Zendesk Chat is the live chat widget you put on a website or in an app so visitors can message your team in real time, with the conversation becoming a ticket agents can work from the same queue as email. It started life as a separate product called Zopim before Zendesk acquired it. It routes on what's typed in the chat itself. We connect it to what you actually know about the account chatting with you.
The core of it is the widget: a chat box on your site or app that creates a real-time conversation and turns it into a ticket when it ends (or sometimes immediately), so it lands in the same place as every other support channel. You can set up pre-chat forms to collect a name or email before the conversation starts, proactive greeting rules based on page or time on site, and routing to specific agents or teams.
Chat triggers work similarly to ticket triggers: conditions based on what's happening in the chat (keywords typed, department selected, time waiting) that fire an action like routing to a specific team or sending a canned message.
If you're trying to support customers across more channels than just a website widget, like WhatsApp or SMS, that broader cross-channel messaging is really Sunshine Conversations' territory rather than Chat's. Chat is specifically the widget-based live chat experience; Sunshine Conversations is the API for unifying conversations across many more channels than just your website.
Chat triggers can act on what's typed and basic session data, but they can't act on what your business actually knows about the account behind the chat unless that data is somehow already in Zendesk. A customer's contract tier, their open orders, whether they're mid-renewal, none of that is visible to a chat trigger unless someone's wired it in.
That means a high-value account and a first-time visitor get treated identically by native routing unless you've built the piece that checks who's actually chatting before deciding what happens next.
A business wanted VIP accounts to skip the general queue and go straight to a senior agent with their order history attached. We built the lookup that runs the moment a logged-in customer opens the widget, before native chat triggers alone could tell the difference.
When a chat converted to a ticket, agents still had to read it and tag it themselves. We built a step that tags and prioritizes the resulting ticket automatically based on keywords and the account data pulled in during the chat.
Tell us what account or order data should change how a chat gets routed. We connect that data in before the conversation starts, not after.
That's a data problem, not a chat-widget problem, and it's fixable without replacing the widget. We build the connection to whatever system actually knows your customers, chat included, across whatever else your business runs.
Tell us what should change →Zendesk Chat is the live chat widget for real-time conversations on a website or app. Zendesk Support is the ticketing system those conversations (and every other channel) flow into. They're built to work together, not as separate standalone tools.
Zopim was the original standalone live chat product before Zendesk acquired it and rebranded it as Zendesk Chat. The underlying widget concept carried over; the branding and integration with the rest of Zendesk did not exist under Zopim.
Chat is sold as part of Zendesk's broader plans and is built to hand conversations off into Support's ticketing. Running it meaningfully disconnected from Support isn't really how it's designed to be used.
Yes, the chat widget works on mobile web, and Zendesk's mobile SDKs let you build native in-app chat for your own iOS or Android app.
Chat is specifically the website/app live chat widget. Sunshine Conversations is a broader messaging API for unifying conversations across many more channels, like WhatsApp and SMS, behind one consistent set of objects.