They are not competitors — they are different tools
Live chat and a support forum get compared as if you must pick one, but they answer different questions. Chat is a private, real-time, one-to-one channel for “I need this solved now.” A forum is a public, asynchronous, one-to-many channel for “how does this work, and what have others figured out?” Confusing the two leads to using one badly.
Where live chat wins
Chat wins on speed and privacy. When a customer has an urgent, specific, or account-related problem, they want a person now, not a thread they hope someone answers by tomorrow. Anything touching their data, their order, or their money belongs in chat, not a public forum. The immediacy is the whole point.
Where a forum wins
A forum wins on scale and durability. One well-answered forum thread quietly helps every future person who searches the same question — the answer works while you sleep. Forums also let power users help each other, turning your most engaged customers into a support multiplier. Chat answers one person; a forum answer can serve thousands.
Most growing teams run both
The mature setup is not either/or. Chat handles the urgent and the private; the forum (and help center behind it) handles the repeatable and the public. Better still, they feed each other: a question that keeps coming up in chat becomes a forum post or help article, and that article becomes the link your chat agents send to resolve the next one faster.
How MyLiveChat fits
MyLiveChat covers the real-time, private side of that pairing — the urgent, account-specific conversations that don't belong in public — and its transcripts surface the recurring questions worth turning into public, self-serve content. It is free forever for one agent, so a small team can add the immediate channel without giving up the forum they already run.