22 Best (Free & Paid) Live Chat Software Tools for 2024

There’s nothing more frustrating when you’re a visitor and a potential customer, and you can’t get in contact with the particular business to get an answer to your question. 

This is why having live chat available on your website can really help drive more sales, as well as build your brand. 

Why? Well, great customer service = great marketing.

There are countless case studies which you can look up which talks about how the effectiveness of live chat and customer service. However, that’s not the main reason why you’re reading this guide. 

You’re here because you know how awesome live chat can be for your business, but you want to know what’s the best live chat software for your business. 

Well, I’m here to help demystify and take you through some of the top recommendations I've had great experiences as a digital marketer.

Before I go into further detail about each of the software recommendations to check out, I always believe to go in prepared when doing your research when it comes to choosing software. Here’s a checklist which you can use (which I also personally use) when exploring live chat providers: 

• Is it more applicable for SaaS or eCommerce?
• Do they have video, screen sharing or even phone support capabilities? 
• What do integrations look like? Can it integrate directly with your favourite CRM and CMS? If not, what’s the cost and setup?
• Does it have a shared inbox? What does the user experience look like if you have multiple customer service reps?
• What does analytics look like? Do they have integrations with Google Analytics or is there a way to track customer service calls with sales?
• Is there available?
• Does it have features such as live chat translation or unlimited chat history?
• What do the reviews and case studies look like? Which big brands are also using the platform?

Of course depending on your business requirements, you probably have more specific questions and use cases that need to be answered. Either way, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet/Google Sheet to jot down the pros and cons of each for your business, and that way you can share with the team internally about which platform will work for you. 

Okay fam, let’s get into my detailed guide. :)

1. Drift

When it comes to conversational marketing, Drift is a powerhouse. Whilst it enables you to collect qualified leads, but it's the 'playbook' and personalisation features that are super impressive and take your lead generation game to the next level. Drift’s unique drag and drop visual flow generator makes creating your chats engaging, while it's powerful analytics make segmentation and targeting simple.

Pros & Benefits 

• You can create chatbots that automatically engage your prospects and use behavioural analysis to determine how best to communicate with them. 
• The reporting functionality is quite advanced - helping you monitor your chatbot's performance very accurately. With analytics & insights, you can see which conversational approaches and pages generate your highest-converting leads.
• There are more than fifty integrations right out of the box, but having Zapier allows users to go further.  

Cool Awesome Features 

• Drift's live chat significantly improves customer experience for current and potential customers. Their live chat is proven to increase website conversion. By engaging more target clients and reducing the sales cycle, Drift can help businesses ultimately increase their revenue.
• You can also send personalised videos and messages that connect with your target audience and customers. 
• Drift's AI-powered chatbots can engage with buyers from any page on your website and help them to qualify for products and make purchases.
• The Prospector tool allows sales teams to quickly and easily identify which accounts are most likely to generate revenue by analysing past user behaviour across any website. All of this information is accessible through a single, user-friendly dashboard.

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• Make sure to utilise the versatile visual flow generator, which lets you design, test, and modify your chatbot's user interface.
• Drift also allows you to create segmented data from the users and customers that interacted with your chatbot. All interactions with your chatbot and your customers’ answers are automatically recorded in Drift's custom fields.  
• Getting the most of the 'playbooks' is also a must to improve engagement. Playbooks can help you create targeted messages to further engage with your leads and prospects, and are flexible enough to create as many custom messages, rules, or emails that you need. 

Plans and Pricing 

They don't currently have pricing published for any of its paid plans since their pricing is pretty custom and depends on what you are looking to do. They will also insist that you get in touch with their sales team so they can grasp what exactly you are trying to accomplish, sync on goals and metrics, and give an accurate cost estimate. They offer a Free Plan though which allows you to test the rudimentary features of the platform. 

2. VideoAsk (by Typeform)

VideoAsk is a great chat tool for conversing with customers or prospects via pre-recorded video responses that you can arrange within the VideoAsk app itself. By creating engaging videos that ask questions and show results based on user responses, you can better analyse what people think and want from your service. It offers a platform where you can leverage the power of a personalised video that gives your customers a sense of connection and understanding.

Pros & Benefits 

• Everything about your conversations is recorded - you can keep track of the questions that you recorded and easily create a share link to your audience. 
• VideoAsk provides an easy way to schedule and book follow-up meetings with your customers or prospects. For example, calendar integrations such as those from Calendly and Squarespace are natively included.   
• One cool feature you might want to look at is VideoAsk's AI-powered speech-to-text transcription. Your videos automatically add captions, even if you speak English, French, or Spanish.  
• You can use VideoAsk to create a chatbot with an interesting personality, which will help to engage users and make conversational workflow an enjoyable experience. 

Cool Awesome Features 

• VideoAsk offers more than just video recorded responses - you can also come up with conditional steps with varying response options. 
• One cool thing about VideoAsk is that it provides insightful analytics on your chatbot's performance. You can see how many users opened and interacted with your chatbot and how much time was spent on each step of the conversation.
• Using powerful filters, VideoAsk can help you find meaning and context based on all the recorded responses and transcriptions that you have gathered. 

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• If you're considering the embed to your website, then be sure to utilise its floating widget without the need for any strict coding experience. 
• Be sure to explore the automated features, such as automatic video replies whenever a customer sends you an email. 
• Make the most out of the powerful Zapier integration. With more than 2,000 apps to connect it with, you can automate just about anything.
• Ensure to use the collaboration tools so you can easily see what people are working on and keep track of project deadlines.
   

Plans and Pricing 

VideoAsk offers a forever-free plan that lets you create a total of 20 minutes worth of video and audio per month, plus 3 steps per video engagement. For higher requirements, you can opt for any of their paid plans: the Grow Plan for $30/month, or the Brand Plan for $50/month.  

