Telegram Chat Widget
A Telegram chat widget that keeps visitors on your website
TGLiveChat is a live chat widget you embed on any website. Visitor messages are delivered to your Telegram, and your replies appear back in the chat box on your page in real time. The visitor never installs anything and never needs a Telegram account. You get a free plan, 32 themes, and a core widget of 14.8KB gzipped.
There are two completely different things called a Telegram chat widget
This trips up almost everyone searching for one, so it is worth being blunt about it. Most products marketed as a Telegram chat widget are link buttons. They put an icon on your site that opens Telegram. The conversation happens somewhere else, and only if the visitor already has an account. That is a fundamentally different product from a chat widget that hosts the conversation on your own page.
| Link button widget | Two-way widget | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the chat happens | Inside Telegram | On your website |
| Visitor needs Telegram | Yes, required | No |
| Visitor leaves your site | Yes | No |
| Works on desktop without the app | Awkward, opens web client | Yes |
| You see page, referrer, country | No | Yes |
| Conversation history stored | Only in Telegram | In your dashboard and Telegram |
| Typical cost | Free to about 6 dollars a month | Free to 29 dollars a month |
Neither approach is wrong. A link button is genuinely fine if your audience already lives in Telegram, which is common for crypto and for businesses in markets where Telegram is the default messenger. It is the wrong tool if you want to talk to every visitor, because most of them will not have an account.
You do not have to take our word for it
The button vendors are refreshingly straight about this in their own help pages. If you are evaluating one of them, these sentences are the ones that matter:
“Yes, users must be logged into Telegram to start a conversation. On mobile devices, the chat opens in the Telegram app, while desktop users are redirected to Telegram Web or the desktop client.”
Elfsight, from their own documentation
“The widget builds a t.me deep link to your Telegram username, channel, or group. When a visitor taps the button, Telegram opens on their device.”
Common Ninja, from their own documentation
“The widget opens Telegram. Conversations happen in Telegram, not inside Jotform.”
Jotform, from their own documentation
“Clicking on an agent’s name opens a dedicated chat window within Telegram.”
Chaty, from their own documentation
That is the whole distinction in four sentences. Those products are launchers. They are cheap, they install in a minute, and they do exactly what they say. They are simply not live chat, and if you are searching for a Telegram chat widget expecting the visitor to type on your page, you would find that out after installing rather than before.
Worth knowing about their pricing shape too, because it differs from ours in a way that matters at scale. Elfsight's free tier is capped at 200 widget views a month and paid plans are sold by view count. Chaty prices by monthly visitors. Both meter the thing your traffic growth increases. We cap conversations on the free plan and then stop counting.
Do visitors need a Telegram account?
No. This is the single most common question about the category and the answer is short.
Your visitor sees an ordinary chat box. They type, they get an answer, they carry on reading your page. As far as they are concerned it is the same as any other live chat. Telegram exists only on your side of the conversation.
That is the entire reason this works as a general purpose support tool rather than a niche one. Asking a stranger to install a messaging app before they can ask whether you ship to Ireland is a tax most people will not pay.
What about Intergram and the open-source options?
Intergram is the project that proved this idea worked. It showed up on Hacker News back in 2017, it does real two-way relay between a website widget and Telegram, it is MPL licensed, and it has around 1,400 stars. If you want to self-host, it is still the reference implementation and it deserves the credit.
Being honest about its current state though: the canonical repository was last pushed in March 2024 and carries 73 open issues. The documented deployment path is the Heroku free tier, which no longer exists. Of the forks that rank in search, one was last touched in 2023 and hosted on a free instance that sleeps when idle, one was a single day of work in 2021, and one is archived outright.
So the trade is the usual one. Self-hosting costs you nothing in licence fees and everything in attention: a server to run, a bot token to keep alive, updates nobody is shipping, and a websocket connection that is your problem at 3am. If that trade suits you, genuinely go and use it. If you would rather the uptime be somebody else's job, that is what a hosted product is for.
Self-host or hosted
Self-hosted Intergram
- No licence cost, full control of the code
- You run and pay for the server
- No AI agent, themes, triggers or analytics
- Maintenance is yours, and upstream is quiet
TGLiveChat
- Free for 100 chats a month, no server to run
- 32 themes, AI agent, proactive triggers
- Forum topics so each visitor gets a thread
- We get paged instead of you
How it works
Three steps, and the whole thing takes about five minutes including making the Telegram group.
Paste one script tag
Add a single line before the closing body tag of your site. No build step, no npm install, no backend to run. WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, Framer, plain HTML and React all work the same way.
Connect your Telegram
Open the bot, tap start, and pick where messages should land. A personal chat works for one person. A supergroup with Topics enabled gives each visitor their own thread and lets your whole team answer.
