Olark

Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Olark

A curated collection of the 3 best self hosted alternatives to Olark.

Olark is a hosted live chat service that embeds a chat widget on websites to enable real-time conversations with visitors. It provides routing, transcripts, visitor monitoring, lead qualification, integrations with CRMs/support tools, and basic analytics.

Alternatives List

#1
Chatwoot

Chatwoot

Chatwoot is an open-source customer support platform with a shared inbox for live chat, email, and messaging channels, plus automation, reporting, and a help center.

Chatwoot screenshot

Chatwoot is an open-source customer support platform that centralizes customer conversations into a shared, omnichannel inbox. It combines live chat, email, and popular messaging integrations with tools for team collaboration, automation, and customer context.

Key Features

  • Omnichannel inbox for managing conversations across website chat, email, and supported messaging channels
  • Website chat widget for real-time customer messaging
  • Help center portal to publish FAQs and support articles
  • Team collaboration tools such as private notes, mentions, labels, and canned responses
  • Workflow automation including auto-assignment, business hours, and autoresponders
  • Contact management with customer profiles, history, segmentation, and custom attributes
  • Reporting and analytics including agent/inbox performance and CSAT reporting
  • Integration options for common support workflows (for example Slack and external tools)

Use Cases

  • Customer support teams handling live chat and email in a single shared inbox
  • SaaS and e-commerce support desks needing contact context, automation, and CSAT tracking
  • Organizations replacing proprietary helpdesk tools while keeping control of customer data

Limitations and Considerations

  • Some channel integrations and advanced capabilities depend on configuring external providers and environment variables

Chatwoot is a strong choice for teams that need a modern, scalable support desk with omnichannel communication and built-in productivity features. It works well for both internal support operations and customer-facing support at growing organizations.

26.9kstars
6.1kforks
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#2
Live Helper Chat

Live Helper Chat

Self-hosted live chat and customer support platform with website widgets, operator console, chatbots, omnichannel integrations, and optional voice/video/screensharing.

Live Helper Chat screenshot

Live Helper Chat is an open-source customer communication platform for adding real-time support chat to websites. It provides an operator console, embeddable chat widgets, automation and bot capabilities, and integrations for messaging channels.

Key Features

  • Embeddable website live chat widget with operator console and multi-operator handling
  • Chatbot/bot workflows with support for integrating third-party AI and REST APIs
  • Omnichannel integrations (e.g., Telegram, WhatsApp via providers, Facebook Messenger/Instagram)
  • File uploads, chat transcripts, archiving, search, and basic reporting/statistics
  • Department routing, transfers, canned responses, and working-hours configuration
  • Optional voice/video/screensharing integrations via external providers

Use Cases

  • Customer support chat for websites with multiple agents and departmental routing
  • Omnichannel messaging inbox bridging web chat with popular chat platforms
  • AI-assisted support flows (FAQ-style automation, intent routing, or agent assist)

Limitations and Considerations

  • Voice/video/screensharing capabilities rely on external integrations rather than being fully native
  • Advanced high-scale analytics/search typically requires optional components (e.g., Elasticsearch)

Live Helper Chat fits organizations that need a self-managed live support system with extensibility and integrations. It is suitable for both small teams and higher-volume deployments when paired with optional scaling components.

2.2kstars
734forks
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#3
Tiledesk

Tiledesk

Open-source conversational platform to build AI chatbots, multichannel live chat, and human-in-the-loop customer support with knowledge base and RAG capabilities.

Tiledesk screenshot

Tiledesk is an open-source conversational platform combining multichannel live chat, visual bot-building, and AI-powered assistants. It provides tools to create LLM-enabled chatbots, manage human handoffs, and integrate knowledge bases for retrieval-augmented responses.

Key Features

  • Multichannel messaging: web chat widget, WhatsApp, and other channels with unified conversation context
  • Visual no-code Design Studio to build conversational flows and prompt chains for AI agents
  • AI Agents and RAG: multiple knowledge bases, hybrid full-text + semantic search, and prompt chaining for contextual answers
  • Human-in-the-loop: smart escalation, agent dashboard, and AI copilots that assist human operators in real time
  • Deployment options: Docker Compose and Kubernetes (Helm charts) with a microservice stack including server, dashboard, chat clients, and MongoDB
  • Extensible integrations: APIs and webhooks for connecting external services, calendars, email, and ecommerce platforms
  • Self-learning workflows: extract insights from conversations to update knowledge and improve agent responses

Use Cases

  • Automated customer support that answers common queries, creates tickets, and escalates complex issues to human agents
  • Conversational commerce and product assistants that present catalogs, build carts, and handle ordering across channels
  • Internal help desks and knowledge retrieval where AI agents surface documents and context from company KBs

Limitations and Considerations

  • Helm charts and provided deployment templates are intended as starting points and include an embedded MongoDB container; they require customization and hardening for production use
  • Some enterprise features and private Docker images are gated behind paid credentials and are not available in the community distribution
  • Advanced AI capabilities depend on configuring LLM providers or external/model-serving infrastructure, which requires additional setup and resource planning

Tiledesk is suitable for teams that need an integrated conversational platform combining bots, human agents, and knowledge-driven AI. It emphasizes extensibility and multi-agent workflows while expecting operators to adapt deployments and integrations for production environments.

269stars
97forks
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Why choose an open source alternative?

  • •Data ownership: Keep your data on your own servers
  • •No vendor lock-in: Freedom to switch or modify at any time
  • •Cost savings: Reduce or eliminate subscription fees
  • •Transparency: Audit the code and know exactly what's running