3. JivoChat

Whilst VideoAsk leverages the power of face-to-face videos, JivoChat focuses on providing a beautiful user experience across live text chat and calls via mainstream messengers. JivoChat is a live messaging platform that allows you to connect with clients through live chat or voice calls using popular messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp for example.  

Pros & Benefits

• The live chat widget is created in such a way that it can perfectly fit on any website, however, it is designed. You can place it on any side panel and do not take up any valuable website real estate. You can also add it to your blog or website, making it super easy for your customers to contact you and talk to you live.
• One of the cool benefits is its ability to work on any device (Windows, Apple OS, or Android), and all major browsers as well.
• Chats can be translated into more than 20 languages so you can better customise its widget to perfectly match your customers' native language.
• Another advantage of JivoChat is that it is relatively lightweight and fast- the chat window opens automatically, without any noticeable lag or hogging of resources.

Cool Awesome Features 

• One of the best features is its proactive invitations. You can set up its chatbot to provide personalised invitations depending on how a customer or prospect interacts with your website.
• Your team will love the capability to handle multiple visitors. You can set up a chatbot to handle chats from as many customers simultaneously while prioritising other customers. 
• Another cool piece of functionality is that it lets you easily connect with your existing marketing tools - whether it’s via email, social media, or any CRM.
• I particularly love JivoChat's capability of showing who's visiting any part of your website and from what domain they were from.

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• They make it relatively easy to facilitate and review communication between agents and customers. You can monitor the quality of your chat service by reviewing JivoChat's chat logs and reports. 
• Another useful feature you want to look at is the ability to forward messages from your company email to your dashboard. It’s a one-stop hub and inbox to communicate with your customers. 
• The built-in analytics allows you to create profiles of your customers based on their interaction history.   

Plans and Pricing  

It comes with a Basic Version that is entirely free to use for up to 5 agents. If you want to access all of JivoChat's features, you can sign up for their Professional Version, which charges $19/month per agent. 

4. Olark

Olark is a popular live chat software provider which is good at organising customer data and making it easier to understand. This is ideal for businesses looking for ways to generate more leads, increase sales, or improve service. Olark's live chat software and advanced tools provide valuable information about your interactions with your customers or potential clients. This information can help you analyse your past interactions and improve future ones.

Pros & Benefits 

• With Olark, you can match your chat platform to be in sync with your business branding. 
• It's easy-to-setup chat automation helps you engage more customers and improve your workflow.
• Get access to crucial data such as chat volume, agent activity, and more with Olark's real-time updates. With easy-to-understand reports, you can quickly identify any areas of concern or success.

Cool Awesome Features 

• Perhaps Olark is one of the few out there that provides accessibility features. With ADA-compliant features, you can be sure that your business is responsive to everyone whatever their situation is. 
• Live chat management is relatively easy. You can set up canned responses and even per-agent chat limits so your agents can stay focused.  
• Another cool feature is CoPilot. This is essentially the platform AI-powered chatbot designed to attract leads to your CRM. 

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• As mentioned, be sure to check out Olark's CoPilot to eliminate certain repetitive admin tasks. Just remember though that this is a paid PowerUp as well.  
• Olark offers what it calls PowerUps. These are add-ons that you can pay on top of your subscription fee. PowerUps include letting you see a customer's screen to assist them, or consolidating other sources of customer data such as those from their social media profiles.  
• It provides automated email reports of user activity so you can monitor usage trends on a schedule. You can then share these data with the rest of your team by including them in the email loop. 

Plans and Pricing 

At the moment, it does not offer a free plan. Instead, you can give their platform a try for a limited time. The platform charges $29/month per seat after the trial period, or you can check out their scalable Pro Plan to unlock other enterprise features.   

5. Intercom

If you're looking for a comprehensive chat engagement tool that packs a punch, then Intercom is a perfect fit. It describes its platform as an "Engagement OS" that allows you to create better relationships and engagement with your customers, on their terms, throughout their journey.  

Pros & Benefits 

• Intercom's features are optimised for real-time conversion: from marketing to sales. With its intuitive interface and rich feature set, Intercom makes it easy for marketers to engage with customers and turn leads into sales.
• Its unique conversational interface makes it easy for customers to get help and ask questions, while it's Contextual Chat feature ensures that every conversation is contextualised and relevant.
• They make it easy for businesses of all sizes to boost customer engagement and conversion rates, whether you're looking to increase sales or build better relationships with your customers. 

Cool Awesome Features 

• More than just a chat tool, it also provides customers with an adaptive onboarding product experience such as interactive guides and sign-up steps.
• The engagement platform gives you a total picture of your customers based on their shared profile, and how they interact with your website. This allows you to create segments, customised responses, and campaigns that help you convert more leads into sales.
• It's centralised dashboard lets your team create versatile workflows. Intercom makes it easier for your agents to collaborate further by connecting customers using a shared inbox or via smart automation.   

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• Intercom offers you to create your repository of help articles based on an analysis of customer interaction. Be sure to set this up so your customers can have a self-help resource where they can find tips and relevant answers. 
• Like other live chat tools, Intercom offers a collection of carefully selected apps that you can integrate to power up your marketing and analytics. 
• It's also powered by custom bots that you can build - code-free - to automatically determine which route to take on every customer conversation that it may encounter.  

Plans and Pricing 

For small businesses and start-ups, they offer a 14-day free trial of its Starter Plan. It offers unlimited inbound conversations and 1,000 outbound conversations per month. If you wish to avail of the Starter Plan after the trial, you can then opt to subscribe for $74/month (billed annually). For more customised solutions, Intercom also offers an Enterprise Plan as well.  

