LiveChat Competitors & Alternatives
LiveChat is one of the most popular live chat solutions available today. However, there are many worthwhile live chat tools worth considering. Before you purchase LiveChat, we recommend reading this article to see how it stacks up against its competitors.
Below, we’ll provide an analysis of the top LiveChat competitors and give detailed insight into their features and pricing. To fully understand the features that LiveChat offers, you can also read our in-depth LiveChat review.
All of our recommendations are based on research, product demos with the software companies, and dozens of hours spent hand-testing these live chat solutions. More details regarding our research process can be found on our live chat category page.
Table of Contents
- LiveChat Features
- LiveChat Competitor Overview: Pricing & Features
- Top LiveChat Competitors
- Bottom Line
LiveChat Features
Before we discuss the top LiveChat competitors, we’ll provide a table of LiveChat’s main features. LiveChat is one of the most powerful and widely-used live chat softwares available today. Details concerning the six most important features are outlined in the table below.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Chat Inbox and Widget | LiveChat has a chat inbox and chat widget that have a modern and simple user interface. There is no lag time between sending and receiving messages. |
| Chat Capabilities and Tools |
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| Chat History | With all plans except the starter plan, LiveChat offers unlimited chat history. These archives are searchable, allowing for easier review of past chats. |
| Ticketing | LiveChat includes a ticketing system to track customer concerns. LiveChat customers can create tickets directly from current chats or manually create them. |
| Analytics | LiveChat has a notably rich analytics section with the ability to drill down into specific metrics. The metrics, charts, and graphs update in real time, which is not true for many competitors. |
| Integrations | LiveChat has built integrations with more than 170 applications. This is one of the most extensive integrations lists across all live chat solutions that we’ve reviewed. Some of the most valuable integrations include Zapier, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Facebook, and Zendesk. |
LiveChat Competitor Overview: Pricing & Features
LiveChat was established in 2002 and has over 30,000 customers, making it one of the oldest and most popular live chat solutions. It’s one of the top solutions on the market and is ranked highly in our live chat category.
LiveChat pricing operates on a per-agent basis and starts at $19 per agent per month. Their pricing model is fairly standard when compared with competitors and sits somewhere around the mid-to-high range in terms of overall cost. It falls short compared to competitors because there is no basic free plan, which many alternatives offer. There are a few details to know about LiveChat’s pricing:
- LiveChat’s additional products—ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase—come at an additional cost, where others will have these included in monthly pricing
- Monthly per-agent prices are nearly identical to Freshchat and Zendesk Chat prices
Overall, LiveChat is one of the top live chat solutions. It is reliable and we found no software issues while testing the product, which we did find in a couple competitors. It’s feature-rich, though undeniably expensive given its add-on features, which many competitors will not charge extra for. Unlike some competitors on this list, LiveChat is better suited for larger teams.
LiveChat Competitors
The live chat market is fairly saturated, with many different solutions that cater to organizations of all types and sizes. We’ve listed seven LiveChat competitors based on features, power, and pricing.
Some of the main LiveChat competitors are:
- Intercom
- HelpCrunch
- Freshchat
- Zendesk Chat
- Crisp
- tawk.to
- Tidio
#1: Intercom
As another heavy hitter in the live chat arena, Intercom competes with LiveChat in terms of power and market influence. We ranked Intercom higher than LiveChat because, though it generally has a higher upfront cost, it offers more advanced marketing features. We recommend Intercom for large technology-forward companies, whereas we recommend LiveChat for teams looking to focus on chat and customer support.
To learn about Intercom's competitors and alternatives, check out our Intercom competitors article.
- You’re focused on customer support instead of marketing features
- You’d prefer straightforward, per-agent pricing
- You want advanced and interactive reports
- You want advanced features like A/B testing
- You’re a large company with the budget for a pricey tool
- You want chatbots and Help Center included in pricing
Intercom is a customer messaging software with over 30,000 customers. It offers features like cross-channel messaging, A/B testing, and chatbots. Intercom is ideal for large and technology-forward companies looking to improve customer engagement.
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#2: HelpCrunch
HelpCrunch is newer on the live chat scene, having been founded in 2016. We found it fairly similar to LiveChat in terms of interface and power. Like Intercom, HelpCrunch has additional marketing features such as email campaigns and website pop-ups. We rated HelpCrunch and LiveChat very similarly. The main difference is that HelpCrunch includes email marketing, pop-ups, a help desk, and a knowledge base for around the same monthly price as LiveChat’s Business plan, which doesn’t include any of those.
