Live chat for websites: self-hosted / open source

A lot of time passed before online chat appeared on the website of our online store. Before that, we somehow managed to manage the osTicket’s ticketing system and classic telephone communication, guided by the logic “the one who needs to be bought must have a genuine desire to do this”. But I myself began to face situations where calling and hanging on the line was frankly broke, and waiting for an answer to the mail for too long. The chat format turned out to be the very golden mean. You start the dialogue and every 5 minutes, doing your own thing, you get the answers you need from the operator on the other side. And in the end, you can send a transcript to your email. Forgive me all the creators and PR commercial web chats ... First-class open source under the cut.

Habr and Giktayms are literally teeming with articles with reviews and comparisons of various customer support chats through the site. That is, the problem when choosing a service provider was not so much in the absence of choice or limited functionality of individual solutions, but in diversity. Read these articles, and then explore the sites of companies was sheer agony. Some companies even stopped me the price of services. The tariff is usually dependent on the number of operators. Being asked a completely natural question about pricing, I hammered into my favorite duckduckgo.com the phrase “open source online chat”. The very first page gave me some attractive options. Meet Live Helper Chat for the price of hosting from 3 EUR per month. If the computational resources of your company allow - download the source and feel at the top of the world.

Of the interesting features I can list:
- A wide range of settings and customizations
- Incredibly flexible access rights management
- Redirect client to another page
- Access to client screen contents. Screen sharing
- The presence of an ecosystem of modules. In particular, there are integration modules with some CRM, xmpp, etc.
- Integration module with osTicket (not yet tested)
- Link to gihub

Friends, let's respect each other and make settings for chats so that they do not pop up on a half-screen over and over again. For me personally, it is usually a rush to close the site, rather than show interest and make a purchase. If you start using this software solution and you will like it, be sure to donate. Developers deserve it.
')
If anyone is interested in reading about how a business in Russia can live completely with software solutions based on open source solutions and linux systems, write in the comments. There were ideas to write an article about it for popularization. Here is what we use:
- Magento online store platform
- OsTicket mail processing system
- Piwik web analytics system
- Management accounting in the system of own development based on Symfony2. Online store platforms are not able to provide the required quality of accounting.
- Office suite LibreOffice. Yes, it has become suitable for commercial use.
- Client Bank Avangard (Firefox + Icedtea)
- Accounting 1C. Do not believe it works stably. The truth is terribly slow.