6. Pure Chat (by Ruby)

Pure Chat by Ruby is designed for quick deployment, simplicity, and ease of installation on any website. When you sign up, you are given instructions on how to install their chatbot on your website through a piece of code or their plugin. You can also customise this widget to fit your brand's image so your customers can easily identify your chatbot and engage with it. 

Pros & Benefits 

• It offers real-time analytics via its customer contact history tool. This data can help you identify who is visiting your site, how they interact with it, and where they are from, providing you with the means to target your marketing efforts better.
• Another benefit of using this app is that it offers unlimited chats across various mobile platforms so you can be sure that your customers can always reach you.
• It allows you to create contextual conversations on your website. Its intuitive UI makes it easy to start chatting with your visitors immediately, and the live chat features give you the ability to keep your visitors engaged.  
• Perhaps one of the best reasons to use Pure Chat is its 30-day free trial which gives you access to all the pro features of the platform. Plus, they give you a refund if in case you don't find their service suitable to your needs. 

Cool Awesome Features 

• The widget builder allows you to customise your live chat widget using its user-friendly editor. You can create personalised chat widgets that are responsive to your customers' queries or needs.
• If you need help finding your chat transcripts, The platform offers a search feature that allows you to reference any of your past conversations. Simply open the chat history dashboard and type in the words or phrases you're looking for. You'll see a list of all the transcripts corresponding to that conversation.
• Pure Chat also offers canned responses to FAQs. This allows agents to easily and quickly reply to questions without having to remember specific answers. This can also be helpful for customers who want quick and easy access to information, as well as for customers who are busy and don't have time to answer individual questions.

Getting the Most Out Of It 

• Pure Chat’s widget allows you to instantly start a conversation with your customers and track the conversation in real-time, while the mobile app gives you complete control of your conversations from anywhere. 
• The platform integrates with popular software products to help you get the most out of your client or customer data. You can seamlessly integrate with either Hubspot or Google Analytics. Or even use Zapier to connect it to more than a thousand applications. 
• Several contact forms are also available. You can opt to deploy a pre-chat information form or a check email form so your customers know that they will receive a reply within a set timeframe.

Plans and Pricing

As mentioned earlier, Pure Chat's essential yet powerful features are available for the first 30 days. Afterwards, you have the option of selecting any of their paid plans: the Growth Plan for $39/month, or the PRO Plan for $79/month.   

7. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a popular platform that excels in many areas, including its live chat service. Its features list is extensive and easy to use, and the pricing is fair for what it offers. It offers a good mix of features, including the ability to chat with customers on any device, support for a variety of channels (email, phone, chat), integrations with various CRM platforms, and the manage multiple chats. There's also the option to leave messages and have them delivered as push notifications.

Pros & Benefits 

• It's kind of hard to focus on specific LiveAgent's features because, frankly, it simply excels in what it does. And one of the features that make LiveAgents stand above all chat support software is its ticketing system. Some of its outstanding ticketing features include automated ticket distribution, a hybrid stream, omni channel support, and much more. 
• There are more than 15 live chat features - some most notable are its proactive invitations and a 360-degree view of all your visitors and customers wherever they are on your website.
• Another advantage is its ability to offer a robust call centre feature that includes both inbound and outbound calls.    

Cool Awesome Features 

• Customisation is where LiveAgent shines. Not only can you choose which badges to display on your profile page, but you can also customise the way each badge is displayed, including colours and fonts. You can also set it to reflect how each agent is performing during any prescribed time. 
• With multi-language chat tools, you can give context to your users in their language. Multi-language support is available even in chat and feedback widgets. 
• It's also a powerful social media management tool that connects all your social media channels in one place. This makes it easy to get a full picture of every person you ever talk to, no matter where they are in the world.

Getting The Most Out Of It

• Offers customer service reporting features, including an analytics overview, insightful performance reports, and agent rankings.  
• Creating a customisable knowledge base is also a strength of the platform. This gives you the ability to gather customer feedback, answer questions, and keep your customers up-to-date on any changes your service or products offer. 
• The help desk software offers a wide range of integrations, plugins, and apps that can be used to improve customer feedback. From email marketing to billing management, you can keep your customers engaged and informed in a variety of ways.

Plans and Pricing 

LiveAgent's pricing depends on the service bundle that you wish to avail of, and you can try all of these risk-free plans for 14 days. You can choose from any of their price plans: Ticket Only ($15/agent/month), Ticket and Chat ($29/agent/month), or All-Inclusive ($49/agent/month). You can also opt to sign up for their forever-free plan that lets you have 1 chat button, 1 phone number, 1 email address, and all the basic reports to start your journey.

8. Crisp

Crisp is a live chat software that can be used to easily and quickly deploy chatbots across multiple channels. It has plenty of pretty neat features to help you improve customer service, marketing, and sales. With its focus on enhancing live chat and customer service, Crisp has built its name as one of the best live chat solutions out there that are scalable for businesses of all sizes.

Pros & Benefits

• It's been regularly nominated as one of the best live chat software, and its shared inbox feature makes it an excellent tool for customer service.
• Crisp also includes CRM software that has dedicated features to help businesses automate repetitive tasks and close more deals. 
• The ticketing system is also another feature to be desired. Crisp's ticketing system can automate customer service tasks, such as ticket creation, routing, and tracking, which can help businesses manage customer interactions more efficiently.

Cool Awesome Features

• With Crisp, your business can have a personalised experience for customers. The integrated knowledge base and chatbot scenarios allow them to interact with you in the most convenient ways - whether it's filing work orders or getting advice about what they should do next.
• The chatbots can be used to craft messages that resonate with customers on various channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Line, or WhatsApp. With one chatbot script, you can immediately deploy any message and reach out to your customers on whatever messaging platform they are on.
• One of the cool features is its ability to provide context for automated interactions, which can help drives leads, nurture visitors and potential customers with key information and your offers.