Reply from your phone
A visitor types on your website, the message appears in Telegram, you answer in the thread, and your reply shows up in their chat window in real time. No dashboard to keep open, no new app to learn.
How do I add it to my website?
One line on any site that lets you edit HTML. Replace the id with your own widget id from the dashboard.
Any website, before the closing body tag
<script src="https://cdn.tglivechat.com/w.js" data-id="YOUR_WIDGET_ID" async defer></script>React and Next.js
npm install @tglivechat/widgetWordPress
Install the official TGLiveChat plugin, activate it, paste your widget id in settings. There is a step by step WordPress guide if you would rather do it without the plugin.
How much does a chat widget slow a site down?
More than most people assume. DebugBear tested 21 chat widgets in isolation on clean pages and measured the JavaScript each one ships along with the CPU time it costs. The spread between the lightest and the heaviest is more than tenfold.
| Widget | JavaScript | CPU time |
|---|---|---|
| TGLiveChat | 15 KB | n/agzipped core, themes load separately |
| Zoho Desk | 67 KB | 259 ms |
| Crisp | 155 KB | 311 ms |
| Tidio | 208 KB | 540 ms |
| Intercom | 301 KB | 514 ms |
| Zendesk | 533 KB | 991 ms9.3s until chat visible |
| Tawk.to | 749 KB | 645 msheaviest measured |
Competitor figures from DebugBear's chat widget performance study, last updated November 2025. The TGLiveChat figure is our own gzipped core bundle measured on the current release, so it is not a like-for-like lab result. Widget sizes change, and the honest advice is to measure your own site rather than trust anyone's published number, including ours.
Why route support into Telegram at all?
Two reasons, and only one of them is about Telegram specifically. The first is that messages sent to a place you already check get answered. The second is that Telegram is large enough and its bot platform is capable enough to carry the job properly.
1 billion+
Telegram monthly active users, announced by founder Pavel Durov in March 2025, making it the second most used messaging app worldwide outside China.
21%
of live chat requests go completely unanswered, in a study of 1,000 websites by SuperOffice. The average wait just to be acknowledged was 2 minutes 40 seconds.
12 hours
average email response time in the same SuperOffice benchmark, which is the real alternative most small sites are offering.
That 21 percent figure is the one worth sitting with, because it is not a story about bad software. Those businesses installed a chat widget on purpose and then a fifth of the people who used it got nothing back. The tool worked. The habit of checking it did not survive a busy month.
Routing to Telegram is not magic, it just removes the habit from the equation. You are not asked to remember a dashboard. Your phone buzzes the same way it does when a friend messages you, and you answer in the queue at the post office.
The technical side, briefly
This runs on the official Telegram Bot API, which is free to use. Telegram publishes its limits openly: roughly one message per second into a single chat, up to 20 messages per minute into one group, and bots can upload files up to 50MB and download up to 20MB. Those ceilings sit far above what website support volume looks like for almost anyone, and we queue outbound messages so a traffic spike cannot trip them.
Sources: Pavel Durov, March 2025 for the user figure; SuperOffice's live chat study of 1,000 websites for the response data; Telegram's official Bot API FAQ for the limits. We have deliberately left out the widely repeated live chat conversion statistics you will see on competitor pages, because tracing them back usually ends at an aggregator citing another aggregator rather than a study anyone can read.
What comes with it
A thread per visitor
Connect a Telegram supergroup with Topics on and every conversation becomes its own thread. It behaves like a ticket queue without buying a ticketing system.
No per-seat pricing
Add your whole team to the group. The bill does not change. There is no seat count anywhere in the product.
32 themes
From frosted glass to a hacker terminal to pixel art, including right-to-left layouts for Arabic. Themes load as separate chunks so you only download the one you use.
An AI agent
Point it at your docs and it answers common questions on its own, then hands off to a human in Telegram when it is stuck or the visitor asks for a person.
Proactive triggers
Start a conversation based on the URL, time on page, scroll depth, page count, country or device. Useful on pricing and checkout pages.
Shadow DOM isolation
The widget renders inside a shadow root so your site CSS cannot leak in and break it, and it cannot leak out and break your site.
Visitor context
Current page, referrer, browser, OS, device and country arrive with the first message, so you are not asking people which page they are on.
Working hours
Set real hours. Outside them the widget says so honestly and collects an email instead of implying somebody is watching.
Photo and file uploads
Visitors can send a screenshot of the thing that is broken, which saves roughly four rounds of messages every time.
What does it cost?
Flat monthly pricing with no per-seat fee and no charge per AI answer. Full detail on the pricing page.