- You would like a ticketing system
- You’re interested in more integrations (170+ compared with ~20)
- You prefer a more responsive customer support team
- You would like included help desk and pop-up features
- You’d like up to five separate chat widgets
- You want arguably more bang for your buck
HelpCrunch is a modern and powerful customer communication platform. With features that help streamline customer support and marketing, it’s a solution that will benefit most teams, ecommerce organizations in particular.
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#3: Freshchat
Freshchat is a chat solution offered by Freshworks. The tool has the same monthly pricing per agent as LiveChat. The biggest difference between the two is that Freshchat will be able to easily connect with other products offered by Freshworks. All plans also come with an automatic Freshdesk integration, which enables a ticketing solution.
- You need advanced integrations and a Zapier integration
- You don’t need email marketing
- You prefer a slightly more updated inbox appearance
- You already use Freshworks products and want to streamline platforms
- You want a free plan with 100 seats included
- You’d like email campaigns to be included
Freshchat is a messaging software offered by Freshworks, a company with a wide variety of products. Its main features include live chat and email campaigns; Freshchat also includes advanced in-house reports. Overall, Freshchat is a solid yet slightly expensive live chat solution.
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#4: Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat is one of the most intuitive live chat tools on the market. It’s very easy to install and use, even more so than LiveChat. The included features are fairly similar, with both tools focused on live chat rather than marketing. Zendesk’s customer support availability varies depending on how much you pay, however, so it should be noted that you won’t have as much customer support access if you’re on a cheaper plan.
- You have a larger team and can pay for advanced add-ons
- You’d like the ability to have chatbots
- You need advanced reports
- You already use Zendesk and want to streamline platforms
- You’re a smaller team with no advanced marketing requirements
- You don’t want there to be a learning curve
Zendesk Chat is a live chat software offered by Zendesk, a software company with a wide variety of products. The chat tool works efficiently with only minor drawbacks. With features like live visitor monitoring, proactive chat functionality, and conversion tracking, it will benefit companies that want to engage website visitors.
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#5: Crisp
Crisp is currently utilized by over 200,000 brands. Like LiveChat, Crisp is well-designed, modern, and powerful. Crisp has a basic free plan for two agents and essential live chat capabilities. Crisp has an edge on LiveChat in terms of unique features with tools like MagicMap, which provides a live map view of website visitors and allows you to proactively chat.
- Your efforts are focused on live chat
- You need a ticketing system
- You want a more robust list of pre-built integrations
- You want unlimited support seats for $95 per month
- You’d like rich visitor information with MagicMap feature
- You want to streamline email campaigns with your live chat tool
Crisp is a live chat and email marketing software with over 200,000 customers. Its notable features include chatbots, which are very intuitive to build, and unlimited seats in the most advanced plan. Crisp is a reliable software at a relatively low price, especially for for startups and small businesses.
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#6: tawk.to
Tawk.to and LiveChat are similar in terms of features, though tawk.to has a more outdated interface and does not work as seamlessly. However, the tradeoff is that tawk.to is entirely free. We recommend tawk.to for those who don’t require advanced, quick-to-update reports or a modern tool.
- You want the ability to add chatbot features
- You’ll want a tool that updates faster and works more efficiently
- You want a more modern interface
- You’re interested in a free yet moderately detailed solution
- You’d like to hire chat agents to handle chat on your behalf
- You don’t mind a more dated interface
Tawk.to is a free live chat solution with over 3 million users. It focuses solely on live chat, with features like ticketing and screen sharing, and tawk.to also allows customers to directly hire virtual assistants and chat agents. Tawk.to is the best free live chat software and would benefit any company searching for a free option.
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#7: Tidio
Tidio is a live chat tool that’s used on over 300,000 websites worldwide. It has one of the top free plans on the market. It competes with LiveChat because it’s valuable for the relatively low price. However, it has a few technical problems like slow reports and unreliable notifications, which LiveChat does not.
- You’re interested in ticketing
- You want more advanced reports and integrations
- You want a reliable, hassle-free live chat experience
- You want inexpensive buildable chatbot features
- You won’t be bothered by sometimes-unreliable notifications
- You want flexible pricing options
Tidio is a live chat and email marketing software that’s used by over 300,000 websites. It offers features like chatbots and email marketing templates. Given its ease of use, Tidio is ideal for those searching for a hassle-free live chat solution.
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Bottom Line
LiveChat is one of the oldest and most-utilized paid live chat solutions. It can be beneficial for teams of all sizes, and we recommend it most for larger companies or those with a larger budget to spend on a chat tool. Overall, LiveChat is modern, relatively easy to use, and has a reliable customer support team.
Before making your choice, we recommend that you read through our reviews of each LiveChat competitor to determine each solution’s strengths, notable drawbacks, and what type of organizations we recommend each for.
If you’re interested, you can sign up for a 14-day free LiveChat trial today.
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