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• With the shared inbox, you can bring all of your chat and communications to a single dashboard. You'll be able to organise and collaborate in a single place while easily building out SMS-based communication tools that are perfect for any company. 
• Collaborating has never been easier. You can share conversations and collaborate effortlessly with others inside of a single interface.
• The WYSIWYG editor makes it incredibly easy to craft messages without the need for coding. You can also filter who gets notifications with its advanced options, so you'll never miss an important email again!

Plans and Pricing 

It offers a straightforward and transparent pricing scheme. And like other live chat software, they also offer a forever free plan good for two seats or agent accounts. For higher requirements, you can opt for their Pro Plan which comes at $25/month per inbox, or the Unlimited Plan for $95/month per inbox.   

9. Tawk.to

In terms of cost-efficiency, then perhaps nothing beats Tawk.to. This live chat tool lets you add live chat services on your site 100% free. It's the perfect solution for adding live chat on your site without spending a penny! As for features, Tawk offers a wide range, including support for Google Hangouts, Facebook Chat, and Microsoft Skype. You can also use it to schedule live chats with your customers and even add call recordings so you can review the conversation later.

Pros & Benefits 

• The good news is that whilst Tawk remains free to use, that doesn't mean it comes with less powerful features. It's the perfect software for marketers who want to monitor website visitors in real-time and know which pages they're visiting, how often this happens on an individual basis, and their entire customer journey.
• It has multi-language support which gives users the ability to communicate with customers in their preferred language. This makes it far easier for customers to get the support they need, regardless of where they are located in the world. It offers a wide variety of translations into 45+ languages.
• It is the perfect app for live chat if you're always on the go. With apps available on Android and iOS, you'll be able to reply to your customers immediately without missing another conversation. 

Cool Awesome Features 

• Tawk offers a variety of features and services, without charging for them, which is pretty sweet.
• Widgets are also customisable and eye-catching, so you can create a chat widget that perfectly suits your brand. You're not limited in what kind of bubbles either.
• It's easy to use and allows you to create profile pages for your brand or organisation with just the click of one button. You can even have as many chat pages as you need. 

Getting The Most Out Of It 

• Of course, the most obvious takeaway is that it's free. It's great value compared to many of the others spoken about in this guide. It's also good to know that the company produces revenue either through white labelling or by hiring the services of the platform's live, human agents for as little as $1 per hour. 
• You can fully customise the widget and email templates to suit your brand. 
• It's a free online messaging service that lets you easily create and send custom email templates. You can fully customise the widget to make your messaging experience more personalised for your visitors.

Plans and Pricing 

There are not much to discuss Tawk's price plans since it's free. However, if you need the help and expertise of a live human chat agent, they also offers their services for as little as $1/hour.   

10. Tidio

It’s not just about having a good website integration but also ensuring that your online chat is interactive and engaging for users. Tidio does this with their "Live Chat Boosted With Bots" service. The company has nicely designed web hooks that allow you to customise how messages appear based on what page someone happens to be visiting at any given time. Definitely something worth considering if you're looking into boosting customer satisfaction through enhanced live chats.

Pros & Benefits 

• Tidio can reduce your response time to under 3 minutes so that customers are always happy with their purchases or queries.
• It provides an easy way to connect to all of your websites and platforms without the need for coding skills. 
• The live chat widget can be customised in many ways, like where you place it on your website and what colour the text is.

Cool Awesome Features 

• The chatbot builder enables and Live Typing features enables businesses to quickly and easily create custom chatbots for automating sales. With a variety of pre-designed templates, businesses can get started quickly and customise their bots to meet specific needs.
• When you're ready to create your chatbot, Tidio has a Visual Flow Builder that will help get the job done.
• It’s also an amazing tool for digital marketers to see what pages on their website are being frequently browsed. This helps them create more personalised responses when necessary.

Getting The Most Out Of It

• The chat integration with email marketing platforms like Shopify, Messenger, or WordPress makes it easy and seamless.
• They have pretty good templates for quick responses for common queries and questions.
• You can chat with your customers anywhere thanks to the mobile app, which is great for answering any questions on the fly.

Plans and Pricing 

They have a free plan that allows 3 operators, unlimited chats, buildable chatbots, and third-party apps. You can check out either their Chatbots or Communicator plan if you need a higher requirement. The Chatbots plan costs $49 per month while the Communicator plan comes in at $19 per month per operator. 

11. Zendesk

Zendesk is another conversational relationship platform which is widely popular with some of the world’s biggest brands. With Zendesk, customers can instantly reach you with their questions or needs for help no matter where they are or whatever platform they use. And with automation built in at every stage of the process, it has become one of the most popular customer service channels out there today.

Pros & Benefits 

• With Zendesk chat, you can now deliver instant support without repetition by leveraging user presence on various social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook.
• You get a single view into your customer's history, so you know what questions might be difficult for them or which ones go better than ever before.
• Zendesk's proactive engagement with customers can help your business double the number of sales you make by initiating chats three times as often. When a prospect chooses to chat, it'll be easy for them and convenient too. 

Cool Awesome Features

• Using the Flow Builder, you can drag and drop your way to create custom conversation flows.  
• With the Web SDK, you can create a custom chat experience that is unique to your business. This allows you to customise the interface and features of your chat system, making it easier for customers to communicate with you.
• Zendesk helps you can keep an eye on your company's metrics in real-time. View actionable data like chat volume and visitor experience to ensure the agents work well for customers.

Getting The Most Out Of It

• If you want to get great visibility into how your support channels are performing, use the live chat metrics. 
• Zendesk's Knowledge Base Management is an excellent tool to manage all your content in one place, track changes, and export content to various formats.
• It comes with a collection of useful pre-built apps and integrations that can help streamline your support operations.

