"Chat" gets used for three very different features, and picking the wrong one leads to a tool that technically works but does not fit how people actually use your site. Let us separate them.
Live support chat
This is the small bubble in the corner that connects a visitor to a staff operator. The goal is conversion and support: answer a pre-sales question, unblock a customer, reduce a support ticket. It is one-visitor-to-one-operator, initiated on demand, and often paired with visitor monitoring so your team can see who is on the site. Cute Live Support covers this use case.
Chat rooms
A chat room is a shared space where many people talk at once — a community, a class, a live event, a support lounge. The value is the group dynamic, and the hard parts are moderation and scale. Cute Chat provides branded, moderated rooms you host yourself.
Private web messaging
Web messaging is one-to-one conversation between your users — think direct messages inside a social feature, a marketplace, or a members area. It needs presence, contact lists, and reliable delivery, but not the public dynamics of a room. Cute Web Messenger adds this to an ASP.NET application.
A quick way to decide
- Do you want staff to help visitors? Live support chat.
- Do you want users to talk to each other in a group? Chat rooms.
- Do you want users to message one another privately? Web messenger.
Plenty of sites use more than one. A learning platform might run live support for sales, private messaging between students and tutors, and moderated rooms for class discussions. Because these are separate concerns, mixing and matching is normal.
What they share
Whichever you choose, the same fundamentals matter: real-time delivery, reconnection after a dropped connection, authentication tied to your existing accounts, and — for anything public — moderation. Self-hosting all three keeps user data on your own infrastructure.
Frequently asked questions
Can one product do all three?
Some overlap exists — a chat platform may include private messaging — but live support, group rooms, and private web messaging are distinct experiences. Choose based on the primary job you need done.
Which is best for customer support?
Live support chat, because it connects a visitor directly to a staff operator and pairs well with real-time visitor monitoring.
Get started
Self-hosted components, built to last.
Richscripts products are licensed once and run on your own servers, with source code available. Explore the full product line or talk to the team about your use case.