Recommendations for Live Chat on L5.3?

Take a look at https://rocket.chat/

@Lebod Why reinvent the wheel? Just use a third-party one that you can add as a JavaScript plugin to your site.

I saw RocketChat, thanks SaeedPrez. I've also heard of Tawk.to. It is sort of re-inventing the wheel I guess but developing one ourselves would give us more flexibility like storing the chats in our own db etc. I'm pretty un-decided at the moment. My dev is also recommending against it...

@Lebod it really depends on your needs and that makes it really hard for someone with little or no info to give advise. There are some nice full feature chat/support software you could setup in less than an hour but it might not be 100% what you want/need. On the other hand, it might take a developer anywhere from a week up to a few months to develop something from the ground up, depending on features.

My general advice would be to start with something that's already out there, try it out for a few weeks, if you still want to develop something on your own, you can do that on the side, at least you'll have a chat until your own chat software is ready and you'll know exactly what features are missing or are working great.

Agree with @SaeedPrez. But with laravel's echo and using pusher you should be up and chatting in less then a week depending on your version of laravel. Then as your chat app increases in use (pusher maybe getting to expensive) you can swap it out for socket io or similar.

I agree packages are hard to decide on. Sometimes by the time you tweak them and get them set you could have coded your own and usually with less overhead. But it's a viable solution to implement quickly. Maybe your users don't use the feature enough to warrant development costs. Maybe it does.

I do see a lot of clients personally who go all in on a feature, developer costs get huge, then it almost never gets used.

Glitter is also good, probably doesn't integrate but you could have a link to it.

I'm actually not the Dev, I'm the business owner, trying to decide... I have some cursory knowledge of Laravel. The live chat would probably be a relatively frequently used feature for us. I know some apps let you for ex. email the transcript to the client. I'm not sure if I need that. I think a relatively straightforward livechat where we can help people with questions while visiting the site is pretty much all we're looking for.

As much as I like programming my own stuff, I would definitely use an existing chat client that has a known good track record of working if you find one surely their site would have good setup and usage instructions. Look at https://www.livezilla.net/home/en/

intercom.io - pricey but completely worth it

check this https://www.liveadmins.com/ this will help you