Plans and Pricing 

The pricing plans start at $19 per month for its Support Team, $49 per month for Support professionals, and $99 per month for Support Enterprise. All of these paid plans are available to try for free for 30 days and include access to ticketing features, customer interaction history, pre-built app integrations, and more. 

12. Userlike 

Userlike is another powerful live chat and customer engagement tool that you can use on websites and e-commerce platforms. Userlike's live chat software is a great way to keep customers close throughout their journey. With the ability to keep them updated on the progress of their order, and answer any questions they may have along the way, the app ensures that buyers and marketers always have everything they need for a good customer experience.

Pros & Benefits

• Userlike is an incredible way to help users understand your product or service, and it's perfect for capturing warm leads. Whether you want to switch from customer chat to video call and screen sharing, it's all possible.
• Providing feedback and chat ratings is relatively straightforward for the customer, while the platform consolidates this information providing operators instant and actionable insights into customer satisfaction.
• It's the perfect way to have multiple conversations at once. You can chat with as many customers as you want and adjust your number of slots up or down depending on how many different people need help from time to time.

Cool Awesome Features

• With the Operator Groups, customers or visitors can now choose which department they want to speak with by clicking on one of the options.
• The Sticky Chat lets you connect your customers with the operator they talked to before so that their next chat is a breeze.
• It offers a way for businesses to turn anonymous web visitors into real people with data. The app automatically builds an accurate customer profile based on shared public information when they provide their email address. 

Getting The Most Out of It 

• With one simple integration, Userlike can provide personalised assistance throughout their journey on any device or browser without sacrificing the quality of service.
• When a chat needs to be forwarded, it’s awesome that it can create automatic transcripts which they can see later.
• You can take advantage of valuable leads encountered in chats by forwarding the transcript to your CRM tools and other integrated marketing stacks.
• It provides a simple way for you to collect feedback from your most engaged customers before or after chats. This insight-driven software also offers pre and post-survey capabilities so that difficult conversations about what matters can happen in an organised manner with ease.

Plans and Pricing 

The platform offers both a forever-free plan and an option to sign up for a 14-day trial period. The free plan includes 1 widget and 1 seat, with all of Userlike's core features. For higher requirements and more seats, you can check out their Team Plan ($100/month for 4 seats), Corporate Plan ($320/month for 10 seats), or Business Plan ($800/month for 20 seats)

13. Acquire

Acquire is the next on my list. It's a live chat tool that provides an all-in-one solution for agents to streamline their workflow and provide the best customer experience. It includes video, voice chat, and co-browse, allowing customers access to information about products while browsing online stores or searching within catalogs without leaving your page.

Pros & Benefits 

• With Acquire, your customer service team can now share files, translate text in real-time, and even route customers to specific agents with live chat. All notes about your conversations are stored on the backend for future reference. 
• With easy-to-use functions, you can have an agent call your customer in the same browser window they were in when they started the call. No need to switch over to a different window or open a new tab.
• Automation is the key to improving response times and costs. With Acquire's powerful features for automation, you can create a consistent experience that gets issues resolved faster while maximising your ROI.

Cool Awesome Features

• The co-browsing feature is damn good.
• It offers a simple drag-and-drop UI to create complex rules and triggers natively. This makes it easy to customise your acquisition process without any coding.
• Use Acquire's chatbots to get answers for your customers and employees. Depending on your automation rules, they'll also route users who need help in the right departments, URLs, or agents automatically.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• The chatbots will automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on more customer-focused tasks.
• The timeline view gives you a complete customer context. You can route messages to the correct agents based on location, URL, or device type so that they're delivered just how your business needs them. 
• With Acquire's program bots, you can provide instant and 24/7 support for your clients with business rules to instantly answer FAQs or request information from visitors. You could also send files when necessary. 

Plans and Pricing 

They don't publish their pricing plans but encourage prospects to submit a custom proposal depending on several key factors of their business. To give users a feel of how these custom plans may look like, they've included probable plans for three business categories depending on their size: Starter, Commercial, and Enterprise.   

14. LiveChat 

LiveChat is one of my personal favs that focuses on delivering great customer service. With LiveChat, you'll be able to provide world-class customer support without any hassles. They have the essential tools and features that you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience, including live chat, ticketing, and comprehensive knowledge-base management.

Pros & Benefits 

• LiveChat is a great way to provide customer service and positively impact sales. You can offer assistance when your customers when they need it most which means they'll spend more time on your site, and hopefully increases conversions and sales.
• High customer satisfaction is possible with LiveChat because of its ability to easily engage many customers at once. This helps keep spending on customer service low overall.
• With this platform, it's easy to see where a customer is having trouble making a payment for example, and reach out to help right away,

Cool Awesome Features 

• The chatbots can help automate customer service operations, allowing businesses to scale up their operations without added staff. These bots are pre-programmed with ready-made workflows specific to certain industries, or you can customise them to suit your business requirements. 
• The workflow possibilities are endless. You can integrate it to improve your workflow and connect the chat into any app that you regularly use, making life easier for everyone in an organisation. 
• You can provide a personalised and positive experience for your customers thanks to great automation capabilities.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• LiveChat enables your business to become more interactive and engaging with personalised experiences that keep customers engaged. You can share announcements, introduce new products or services to your priority customers, and get meaningful feedback from them.
• This live chat software lets you generate reports which can be saved as CSV files and sent automatically to your email every day, week, or month.
• There's no limit on creating agent accounts in LiveChat. In such a way, it helps your team become more efficient, creating a better experience for the customers.

Plans and Pricing 

It is scalable enough to fit right in with the needs of small and large companies. Each of their paid plans comes with varying features and a 14-day free trial so you can see which one is the perfect fit for your company. They offer a Starter Plan ($16/month per agent), a Team Plan ($33/month per agent), and a Business Plan ($50/month per agent). 

