request a demo
A great way to increase engagement on your website is to provide a way for your visitors (and potential customers) to send you messages online. Email works okay, but it lacks the direct interaction that a live chat widget can provide. And, since it’s so easy to start a conversation with a chat bubble, visitors are more likely to engage with you, which gives you more opportunities to turn a question into a sale!
We've compiled a list of available services that give you quick and easy live chat support integration. For basic integration, you’ll just need access to your website’s files and an editor in order to paste in some javascript snippets.
Tawk.to
Probably the most popular solution available, Tawk.to offers a slew of wonderful features in their live chat widget, all at their promised “always free” pricing. Yes, that’s right, they tout that their live chat services will always be available for free! Installation is super simple, as they give you a snippet of javascript to paste into your website pages, and also offer a variety of plugins for use with other website services such as WordPress or Drupal.
Like most of these services, Tawk.to offers more than just a way to communicate with your customers! Its dashboard offers information such as a list of visitors currently on your site, page view and visitor statistics, support ticketing, and knowledge-base features.
While the service itself remains free, you can opt for a variety of paid features (such as removing the Tawk.to branding from the chat bubble or even hiring outside agents to speak to your customers for you).
Crisp
A great alternative to Tawk.to that offers a free plan that allows up to 2 of your employees to chat with customers, Crisp provides another quick and easy live chat solution for your website. While their free plan does not include statistics like Tawk.to does, it does offer a large variety of plugins and features for its higher tier plans. Its free dashboard includes a contact directory for customers who have contacted you through your website, a live list of visitors currently viewing your pages, and even a real-time map to show you the location of each website visitor.
Some of the paid features include help desk/knowledge base support, MagicBrowse (which allows you to see what your visitors are seeing on your website), and various analytics.
Here’s a run down of Crisp’s paid plans:
Free
- 2 seats
- Features:
Pro - $25 / month
- 4 seats
- Features: Everything from previous tier, plus:
Unlimited - $95 / month
- Unlimited seats
- Features: Everything from the previous tiers, plus:
Chatify
The last contender on the list offers a slightly different approach when it comes to restrictions on their plans. Their free plan offers all core features of the site plus no restrictions on team size, but it limits your account to 100 individual conversations per month (though this does not count internal group/direct messages). While this works perfectly for small businesses who don’t foresee surpassing that limit, it may require some businesses with a larger customer base to upgrade in order to fully take advantage of its features.
The core features of the site, available in the free plan, include:
- Email notifications
- Unlimited agents
- Team messaging
- Unlimited auto-messages
- Unlimited FAQs
- Bot auto-answers
- Desktop and mobile apps
- ...and more!
Just like the other entries here, installation is just as simple as opening up your webpage files and pasting in a small HTML/Javascript snippet.
Chatify’s paid tiers offer different pricing depending on wether you’d like to pay annually or month-to-month. Here’s the breakdown.
*EUR to USD conversion accurate as of 2/25/21
Starter
- €49/month annually or €60/month monthly
- ($59.66 and $73.05 USD respectively)
- 250 conversations per month
- Standard support
Pro
- €89/month annually or €100/month monthly
- ($108.36 and $121.75 USD respectively)
- 500 conversations per month
- Priority support
Pro PLUS
- €169/month annually or €200/month monthly
- ($205.76 and $243.50 USD respectively)
- 1,000 conversations per month
- Premium support
Regardless of which solution to choose, offering live chat on your website gives you a great way to allow your visitors to effortlessly communicate with you and your employees.