Anyone tried out the open source live chat software Rocket Chat?

[RobinHood]

I just came across this open source live web chat software, developed in JavaScript, using the Meteor fullstack framework.

https://rocket.chat/

https://demo.rocket.chat

It has web interface, desktop interface for Mac and Windows, and Mobile apps.

https://rocket.chat/download

You can download it for free and self host, or you can pay to have them host it for you with a $50 per month entry point, you can also white label it.

https://rocket.chat/hosting

Anyone able to figure out if this is something that could be integrated nicely into XF for live private chat between users?

https://rocket.chat/docs/

 

[matthewalan]

We used Rocket.Chat for almost a year. It's a really great piece of software. We only used it for internal messaging, similar to what people use Slack for. We never ended up using some of the other cool features on it like the helpdesk chat, or video messaging or anything.

The only reason we stopped using it was because we had too many projects to worry about maintaining it. I didn't have the time to update it or to fix it when it crashed.

I would imagine it's possible for it to work with XF for live chat, but I also think that it would take a massive amount of work. And even then, most people would need to hire someone to install it since it runs on node and not regular PHP. Their server would need a lot of configuring.

But I also could be wrong Never really worked with it other than routine maintenance.

 

[Matt C.]

I tried it out, out of curiosity. I have a DigitalOcean VPS and thus used their guide (located here) for installing it. As matthewalan stated, it is quite complex. I can't go into a huge amount of detail since I didn't use for very long, but it seemed quite impressive and there were an extensive amount of options and third party integrations.

 

[Lucas]

They should have a demo account to check the app, I really would like to see it and don't think I should have to create an account to do so. Oh well.

 

[Sim]

On paper Rocket Chat looked like a winner - all the features you would need and the ability to be extended for integration purposes.

But when I started to get it set up, it was so messy and at times illogical that I simply gave up - I don't have time to futz with a system, got too many things which are much higher priority. If I employed a full time administrator in my business I might have given it a go.

So we instead moved to Slack because it was just easy. I'm not 100% happy with the functionality - it's not really designed for communities to use, it's a corporate product so there are some limitations when using the free version.

At the moment I'm considering trialling Discord as an alternative.

 

[matthewalan]

@Sim I definitely agree with you about Rocket Chat. By time we were done paying for hosting, maintenance, and just the headache of having to deal with the various issues Rocket Chat had at least for us, it was cheaper to move to another platform. I wished we moved to slack, but hipchat was a decent alternative too and much cheaper for our small firm.

 

[Sim]

We've used HipChat for our internal discussion and system monitoring for quite some time. I have it integrated with my XenForo forums so that I get alerts and notifications about various things such as new member registrations, new threads, reported posts and so on.

I think it excels for this purpose and have no intention of changing at this point. When we first started using it, we were on a paid plan - but since then they have changed their pricing and we no longer pay anything for it! Can't argue with that!!

 

[matthewalan]

Our plan was to initially be on a paid plan. At $2 a user, it's dirt cheap. But we never ended up needing to upgrade our account.