WP Live Chat Support vs Super Speedy Chat

TL;DR: WP Live Chat Support is now 3CX Free Live Chat, a genuinely free widget that connects your site to 3CX’s cloud phone system. Choose it if you want free chat with voice calls and don’t mind your messages travelling through 3CX’s servers. Choose Super Speedy Chat if you searched for what WP Live Chat Support used to be: a fast chat plugin that runs entirely on your own site, with your conversations in your own database.

Last updated: 1 August 2026.

Overview of WP Live Chat Support (now 3CX Free Live Chat)

WP Live Chat Support was built in 2014 by Dylan Auty and Nick Duncan of Code Cabin, the South African studio also behind WP Google Maps, and grew into the most popular chat plugin on WordPress.org, with over a million downloads. Its original source is still public on GitHub, which mattered: you could read the code, patch it, and see exactly what it did with your data. In October 2019 it was acquired by 3CX, the phone system company, and it has since been rebuilt as “3CX Free Live Chat, Calls & Messaging”. The current plugin (version 10.0.18, updated June 2026, 100,000+ active installations, rated 4.6 from 821 reviews) is a front end for 3CX’s communications platform: you create a 3CX account, and the widget gives your visitors live chat and voice calls, with WhatsApp, Facebook and SMS messages aggregated into the same 3CX dashboard.

Taken on its own terms it is a strong product: genuinely free, actively maintained, and the click-to-call feature is something few chat plugins offer. If you want a free phone-system-plus-chat hub and you are comfortable with 3CX operating it, it is a fair choice.

Visit WP Live Chat Support (3CX) →

The catch: it is not self-hosted any more

Most people searching for “WP Live Chat Support” remember the original pitch: chat stored in your own WordPress database, no third-party account. That is no longer what this plugin is. The current version requires a 3CX account, and its real-time messaging runs through 3CX’s infrastructure. Why does that matter? Six concrete reasons:

• You work in their system, not yours. Chats, WhatsApp and Facebook messages are answered from 3CX’s web and mobile apps, so your team learns and lives in a third-party dashboard.
• You don’t hold your own data. Conversations transit (and depending on setup, live on) 3CX’s platform rather than your database.
• GDPR gets harder, not easier. Customer messages flowing through a vendor’s servers means processor agreements and jurisdiction questions; the review below reports exactly this problem in practice.
• Free is a business decision, not a contract. The vendor can reprice or retire the free layer whenever the funnel maths change, and your chat widget goes with it.
• Their downtime is your downtime. If the 3CX service has an outage, the chat on your site stops working, however healthy your own hosting is.
• It’s a closed service now. The original plugin’s code was on GitHub for anyone to read or patch; you cannot review a cloud service’s code yourself, or point your own AI tools at it, and feature requests go into a corporate queue.

One long-standing review puts the data point plainly:

“Even when opting for standalone storage (on your own WP server), this plugin communicates with 3CX servers by WebSockets for real-time operations. And all your confidential data are passed through this channel… It means for me a major privacy issue, a poor GDPR compliance and, overall, a severe lack of trustability for a solution presented as standalone.”

– thomasmathys, 1-star review “Privacy major issue”, wordpress.org, 10 March 2022

To be fair to 3CX, plenty of users are happy with the trade. A 5-star review from October 2025 reads:

“As said in the title, it works beautifully. You can tweak its appearance on the admin panel and choose if you want chat only or chat and call. Great. The only downside in my opinion is the button position on mobile.”

– shnalla, 5-star review “Works flawlessly”, wordpress.org, October 2025

This is a familiar arc for popular free plugins: they get acquired, and development starts serving the acquirer’s platform rather than the people who installed the original. Not every acquisition goes that way, but here the dates are all public: built in 2014, grown to a million downloads as a self-hosted tool, acquired in October 2019, cloud-connected ever since, under the same wordpress.org URL and name people still search for. If you feel the plugin changed underneath you, you are not imagining it. The question is simply which product you were actually looking for.

Why is it free? Follow the incentives

3CX is a phone system company. Their own acquisition announcement framed the purchase as 3CX “entering the multi-channel contact center market”, and the paid product the chat feeds into is not cheap: independent 2026 pricing guides put a small self-hosted 3CX system at $320 to $775 a year depending on edition, with cloud hosting from $645 a year. The free chat widget is the top of that funnel, and its signature feature – elevating a chat into a phone call – is the funnel working as designed.

None of that is sinister, and if you want a phone system it is arguably the point. But incentives shape products. A vendor whose revenue is telephony builds chat to route conversations towards calls; a vendor whose product is the chat itself builds chat to resolve conversations in chat. Super Speedy Chat is the paid product – its only incentive is that the chat is good enough to keep paying for.

