Rocket.Chat versus LiveChat

Rocket.Chat is a SaaS and genuine Free Open Source Software platform. They are developing an impressive range of communication and collaboration solutions for a wide variety of organizations, catering to industries like financial services, healthcare, and governments.

Rocket.chat, being Open Source, lets you review the code yourself or contribute to the project in their GitHub Repository. Unlike most providers, Rocket.Chat holds an MIT license, granting you full ownership and control over your code, data, privacy, and security. Detailed documentation for developers is available on the Rocket.Chat website, allowing you to build upon their framework and customize integrations.

One of their core products is Team Collaboration which you can set up as a privately hosted alternative to Slack. Of course, the use case for their software highlighted here is Customer Service and Engagement.

With Rocket.Chat you can manage live chat, email, SMS, and social media channels in a single security oriented hub. The options and features at hand are mostly limited by your imagination.

Setting up, self-hosting, and maintaining your own server is free. However, you will need technical prowess or hire developers to leverage most of the possibilities of their stack. Some Enterprise Edition features are only available with a subscription, which you can try out with a 30 day free trial.

A 30 day free trial is also available for their robust and scalable cloud hosted SaaS Enterprise solutions. If your organization requires more strict control, the entire infrastructure can be hosted on premise.

LiveChat, originally from Poland, has been in the online customer service software business since 2002, being one the first companies to provide a live chat function to websites.

As one of the largest providers they offer a large number of app integrations and customization possibilties, ranging from CRM to e-commerce and help-desk software.

Their cheapest plan starts at $16 per month for one agent. A lot of features, analytics, and plugins are paid options or only available in their more expensive plans. They don’t offer a free plan. However, a 14 days free trial is available.

LiveChat has a substantial customer base consisting of over 35,000 companies worldwide. Among their customers are titans of industry like Adobe, Atlassian, PayPal, and Unilever.