Live chat software
Compare live chat software with which you put a chat function on your website, from free chat windows to shared inboxes with WhatsApp, email and a chatbot.
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Live chat software at a glance
Price indications and features as stated by the suppliers. Ratings are the average of the reviews on SoftwareWatcher.
| Software | Rating | From per month | Budget per user per month | Free trial account | Demo | Cloud | Dutch-language |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belco | – | From € 50 per agent per month | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Channel.me | – | On request | – | Yes | – | Yes | – |
| Crisp | – | €45 | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| JivoChat | – | From € 30 per agent per month | – | Yes | – | Yes | – |
| Lime Connect | – | From € 105 per month, minimum 3 seats | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| LiveAgent | – | From $19 per agent per month | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Olark | – | From $29 per agent per month | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Parley | – | On request | – | – | Yes | Yes | – |
| Shopify Inbox | – | On request | – | – | – | Yes | Yes |
| Smartsupp | – | €20 | – | Yes | – | Yes | – |
| tawk.to | – | On request | – | – | – | Yes | – |
| Text by LiveChat | – | From $25 per user per month | – | Yes | – | Yes | – |
| Tidio | – | From $29 per month | – | Yes | – | Yes | – |
| Web1on1 | – | €99 | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Zoho SalesIQ | – | From € 10 per operator per month | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Zendesk | – | €55 | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Compare live chat software
With live chat software you put a chat function on your website. Visitors type their question in a chat window and an employee answers straight away, from the browser or an app on their phone. A chat on your website like this is faster than email and a smaller step than calling. Webshops use it to help hesitant buyers, and customer services use it to handle questions faster. If nobody is online, the visitor leaves a message or a chatbot takes over the first questions.
Just a chat function or a complete inbox?
The first choice is how much you want on top of that. If you mainly want a chat for your website, you end up with a live chat tool such as tawk.to, Smartsupp, Olark or JivoChat. Other packages are a shared inbox: with Tidio, Crisp and the Dutch Belco you also answer messages from other channels there, such as email, WhatsApp or Instagram. With helpdesks such as Zendesk and LiveAgent, web chat is one of the channels alongside tickets. If you have a Shopify webshop, there is Shopify Inbox. For large customer contact centres there is Parley, also for chat in your app.
The technology is the same for almost every package: a chat widget for your website, which you add with a snippet of code or a plug-in. This way you also get live chat on your website without a developer.
What should you look out for?
- Pricing model: you pay per employee, per number of conversations or a fixed amount per month. Work it out for your team and number of chats.
- Channels: check whether, besides web chat, you also want to answer WhatsApp, email or Instagram in the same inbox, and which plan that is in.
- Automation: see whether you can automatically invite visitors to a conversation and whether a chatbot answers when nobody is online.
- Language and privacy: check whether you can set the chat window to Dutch, where the conversations are stored and whether the supplier concludes a data processing agreement with you.
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