Brand control
Self-hosted software should not force your team into a generic widget. ZChat lets you shape the visitor experience, form flow, colors, labels, and messaging so support feels native to your brand instead of borrowed from a hosted vendor.
Tune the launcher, layout, and chat window presentation to match the tone and structure of your site.
Adjust the information you collect and the order you collect it so routing and follow-up are cleaner.
Write the greeting and the offline message yourself, and use built-in widget labels in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese or Chinese.
Make design and behavior changes from the same admin experience used to manage the rest of your support stack.
Match chat to your site with its colour, corner, greeting and pre-chat questions.
Most chat widgets are customised by writing increasingly specific CSS against somebody else's markup, which breaks on their next release. ZChat exposes the choices as options, and isolates the rest so neither side can damage the other.
Accent colour, launcher position, greeting text and offline message, all set from the widget builder in the dashboard with a live preview, and all expressed as embed attributes you can edit by hand afterwards.
Dark mode follows the visitor's system preference, using a full set of surface, text and alert colours rather than an inverted light theme.
Decide whether email is required, whether the department selector appears, and which departments are offered. Add your own pre-chat questions - text, email or dropdown - and mark each required or optional.
33 languages ship with the widget in the ASP.NET Core edition, following the visitor's browser language unless you pin one explicitly in the embed. Chinese follows the script a visitor reads: Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau get Traditional characters, everywhere else Simplified.
The post-chat rating, the notification sound, session persistence, proactive triggers, the AI assistant and visitor monitoring can each be disabled for an individual embed, so one page can behave differently from the rest of the site.
The dashboard includes a widget builder with a live preview: set the accent colour, choose bottom-right or bottom-left, write the greeting and the offline message, then copy the generated embed code. Everything is expressed as attributes on the embed, so you can also edit it by hand.
Yes. Require an email or not, show or hide the department selector, and add your own fields - short text, email, or a dropdown with your options, each required or optional.
Yes. It follows the visitor's system preference automatically, and the dark palette is a full set of surface and text colours rather than an inverted approximation.
In the ASP.NET Core edition the interface ships in 33 languages, including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and right-to-left Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu, and follows the visitor's browser language by default. Pass an explicit locale in the embed to pin one.
No. The widget renders inside a Shadow DOM, so your stylesheet cannot reach inside it and its styles cannot escape. Customisation happens through the documented options rather than by fighting CSS specificity.
ZChat gives you the installable server, web dashboard, website widget, and desktop agent tools in one self-hosted product, with live chat free to run. Run it on infrastructure you trust and connect AI only if and how you want it.
Deployment
Install on Windows or Linux, behind IIS or Nginx, in a VM, or in Docker if that fits your stack.
Commercial model
Live chat is free with unlimited agents. Only the optional AI assistant is billed, per agent per month.
AI Flexibility
Use Ollama locally or connect OpenAI and Anthropic with your own provider accounts.