Labs

Drupal Chat Module Comparisons

By John Ennew | 12th June 2013

A list of chat modules evaulated recently and their pros and cons

Drupal Chat

http://drupal.org/project/drupalchat

Person to person chat on the site. Out of the box it looks like facebook chat with a little widget that floats in the bottom right of the window.

  • Dependencies: None required (node.js is optional but ajax default)
  • Ease of install: Easy
  • Theme-able: Yes
  • Anonymous can use: Yes
  • Chatroom or person to person? Just person to person.

Chatroll

http://drupal.org/project/chatroll

This requires an account on the pay-per-month chatroll service: http://chatroll.com. Hosting on the external service means much less load on the site and much less development time our end. We can just make it look pretty. Access control can be achieved in Drupal by restricting access to nodes the chat room appears on.

  • Dependencies: none
  • Ease of install / setup: very easy
  • Theme-able: Yes (via CSS, it's hosted on their own servers)
  • Anonymous access: Yes
  • Chatroom or person to person? Charroom. though it's possible to send a short IM to someone in the room.

Chatroom

http://drupal.org/project/chatroom

This is the fully integrated Drupal solution with no need for external account. All aspects are controllable and themeable
Needs a node.js server and the version of nodejs and chatroom tested had bugs (the page had to be refreshed to see new messages). Presently Acquia have told us they do not have node.js server running on dev cloud.

  • Dependencies: node.js
  • Ease of install: Hard (got to configure node.js)
  • Theme-able: Yes - Fully
  • Anonymous: Yes
  • Chatroom or single chat: Chat room only

Comments

Tarun Nagpal
Tarun Nagpal

Hello Guys,
I want to integrate the Live chat functionality on a banking corporate website. I want the following features can anyone GUIDE..?

1. Live Chat for anonymous users only
2. No room or other functionality needed.

Regards
Tarun Nagpal

Oskari's picture
Oskari
Oskari

Ok so are the "Private embedded chatroom" and "Group chat" available without monthly plan?

Herci
Herci

All links go to http://drupal.org/project/drupalchat by mistake.

Shashwat
Shashwat

DrupalChat module (http://drupal.org/project/drupalchat) does provide one public chatroom along with one to one (private) chat option. It's cloud based commercial version offers a wider feature set (including option to have multiple chatrooms). Thanks.

Sam
Sam

Live2Support live chat module is another nice chat module for Drupal website. Enabling Live2Support live chat module can add a live chat room to Drupal in just few minutes. And the best part is once the module is successfully installed, a free hosted chat will be assigned to your Drupal. http://www.live2support.com/integrations/drupal-live-chat-plugin.php

rickyricardo's picture
rickyricardo
rickyricardo

Thanks for the new topic.

Oskari
Oskari

Hi

Thanks for the comparison. Does the Drupalchat require monthly plans to run in Drupal ( http://drupalchat7.botskool.co.in/ ) ? Or is it only for the Node.js ?

FLYWING14
FLYWING14

DrupalChat doesn't require monthtly plans at all, it's just an option so you don't have to set up your own node.js server.

Shashwat
Shashwat

No, you don't need any monthly plan to run DrupalChat (with default configuration). It's only required when you use its cloud based commercial version. Thanks.

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