15. Freshchat

Freshchat's live chat tool is a great way to make team collaboration easier. You can have agents balance their chat conversations based on their workloads to avoid overlap and ensure that everyone has enough time to complete their tasks. This automated task routing feature will allow your team members the most amount of time possible to respond to customer inquiries without getting overwhelmed. 

Pros & Benefits 

• Whether on the website, app or via text messages ( WhatsApp, SMS ), Freshchat enables users to unify their experiences across different mediums so they can personalise every aspect of how content is delivered.
• It's no-code chatbots are a great solution because they don't require any programming skills and can be easily built using easy-to-use tools. 
• It's the perfect tool for insights-driven action. With its native AI, you can get insights into your conversations quickly and easily. 

Cool Awesome Features 

• Freshchat's Team Inbox allows agents to manage and reply to conversations from one workspace, regardless of the channel. It uses native and third-party app integrations to provide contextual information in one place.
• With the ability to provide a real-time overview of your team's progress, it allows you to identify areas of improvement and take action accordingly.
• With the chatbots, you can quickly and easily respond to customers' small talk, building a deeper connection with them. This way, you can keep them informed about your product or service, as well as answer any questions they may have. 

Getting the Most Out of It 

• You can create a high-context engagement experience for your customers and visitors. By designing powerful workflows, customer segmentation, and contextual messages at the right time based on intent, you can drive engagement and provide a better customer experience.
• Be sure to maximise it's ability to automatically assign conversations to help you save time and keep your customer conversations flowing. 
• Bot templates are available to help you speed up the process of creating a bot. Plus, you can customise all aspects of your bot, including its name and logo.

Plans and Pricing 

It offers a sort of limited Free Plan where you can set up your account to explore the features of the platform, without having any live sessions with customers. If you wish to see the app in action, then you can sign up for a 21-day trial period of any of their paid plans: the Growth Plan ($18 per agent/month), Pro ($47 per agent/month), or Enterprise ($83 per agent/month). 

16. Respond.io 

Respond.io takes the guesswork out of conversations by integrating with messaging apps so you can have a holistic record and better engage your customers. This live chat solution also allows companies to scale their conversations without scaling teams - making it easier than ever for businesses large and small.

Pros & Benefits

• Respond's Broadcasts allow you to send messages to a large audience with just a few clicks. Enrol new contacts in drip campaigns so they are automatically updated with your latest promotions. Trigger event-based promotions via API to capitalise on specific interests or events.
• Conversational Sales is another powerful feature from Respond that increase sales visibility and close more deals. By using personal messengers as a business account, you can trade in your existing personal messenger for an account with Conversational Sales. This will automatically qualify leads and sync with your CRM, making it easier for you to manage and track your sales pipeline.
• It also offers automated messaging to identify customer issues and route customers accordingly according to skill, function, language, shift, and more.

Cool Awesome Features

• Respond's unified messaging platform gives context to different departments. This allows for more effective communication and collaboration to resolve customer concerns. It also has a sales and support platform, which makes it easier to connect with customers and employees.
• The possibilities with the Broadcast Modules are epic. You can use this for routine and urgent broadcasts of newsletters, event updates, or emergency bulletins to keep your company up to date on what's happening in real-time without waiting days between sends.
• It offers a variety of flexible automation workflows with powerful features such as chat routing, sales qualification, and drip campaigns among others to help you get your message across in the most effective way possible.

Getting the Most Out of It

• Leveraging inbound support conversations can help create marketing opportunities, increase engagement and convert more leads into customers. By automatically tagging conversations with interest tags, you can easily track which topics are most relevant to your audience and build lead lists for drip campaigns or broadcasts.
• Be sure to take full advantage of the multi-channel features. For example, maximise the use of social media to create a more powerful message while using templates and tags to help you personalise your content for different platforms.
• The daily supervisor dashboard is also a helpful tool for managers to keep track of agent and customer conversations. 

Plans and Pricing 

Each of the paid plans comes with a free 14-day trial. You can select from either their Team Plan for $99/month good for 10 users/agents or their Business Plan for 299/month good for 25 users/agents. They also offer a customisable Enterprise Plan that is fully scalable to the size and demand of your business.   

17. Hubspot Chat 

If you're a small company or planning to launch a startup any time soon, then you may want to take a look at this from Hubspot. As one of the leading marketing tools over the internet, it offers a forever-free plan that includes the use of its chat software. It includes Hubspot's core live chat features, with the option to upgrade to a paid plan at any time, which gives you access to more advanced features and support.

Pros & Benefits 

• Hubspot live chat can help you connect users with the right people on your team so that you can handle customer inquiries and leads efficiently.
• Creating your chatbot is relatively easy and does not require any specialised coding skills. 
• HubSpot's CRM data gives each member of your chat team context about the contact, which makes crafting the perfect response much easier.

Cool Awesome Features 

• The HubSpot live chat is the perfect way to monitor how your website visitors interact with you. You can see their page views, form submissions, and sales activity all in one place.
• Hubspot has made it easy for your teams to stay on top of conversations with their universal inbox. Every important piece of data is stored in one location, and you can set who among your team can have access and reply accordingly.  
• Be sure to connect and engage with website visitors, whatever messaging platform they're on. The platform's chatbots will help you easily connect and engage on multiple channels like Facebook, Messenger, or WhatsApp.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• Creating meeting schedules within your live chat is practically easy. It provides you with the tools to schedule an appointment with any of your team members so customers can feel that their queries are addressed.   
• It offers a variety of tools to help you create effective online forms, pop-ups, banners, and slide-ins. 
• You can create custom templates for your emails and canned responses, which can then be used to increase the effectiveness of your sales messages and be shared with other team members as well. 

