Olark Review, Pricing & Features

What is Olark?

Olark is a live chat software with more than 12,000 customers. With all the foundational features to support visitors over live chat, it’s a simple, straightforward customer support tool.

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Table of Contents

Olark Review Summary

Olark is a live chat software company that was founded in 2009 by Ben Congelton, Matthew Pizzimenti, Roland Osborne, and Zach Stiendler. The company is used by over 12,000 businesses worldwide and is currently headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Olark includes a suite of chat features like chat transcripts, reports, and chat ratings. There are no marketing features like email marketing and website popups, which can sometimes be found in more full-bodied customer engagement tools. Olark’s main strength lies in their detailed, searchable chat transcripts, which offer helpful insights into each conversation a company has with a visitor.

All of Olark’s plans come with the same features. The company offers a discount for longer-term contracts. A handful of advanced features, such as co-browsing and chat translation, can be purchased for an extra cost. Olark also offers a free plan with limited features.

Overall, Olark is an effective messaging software that is ideal for small businesses. If you’re looking for affordable and basic live chat with strong in-house reports and transcripts, Olark is worth considering. However, there are alternatives that offer more features for the same price, or the same features for much less. Here are some alternatives to consider:

  • tawk.to is an entirely free option that also just offers live chat
  • Crisp is similarly priced to Olark, but offers more advanced features
  • Gist offers a combined support and marketing plan for a similar price

Olark Pricing & Cost

Olark pricing operates on a pay-per-agent model. Unlike most other live chat services, Olark offers all features in every plan rather than providing more advanced features only in the most expensive plans. There are five PowerUps that customers can add onto plans for a monthly fee.

Plans

  • Free: One agent, 20 chats per month, and limited features
  • Monthly: $19 per agent per month
  • One Year Plan: $15 per agent per month
  • Two Year Plan: $12 per agent per month

PowerUps

  • Live Translation: $29 per month
  • Remove Branding: $59 per month
  • Visitor Insights (Social): $59 per month
  • Co-Browsing: $99 per month
  • Visitor Insights (Social + Professional): $99 per month

Olark Key Features

Below, we’ll discuss Olark’s key features and describe how they can support your company’s live chat and customer engagement. We’ll include screenshots of the software to provide you with a sense of the overall layout.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

Live Chat

With live chat, companies can connect with website visitors and provide real-time support. Olark’s live chat feature is straightforward and offers most necessary features like chat routing, conversation tags, and the ability to attach files. Customers can also create actions—to automatically end chats, for example—or canned messages, which are pre-written messages that save time during conversations.

Agent Chat Page

Each customer support agent has an individual chat page that they’ll use to communicate with visitors. After selecting the “Launch Chat” button from the dashboard, team members will be taken to their chat pages, where they can set their status to “Accepting Chats”. The chat page is displayed below, with recent conversations and visitors displayed on the left, the current chat shown in the middle, and visitor profiles & activity in the right column.

Olark Chat Page

Chat Widget

Website visitors will converse with agents using the Olark chat widget, which is housed in the bottom left or bottom right corner of a website. Olark customers can lightly customize the widget with different colors, button styles, and sizes. The widget is not quite as modern-looking as some other companies’ widgets.

One benefit of the widget is that once a chat has been ended, either by the chat agent or the visitor, visitors will be shown the options below. Visitors will have the ability to send a copy of the chat transcript to themselves and to rate the chat.

Olark Widget

Chat Ratings

Enabling chat ratings will allow visitors to rate their live chat interactions with your company. These reviews can help your company understand whether or not you are providing their visitors with superior support. Olark’s chat rating system is slightly more comprehensive than those offered by competitors. The questions presented to visitors after a chat has ended are:

  • How satisfied were you with this chat?
  • How knowledgeable was the chat agent?
  • How responsive was the chat agent?
  • How friendly was the chat agent?
  • Additional feedback

These questions are rated on a Likert scale (on a scale from one to five), which is also more detailed than other companies’ rating systems that often have only “good” or “bad” options. Chat rating reports can be seen both in the dashboard and within the reporting section.

Dashboard

The Olark dashboard provides a high-level overview of live chat metrics. These metrics include:

  • Team metrics
  • Recent transcripts
  • Agent activity
  • Visitor feedback
  • Tags utilized
  • Chat volume by time of day
Olark Dashboard

Overall, the dashboard is a helpful tool that allows companies to see a few of the most important customer support benchmarks.

Transcripts

Olark’s database of searchable chat transcripts make it easy to locate and analyze past conversations. This section is one of Olark's strongest, given the amount of detail that can be found in the transcripts. Olark customers can search past conversations by keyword or filter by chat quality, agent, visitor ID, and more. When drilling down into a transcript, agents will see this view:

Olark Transcripts

A few of the details that can be found in this transcript are:

  • Actions the agent took (canned responses, etc)
  • Actions the visitor took (uploading files, etc)
  • Automated messages sent to visitor
  • URL the visitor started chatting from

Reporting

The reporting section provides data on overall chat metrics and agent-specific metrics. Much like the dashboard, this section is laid out in an effective and easy-to-visualize manner. Another key benefit is that reports update in real time; in some other live chat softwares, the data takes a while to populate in the dashboard. In both the Reporting Overview and Agent Activity sections, you will be able to email or export reports.

Reporting Overview

Within the Reporting Overview section, Olark customers will see data concerning agent performance, chat traffic, and visitor satisfaction. The visitor satisfaction section is particularly helpful because chat agents can view the transcripts of low-rated chats.

Olark Reports Overview

Agent Activity

Each agent will be able to view reports of their personal chat performances. This section includes details like agent availability, chat duration, and the average rating across all conversations.

Olark Agent Activity

Integrations

Olark offers fewer integrations than many competitors, with only 18 currently offered. Customers do, however, have the ability to build their own integrations using Olark’s API. The current integrations list is displayed below:

  • JIRA
  • Mailchimp
  • Nutshell
  • Salesforce
  • Slack
  • SugarCRM
  • WooCommerce
  • Wordpress
  • Zendesk

Olark Customer Support

When interacting with Olark customer support, we found their team to be helpful and responsive in spite of relatively limited contact hours. Their customer support team is available from 9AM to 3PM, Monday through Friday.

Customer Support ChannelsLive Chat, Email
Customer Support Availability9AM - 3PM, Monday - Friday
Other Support ResourcesHelp Center, Demo Videos, Blog, Social Media
Application Status PageYes

Olark Alternatives & Competitors

Olark is most similar to a few other softwares that are focused on live chat, such as tawk.to and LiveChat. Other alternatives, many of which are full-featured customer engagement platforms, are listed below. The best choice for you will depend on your budget and preferred features.

Is Olark Right For You?

Olark is a live chat software with all the essential features. It is a well-established company, having been in business since 2009, and the company has over 12,000 customers.

Overall, Olark is an effective messaging software that has detailed transcripts. If you’re looking for affordable and basic live chat with decent in-house reports, Olark is worth considering. However, there are alternatives that are also worth consideration if you want a cheaper or more robust software:

  • tawk.to is an entirely free option that also just offers live chat
  • Crisp is similarly priced to Olark, but offers more advanced features
  • Gist offers a combined support and marketing plan for a similar price

If you are interested in trying Olark, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Katelyn Anderson

Katelyn is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses of technology markets & products and writes software-related content. She graduated summa cum laude with degrees in English and Psychology. Her main areas of interest are content creation, user experience, and search engine optimization. You can connect with Katelyn on LinkedIn.

Katelyn is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Accounting software
  • Integration software
  • Live chat software
  • Vacation rental software
  • Video conferencing software