Free
$0
100 chats a month, one widget, no card needed
Pro
$12/mo
Unlimited chats, AI agent, white label
Agency
$29/mo
Ten client workspaces, unlimited knowledge base
Lifetime
$149
One payment, limited to the first 100 customers
Common questions
What is a Telegram chat widget?
A Telegram chat widget is a chat box you add to your website whose messages are delivered to Telegram, where you reply. There are two very different kinds. A link button simply opens Telegram or t.me and sends the visitor away from your site, which requires them to have a Telegram account. A true two-way widget keeps the conversation on your own page and routes it to your Telegram in the background, so the visitor needs no account and never leaves.
Do website visitors need a Telegram account to chat?
Not with a two-way widget. The visitor types into a normal chat box on your website exactly as they would with any live chat tool. Telegram is only used on your side, to receive and answer the message. Link-button widgets are the opposite: they deep-link to Telegram, so the visitor must have it installed and must leave your website.
Is there a free Telegram chat widget?
Yes. TGLiveChat has a free plan covering 100 chats per month on one website, with no time limit and no credit card. Paid plans start at 12 US dollars per month for unlimited chats. There are also open-source options such as forks of Intergram, though you have to host and maintain those yourself.
How do I add a Telegram chat widget to WordPress?
Install the official TGLiveChat plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, activate it, and paste your widget ID into the settings. If you prefer not to use a plugin, paste the single script tag into your theme footer before the closing body tag. Both approaches take about two minutes.
Can my whole team answer from one Telegram group?
Yes. Connect a Telegram supergroup with Topics enabled and each website visitor gets their own thread inside that group. Anyone in the group can reply in a thread, and the reply appears in that visitor’s chat window. There is no per-seat charge, so adding teammates does not change your bill.
Does a chat widget slow down my website?
It depends entirely on the widget. Independent testing by DebugBear measured mainstream chat widgets between 67KB and 749KB of JavaScript, with the heaviest adding almost a second of CPU time. The TGLiveChat core is 14.8KB gzipped with themes loaded as separate chunks, so only the theme you actually use is downloaded.
What happens to conversations when I am offline?
You set working hours. Outside them the widget switches to an offline state and collects an email address instead of implying somebody is waiting. You can also enable the AI agent to answer common questions overnight and escalate anything it cannot handle to your Telegram.
Can customers see my personal Telegram username or phone number?
No. Messages are relayed through a bot, so visitors never see your personal Telegram account, username or phone number. This is a real advantage over link-button widgets, which typically deep-link to your personal handle and expose it to anyone who clicks.
Do I need to keep a dashboard open to reply?
No, and that is the point of the product. Replies are sent from Telegram on whatever device you already have it on. There is a full web dashboard with an inbox, search and analytics if you want it, but nothing requires you to sit in it.
What is the difference between a Telegram chat widget and a Telegram channel embed?
They are unrelated products that share a name. A channel embed displays the posts from a public Telegram channel on your page, like a feed. A chat widget lets a visitor send you a private message. If you searched for one and found the other, that is why.
Is there an alternative to Intergram that I do not have to host myself?
Yes, that is essentially what this is. Intergram pioneered the approach and still works, but the main repository was last updated in March 2024 with 73 open issues, and its documented deployment path relies on a Heroku free tier that no longer exists. TGLiveChat is the hosted version of the same idea with themes, an AI agent and forum-topic threading added.
Does it work with caching plugins and CDNs?
Yes. The widget is a static script served from a CDN and it opens its own websocket connection, so page caching does not interfere with it. This is worth asking about because some WordPress chat plugins render server-side and break the moment a caching layer is switched on.
Is it GDPR compliant?
The widget collects only what you configure it to collect. Pre-chat fields are optional, so you can ask for a name without asking for an email or phone number. Visitor IP is used to resolve a country and is stored with the conversation. You can point the widget at your own privacy policy URL so the link appears in the chat window.
Is TGLiveChat affiliated with Telegram?
No. TGLiveChat is an independent product that uses the public Telegram Bot API. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Telegram Messenger or Telegram FZ LLC.
Keep reading
Telegram vs Discord for support
Which one suits one-to-one support and which suits community.
Telegram group support for SaaS
Setting up forum topics so each visitor gets a thread.
We weighed 10 chat widgets
Real measurements, and how to test your own site in two minutes.
Telegram vs traditional live chat
Where messages actually get answered, and why that decides everything.
Compare against Intercom
Per-seat plus per-resolution pricing against a flat rate.
Compare against Tawk.to
Both have free plans. They are free in very different ways.
Put it on your site and see if anyone talks to you
The free plan covers 100 chats a month with no card and no time limit. If nobody messages you, you have lost five minutes and learned something useful about your traffic.
Create a free widgetTGLiveChat is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Telegram Messenger or Telegram FZ LLC. Telegram is a trademark of its respective owner.