Plans and pricing 

From the get-go, the paid plans have plenty of features that go beyond providing free live chat software. As a total CRM and marketing solution, its paid plans come in three variants: the Starter Plan ($45/month, good for 1,000 contacts), the Professional Plan ($800/month good for 2,000 contacts plus more advanced features), and their Enterprise Plan ($3,200/month and access to 10,000 marketing contacts).  

18. ChatBot

ChatBot is the next provider that you should try this year. It's an all-in-one platform to build and launch conversational chatbots without coding, making it easy for businesses to automate customer service and communicate with their customers authentically.

Pros & Benefits

• With 24/7 support, your customers can always count on ChatBot to be there for them. You can also use chatbots to manage customer service queues and respond quickly to customers' questions. This way, you can keep your customers happy and motivated and ensure that they receive the support they need promptly.
• It helps shorten customers' wait times by providing prompt answers to queries. 
• You can build relationships with your customers and help them find and purchase products that they need quickly and efficiently. This will increase conversion rates and trust for your business and create a strong customer base that you can rely on in the future.

Cool Awesome Features 

• The no-code builder allows you to drag and drop conversation blocks easily. Choose from multiple bot response formats or actions for your story to be more engaging.
• You can access all previous conversations via the comprehensive archive. Here, you'll see all the messages your chatbot sent and received. 
• Customers can contact you through their favourite messaging platforms, such as the out-of-the-box integrations, making yourself available 24/7.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• The flows are easy to set up using prebuilt templates, which makes creating and managing your bot quick and simple. You can also easily develop more complex Stories with them, making them a powerful tool for customer service.
• The free chat widget can be placed on any part of your website. It also comes with plenty of customisations so you can control where, when, and how your chatbot responds to customer inquiries.
• Their Academy can help you create a chatbot with ease. With their lessons, you can learn from experts how to create a successful chatbot, so be sure to check it out as well.

Plans and pricing 

ChatBot offers a 14-day, no-risk trial period for their Team Plan, which is priced at $149/month. They also offer a Starter Plan ($50/month) for smaller companies or start-ups that comes with 1 active bot and a Business Plan ($149/month) that offers unlimited bots and other advanced features. If these pre-structured paid plans are insufficient, you may contact their sales to inquire about their Enterprise solutions.   

19. Birdeye Webchat

Birdeye's Webchat platform is a powerful way to give context and interest to your visitors, turning them into customers. With Webchat, you can easily add the feature to your website without any coding or design experience. Plus, with Birdeye's customer support team available 24/7, you can be sure that your visitors will have all the help they need when making a purchase.

Pros & Benefits 

• The lead management feature allows you to convert website visitors into leads by capturing their names, phone numbers, and other identifying data. 
• Birdeye lets customers chat with representatives immediately when they come across your site. This helps to engage leads immediately and makes the conversation more real-time, which can lead to better conversions.
• "Robin" - Birdeye's AI-powered chatbot - automates tasks that would otherwise require human input to complete. It is designed to save time for busy professionals by completing routine tasks for them.

Cool Awesome Features

• It comes with SMS features that allow you to reach out to your customers or site visitors after they sign up at your website. 
• Its AI-powered chatbot is an expert in answering business-specific questions. It has the capability of developing a repository of FAQs and can provide answers to customers automatically.
• The widgets make it easy for you to provide context and answer questions smoothly and efficiently.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• Leads from your website forms are funnelled into one inbox, where they can be engaged via text or email. Those that engage with the leads are then converted to customers.
• The Webchat widget makes it possible for your customers to be consistently notified. You can customise chat icons, colours, and greetings to let your visitors know who they'll be chatting with.
• It has an integration with Google Analytics helps you track website visitors' interaction. 

Plans and pricing 

Birdeye does not publish its pricing, but it offers three pre-structured payment plans depending on the number of your business locations: the Standard, Professional, and Premium plans. If you need to know more, they recommend that you get in touch with their product specialist to know which plan is the perfect fit for your business.  

20. Smartsupp

Smartsupp is one of the top eCommerce live chat platforms that functions as an online shopping assistant. It brings together chatbots and lives chat to help convert visitors. With Smartsupp, customers can quickly and easily get help with their shopping needs, whether they're looking for product information or assistance with a purchase. You can also use it to manage your customer relationships more efficiently by recording chats and sending transcripts to your team for review.

Pros & Benefits

• Smartsupp provides you with insights into what topics are being discussed, what interests people on your website, and what areas need improvement. 
• You can also send files to your customers which makes it easy for customers to get the information they need, no matter where they are in the world. You can easily send files and share important information with your customers in a live chat session.
• Smartsupp's capabilities can help provide context and support right when customers need it most. By integrating the platform into your eCommerce CMS, you can provide customers with a seamless experience and improve your overall customer satisfaction ratings.

Cool Awesome Features

• The chatbots are easy to set up and run quickly, requiring no coding skills. Their creation process is clear, quick, and simple, so you can get your chatbot up and running in no time.
• Bring together live human and chatbot conversations. The app brings these together to help significantly increase online sales.
• To centralise all visitor communication within your dashboard, you have the option to activate email notifications for missed conversations when you go offline.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• Smartsupp allows users to customise the look of their chat interface to match their company colours and add a personal photo to show that there are real people behind the website.
• You can view the insights of your customers’ interactions on your site which can be accessed on the centralised dashboard.
• It also offers integrations with many popular website builders and eCommerce platforms, such as PrestaShop, WordPress, and Shopify. 

Plans and Pricing 

Another great reason to consider it as a solution for your business is its forever-free plan that offers live chat for 1 seat or agent. And if you think you'll benefit more from a higher tier plan then you may consider selecting either their Standard Plan ($25.5/month), or Pro Plan ($60/month) - both of which come with a 14-day trial period. There's also the Ultimate Plan that offers tailor-fit solutions, available by contacting sales.

