eCommerce websites abandon without checking out because of poor user experience. But if you have proper live chat software installed on the website and engage with the user before they are lost or leave the website, you can save that customer. Customers want their questions to be answered instantly, and any confusion during the purchase process can result in losing a sale. However, open source community is very vibrant and has developed many open source customer support chat software.
Using the right live chat software solution helps you respond to your customer’s queries instantly and convert them into sales. This blog post is aiming to share the list of top-rated free live chat applications which we think are best for small and medium businesses.
Rocket.Chat
Rocket.Chat is an open source web chat software. It’s a completely free and self-hosted chat system. It’s a comprehensive communication platform that provides team communication using direct messages and group messages.
Rocket.Chat has a huge open source community. As a result of this, this open source chat app has more plugins available to further enhance the experience of the product. It helps teams to work remotely as it provides audio and video chat tools. It can be a cheap alternative to zoom and slack. Here are the notable features of this open source chat solution.
- BYOS (bring your own server)
- Hubot Friendly – [Hubot Integration Project]
- LDAP Authentication
- REST-full APIs
- Native Cross-Platform Desktop Application
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Zulip
Zulip is one of the most popular open source chat solutions that follows stream-based threading model. In Zulip you subscribe to the streams instead of channels so that you are only notified of the streams you are interested in. This stream subscription helps you track conversations later and keep organized.
This open source chat app is cross-platform and offers APIs to develop your own custom integrations. Like other web chat software, it supports emojis, inline images, video, and tweet previews. Zulip is 100% free and open source software. Here are the top features of this customer support chat software.
- INLINE IMAGE, VIDEO, AND TWEET PREVIEWS: Zulip automatically generate a preview of links you send in conversations
- CUSTOMIZABLE AUTOMATIC LINKIFICATION: Customize Zulip’s markup to automatically link back to your issue tracker or GitHub.
- INTEGRATIONS: Get alerts and updates from your favorite services with off-the-shelf integrations for Trac, Nagios, GitHub, Jenkins, and more.
- API: Zulip has a dead-simple RESTful API and Python bindings
- MOBILE APPS: Supports native quality iOS and Android apps.
- DESKTOP APPS: Supports Multi-Platform Desktop Apps.
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Mattermost
Mattermost is an open source web chat software, which is highly secure and scalable. Firstly, it’s considered as an alternative to the most popular proprietary live chat apps. Secondly, this open source chat app is a mixture of both Slack and Microsoft Teams. In conclusion, makes it a superset of both the applications.
This open source chat solution helps large companies to consolidate all their communications. For example team chats, video chats, and document sharing at once place. Therefore, make it simple to search and discover information.
Here are some of the top features of Mattermost
- Accelerate workflows with integrated tools
- DevOps integration set
- Incoming and outgoing webhooks
- Plugins and extensions
- Bots and developer toolkit
- Robust API library
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Let’s Chat
Let’s Chat is a self-hosted customer support chat software for small teams. this web chat software is developed using Node.js and MongoDB and focuses on easy and quick deployment. You can install it on your server with a few clicks. It’s 100% free and open source with its source code available on Github.
What makes Let’s Chat unique from other open source software is its enterprise features like LDAP and Kerberos authentication. This customer support chat software is constantly being updated by the development team and more and more features are being added. Here are the top features available now
- LDAP / Kerberos Authentication
- XMPP Multi-user chat (MUC)
- Hubot Friendly
- REST-like API
- Transcripts / Chat History
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Botpress
Chatbots are on the rise these days. Whether you use them for sales, marketing, or support, they can be a great addition to your virtual team.
Hence making Botpress is one of the most popular open source live chat software for websites. It has a visual conversation builder and an emulator to test your conversations. It uses AI and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Therefore, is allowing the different specialists to put their knowledge together into building better conversational assistants. Hence improving the machine’s power to understand humans.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have improved a lot recently. Therefore, the demand for AI-based conversational customer support chat software has gained a lot of boosts. So, here are the notable features that Botpress offers.
- Conversation Flow Manager
- Third party integrations
- Content & flow separation
- Human in the loop
- Modular design
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Conclusion
In this article, you have reviewed the best open source web chat software available for small and medium businesses and teams. This blog post will really help you in making the right choice while choosing an open source customer support chat software for your business website. Firstly, we listed the top-of-the-line features of Rocket.Chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Let’s Chat, and BotPress. Secondly, we explained how these features make them unique. In conclusion, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost are suitable choices if you want more plugins and integrations. Zulip and Let’s Chat can be good livechat software if you need a quick and easy solution. For bot building Rocket.Chat does offer features. But Botpress is a more popular choice.
Finally, containerize.com is writing articles on further open source open source chat apps. Therefore, please stay in touch with the Live Chat category for regular updates.