There is also a plainer risk. Independent pricing guides document 3CX repricing and restructuring its licensing in 2026, and “free forever” on a plugin listing is a promise, not a contract. This plugin’s own history is the proof: everyone who installed the self-hosted original before 2019 watched it become a cloud service under their feet. The deal has changed once already; if it changes again, the vendor is the one holding your conversations.

Good promises you cannot check

To be clear about the data: 3CX’s privacy policy says plainly that they “do not sell or share subscriber data with third parties for advertising or profiling”, and their documentation states that chat message content is not logged. Those are good promises. The issue is that with any hosted service they are only promises: you cannot read the code that handles your messages, and a policy document can be rewritten. With a self-hosted plugin, the code runs on your server where you, your developer, or your AI tools can read every line that touches a message and confirm exactly what it does. Trust is optional when you can verify.

How Super Speedy Chat differs

Super Speedy Chat is what the old WP Live Chat Support promised: every conversation stored in your own database, no external account, no third-party scripts on your pages. It then goes further on the two things a self-hosted chat usually gets wrong. Performance: chat requests can bypass the full WordPress load entirely via a must-use plugin, and a built-in benchmark measures all three of its speed modes on your own server and verifies they return identical responses, so you can see the numbers yourself rather than take anyone’s word. Reachability: nobody on your team learns a new dashboard. Once set up, you carry on in the apps you already live in – replies flow from Discord or from your own WhatsApp, where quote-replying a forwarded message sends your answer straight back to the visitor (both via your own accounts, so even those channels are yours). Meanwhile an optional AI answers from your canned responses, a search-assist robot suggests pages from your own site search, and Opening Hours tells visitors when you are actually around, in their own timezone.

Feature comparison

Where 3CX Free Live Chat is the better choice

• You want genuinely free live chat and are happy with a 3CX account operating it.
• You want visitors to be able to phone you from the widget. Super Speedy Chat does not do voice.
• You want Facebook Messenger and SMS folded into one inbox alongside chat.
• You already run a 3CX phone system, where the integration is the whole point.

When to choose Super Speedy Chat

• You searched for this comparison because you wanted self-hosted chat. That product now exists here, not there: your data, your server, GDPR kept simple.
• Your site’s speed matters to you. No third-party scripts are added to your pages, and chat polling can skip WordPress entirely.
• You live in Discord or WhatsApp rather than a vendor dashboard, and want replies to flow from there.
• You are a small team that is not online 24/7 and wants honest away handling instead of a bubble that promises a liveness you cannot deliver.

Switching is uneventful: deactivate the old widget, install Super Speedy Chat, and new conversations start arriving in your own database. The knowledge base covers the details in Migrating from another chat plugin.

The bottom line

If you searched for WP Live Chat Support, you were probably after the plugin it used to be: a chat box that lives on your own site and keeps your conversations in your own database. That plugin effectively stopped existing in 2019. If what you actually want is 3CX’s free phone system with chat attached, use theirs – it is genuinely free and actively maintained. If you want the self-hosted thing, that is what Super Speedy Chat is, and it ships a benchmark button so you can check the speed claims on your own server rather than take a sales page’s word for it.

Frequently asked questions

Is WP Live Chat Support still self-hosted?

Not in the way it originally was. Since the 2019 acquisition by 3CX the plugin has become 3CX Free Live Chat, which requires a 3CX account, and its real-time messaging runs through 3CX’s servers even when storage is set to standalone. Super Speedy Chat keeps conversations and their transport on your own site.

What happened to the original WP Live Chat Support plugin?

Code Cabin built it in 2014, it became the most-installed WordPress chat plugin, and 3CX acquired it in October 2019 and folded it into their communications platform. The wordpress.org listing now carries the 3CX product under the old URL.

Which is faster?

There is no published head-to-head benchmark between the two, so no number is claimed here. What can be said factually: Super Speedy Chat adds no third-party scripts to your pages, can answer chat requests before WordPress fully loads, and ships a benchmark that times its three speed modes on your own server and verifies identical responses, so you can measure it yourself in one click.

Does Super Speedy Chat have a free version?

No. It is a paid plugin from €19.00 a year (with a lifetime option), covered by a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can run it on your own site and get a refund if it is not for you.

Can I keep my visitors’ chat history if I switch?

Conversations start fresh in Super Speedy Chat’s own database tables; there is no importer for another chat plugin’s history. Your old plugin’s data stays wherever it lives today, and the migration guide covers a clean switchover.