21. Chatra

Chatra enables businesses to reach out to their customers quickly and effectively. It provides the convenience of live chat on your website while allowing you to continue working on other tasks. It's really user-friendly for eCommerce store owners and can be set up in minutes. 

Pros & Benefits

• It helps increase sales and customer retention. It helps you answer questions from visitors, clarify concerns, and cross-sell and upsell products to potential customers.
• The chatbots can help you automate routine work tasks, such as collecting visitor contact data and getting their consent. 
• The mobile apps and chat feature allow users to communicate with others from anywhere.  

Cool Awesome Features

• With Chatra, you can see your entire conversation history - who has been talking to you, when they were talking, and what they said. This helps you keep track of the conversation and ensure efficient quality control.
• If you are not the focus of a conversation between other agents, you will not receive notifications. This allows you to continue working on conversations without interruption.
• Another cool feature includes its email open tracking. It tells you when your email has been opened or seen, and another type of feature is typing insights that let you see what your customers are typing so you can be ready with your reply.

Getting the Most Out of It

• Manage your messages from one multichannel dashboard.
• See who is currently visiting your website, and greet them with personalised messages based on their browsing history and location.
• Chatra sends data directly to Universal Analytics efficiently without any additional third-party tracking. This makes it an ideal choice for companies that want to track user behaviour.

Plans and pricing 

It's also nice to know that it offers a free, single-user plan that lets you freely use the platform's online and offline chat widget, browser dashboard, complete conversation history, and more. To access Chatra's full lineup of features, you may opt for their Essential Plan, which comes at $21/agent per month, or their Pro Plan for $29/agent per month.   

22. Kayako

Kayako is a customer support platform that provides various chat functionalities that integrate with your knowledge base, websites, and mobile apps. It has a great UX which helps users to easily communicate with customers through live chat, allowing you to provide them with the support they need hassle-free. 

Pros & Benefits

• The live chat software is available on mobile-friendly websites via SDKs that can be integrated into apps for iOS and Android. With excellent customer service at your fingertips, you'll never have to worry about customers again.
• Customers can get personalised help from Kayako's live chat software, which is easy to set up and integrate into your website, apps, and other systems.
• Using Kayako's self-help repository, customers can find quick and easy answers to common questions. This includes articles, videos, and FAQs.

Cool Awesome Features 

• The platform makes sure your customers are always a top priority with its innovative chat widget. When they step away from the website, it automatically sends a follow-up message to their email where you can continue talking about what made them leave in the first place!
• The automated chat system is designed to offer helpful, behaviour-driven answers for customers by directing them automatically into your website's knowledge centre.
• It has one of the most comprehensive analytics dashboards for customer service providers. With it, you can instantly see your page views and orders in real-time with a single click of a button on an easy-to-use interface that also provides historical information about customer behaviour patterns.

Getting the Most Out of It 

• Kayako provides a variety of design customisation options for its live chat software. You can choose your colour scheme and welcome message, both of which will appear on all supported channels.
• It has integrations with hundreds of apps makes it easy to bring customer activities into context. For example, Slack and SalesForce integrations come out of the box, making it easy to keep everyone in the loop.
• With macros, you can send predefined replies and canned responses to common questions all in a single click.

Plans and Pricing 

It doesn't follow a pre-structured payment plan but instead bases its pricing on the number of agents you are expecting to deploy, like its contemporaries. The good thing is that it also offers a no-risk, 14-day trial period so you can see if the platform is the right live chat tool just for you.

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⚡ Frequently Asked Questions ⚡

What's the best live chat software for eCommerce brands?

There are a quite a few good options that can be used for eCommerce stores which I’ve talked about in this guide, but from experience I’d have to say Crisp Chat, Tawk.to and Gorgias would have to be my top picks.

What free live chat software options are best for SaaS startups?

Many of the platforms I’ve spoken about have a free version or at the very least have a free trial period for you to test out the tool. If you’re an early stage SaaS, I’d recommend looking into Tidio, Drift or Video Ask. VideoAsk in particular I think is a pretty awesome option as the video widget certainly helps with conversions for some campaigns I’ve worked on with clients. If you’re a more established SaaS company, any of the platforms mentioned are good choices, it just comes down to integrations, and whether or not you’re looking for a customer service platform, or simply a live chat app.

What live chat support software has features such as support requests and shared inboxes that can work for teams?

My two favourite live chat software that has done an epic job with shared inboxes and requests has to be Intercom and Zendesk. Both really established and are great options as a conversational relationship platform for fast-growth startups and businesses. Super easy to work with other team members as you can see the chat history and the current state of conversation, which makes it super easy for customer service agents, as well as marketers and general customer support.

Is there live chat software that has video chat and have the ability to share screens?

Yes, and the two best options in the market are VideoAsk and Livechat.com. Both give you the option to screen share and the user experience for each of them are simply awesome for both users and customers. Highly recommend trying both out.

What are some best practices when you incorporate a live chat solution on your website?

It's pretty straight forward to install a live chat solution on your website. Most provides share a simply JS code which you copy and paste onto your site, or even a direct integration with your preferred website CMS. However, whilst installing the live chat app is easy and may work when you prompt it, doesn’t mean it provides the best user experience for visitors. For best practices, here’s four important things that I recommend and keep in mind. Firstly, ensure the live chat widget pops up at the right time with the right message that makes contextual sense. Secondly, ensure there’s a human element - if it’s all automated this will annoy users. Thirdly, tag conversations properly so you can track what they’re asking, where they’re asking, and whether they are an existing customer or not. And Lastly, respond to them in a timely manner, or at the very least, notify them when a real person will get in touch with them. So simple, yet so many businesses don’t highlight or notify visitors.