Practical day-to-day use
ZChat is built for teams that want ownership and deployment control without making operators and administrators fight the interface. From localhost evaluation to production rollout, the goal is straightforward setup, clear operations, and a support experience people can learn quickly.
Start locally, validate the workflow, then move to a production domain without changing products or pricing models.
Give agents login, session, and availability flows that are fast to learn and easy to repeat every day.
Manage widget behavior, team settings, and reporting from a single dashboard instead of scattered tools.
Fast sign-in, readable dashboards, and clear session handling reduce the friction that usually comes with self-hosted support tools.
Design the widget, tune settings, and shape the visitor journey from interfaces that are built to be changed by real teams, not just power users.
Self-hosted software earns a reputation for being heavy when the first hour is spent on prerequisites. The evaluation path here is deliberately short, and the same steps scale to a production install.
Unzip and run the local runner. It creates the demo database, applies the schema and seed accounts, and starts the server - then tells you the dashboard URL and the sign-in details.
Running it again is safe: an existing database is detected and left untouched rather than reset.
A single script tag before the closing body tag, pointing at your own server. No build step, no package to install, and it behaves the same on WordPress, Shopify, a custom application or plain HTML.
A liveness endpoint says the process is answering. A readiness endpoint reports the database, licence and schema individually, so an outage tells you which dependency failed instead of returning a bare error.
Privileged actions are written to an audit log, so 'who changed that setting' has an answer.
The download includes a verification checklist that walks through proving each surface actually works - health, sign-in, the widget, the public APIs, and a full end-to-end conversation with a rating.
One command. Unzip the download and run run-local.cmd: on first run it creates the demo database, applies the schema and seed accounts, and starts the server. Re-running is safe - an already-provisioned database is detected and left alone.
No. The download ships the compiled server, the dashboard and the widget bundle. Adding chat to your site is one script tag.
No. The dashboard is served by the same server as the chat itself, in a browser. There is no second host to deploy and no vendor console to sign into.
The package includes a verification checklist that proves the server, database, licence, dashboard and widget are genuinely working, not just that a page loaded. A readiness endpoint reports the database, licence and schema separately, so a failure names the dependency at fault.
The seed accounts exist so you can sign in immediately. Because they are published in the download, the dashboard shows a warning banner until the password is changed, and the banner clears itself once it is.
ZChat gives you the installable server, web dashboard, website widget, and desktop agent tools in one self-hosted product you buy once and keep. 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
One-time purchase, perpetual license, and no monthly per-agent bill attached to growth.
AI Flexibility
Use Ollama locally or connect OpenAI and Anthropic with your own provider accounts.