// the find
LiveHelperChat/livehelperchat
Live Helper Chat - live support for your website. Featuring web and mobile apps, Voice & Video & ScreenShare. Supports Telegram, Twilio (whatsapp), Facebook messenger including building a bot.
LiveHelperChat is a self-hosted PHP live support platform that's been running in production for over a decade. It handles the full stack: web widget, operator back-office, mobile apps, bots, and integrations with every major messaging channel. For teams that need an on-premise Intercom alternative and don't want to pay per-seat cloud pricing, this is the most complete option in the PHP space.
The integration surface is genuinely impressive — Telegram, WhatsApp via Twilio and open-wa, Facebook, Discord, Viber, Mattermost, all as separate maintained extensions rather than half-baked stubs. The bot engine is flexible enough to wire in any third-party REST API, and the ChatGPT/Ollama integrations are recent and maintained. The performance story is credible: the docs reference 10,000 chats/day configurations using Elasticsearch + Node.js + PHP-Resque for offloading, which is honest about what PHP needs to scale rather than pretending it's magic. The widget is v2 React-based with RTL support, which is more than most open-source chat tools bother with.
The codebase is PHP with a custom ORM and template engine — not Laravel, not Symfony, a home-grown framework from an era before modern PHP. The development build process requires compiling three separate JS apps (wrapper, react-app, admin) plus running Gulp for CSS, which is genuinely painful to set up. Fourteen-plus years of feature accumulation means the admin UI is dense to the point of hostile; new operators regularly need training just to find basic settings. Self-hosting also means you own the operational complexity of XMPP notifications, cron jobs, optional Elasticsearch, optional Node.js helper, and optional Redis queues — the simple install is simple, but production-grade is a non-trivial ops burden.