Live chat puts a person on your website while the visitor is still on it. The software is the easy part: a widget, a queue and a transcript.
What decides whether it works is who answers, how fast, and when. This guide ranks the tools on staffing reality, on what the pricing unit counts, and on where the transcripts live.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry
says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a
vendor. How that works.
In short
What live chat software does
Live chat software places a messaging widget on a website and routes those conversations to human agents in a shared queue, keeping transcripts, visitor context and history.
Five things, in this order. Feature counts are not among them: they are the least useful
comparison in software, because every vendor ticks every box.
01
Setup effort in live chat software
What the first ninety days of a live chat software rollout cost in hours, not in licence fees. A product that needs a partner engagement before it does anything is a different purchase from one a team configures in an afternoon.
02
What live chat software really costs
What the bill becomes once the modules a normal buyer of live chat software needs are added, and whether you can read that number without a sales conversation.
03
Getting your data out of live chat software
How your own data comes back out, in what format, and whether that export is included in the live chat software contract or billed as a project.
04
Independence from the vendor
Whether you can buy live chat software, run it and leave it on your own terms. This test decides most of the order on this page, and it is why the largest vendors in live chat software often sit below the smaller ones.
05
Who the product is built for
The size and shape of company each live chat software product was actually built for. Most regret in software comes from buying for a company you are not yet.
The fourth test decides most of the order on this page, and it is the reason the largest
live chat software vendors sit below the smaller ones. A product with a published price, an export
that works and no mandatory implementation partner is a product you can leave.
A platform suite that arrives with a quote, a partner and a two-year commitment may well be
the better software and is still the harder decision to reverse. We rank live chat software for the
buyer who has to live with that decision without a procurement department, which is a stated
bias rather than a hidden one.
We do not publish a score out of ten. A number like 8.4 is a judgement dressed as a
measurement, and nobody can check it.
What you can check is on this page: what each live chat tool costs, where the vendor is
established, whether the price is published, and what we think it is bad at. Our full method
is on the how we work page.
B2B sales teams chasing named accounts on a marketing website
Customer support teams answering questions about existing orders
Country is where the vendor is headquartered or contracts from, which is a
different question from where your data is hosted. Where the two tell different stories, the
entry says so.
The specialist that does website conversations and little else
Ranked #1 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
LiveChat is the specialist's specialist: canned responses, transfers, supervision of live conversations, and reporting that answers whether staffing matches demand. Agents who use it all day notice the difference from the cheaper widgets within a week.
The commercial shape is the objection. Everything adjacent, from the bot to the ticketing to the help centre, is another product from the same company at another price, so a team wanting one integrated stack should price the whole family before comparing.
What stands out
Published pricing
Mature product
Polish vendor
Where it costs you
Chatbot, help desk and knowledge base are separate subscriptions
Little value if chat volume is only a few conversations a week
Right for
Support or sales teams handling steady daily chat volume properly
German-hosted chat with WhatsApp and messaging channels included
Ranked #2 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
Userlike answers the compliance question directly, with hosting in Germany and contract terms written for a German buyer, and it adds WhatsApp, Facebook and SMS to the same agent inbox without an extra product. For a mid-sized European company that is usually enough.
Push it harder and the limits appear: skill-based routing is coarse, the reporting will not tell you much about queue behaviour, and customisation of the widget beyond colours is limited compared with the Polish competition.
What stands out
German hosting
WhatsApp included
Free tier
Where it costs you
Routing and automation rules are simpler than LiveChat's
Analytics stay at the surface level
Right for
German-speaking companies needing EU hosting and WhatsApp in one inbox
Wrong for
Teams needing detailed routing logic and deep reporting
GermanyFree tier; paid per seat per month, published
Open source shared inbox you can host on your own server
Ranked #3 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierOpen sourceSelf-hostablePublished pricingNorth America
Chatwoot gives a shared inbox with website chat, email and messaging channels under an open source licence, which removes both the per-agent fee and the data residency argument in one step. Run it on your own infrastructure and the transcripts never leave.
The trade is real work: container upgrades, a database to back up, and websocket issues to diagnose when chats stop appearing. The hosted version is priced sensibly, but then you are back to someone else's servers.
What stands out
Open source
Self-hostable
Own your data
Where it costs you
Self-hosting means you run upgrades, backups and scaling
Mobile applications lag behind the web interface
Right for
Technical teams that must keep conversation data on their own servers
Wrong for
Support teams with no engineer to maintain the deployment
United StatesSelf-hosting free and open source; cloud per seat per month, published
Chat widget for small shops, with bots on a separate meter
Ranked #4 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
Tidio is built for the shop owner, with a free tier that works, ecommerce integrations that pull order data, and an interface nobody needs training for.
The pricing unit deserves attention before anything else: plans are sized by monthly conversations reached, so success on the marketing side raises the support bill, and the AI answering carries its own meter on top. As a multi-agent tool it runs out of routing, permissions and reporting quickly.
What stands out
Free tier
Ecommerce focus
Conversation pricing
Where it costs you
Billing counts conversations, so a busy month costs more
Falls apart as a team tool beyond a few agents
Right for
Small online shops where the owner answers the chats personally
Wrong for
Support teams of more than three or four agents
PolandFree tier; paid by monthly conversations reached, published
Czech chat with video recording of visitor sessions
Ranked #5 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
Smartsupp combines a competent chat widget with recorded visitor sessions, so an agent can see the checkout step where the customer gave up rather than asking them to describe it. At this price that is genuinely useful, and hosting in the EU removes a procurement conversation.
Two caveats: recording visitor behaviour is personal data processing that needs a lawful basis and a notice, and the integration list is short enough that connecting it to a warehouse or ERP means custom work.
What stands out
EU hosting
Visitor recordings
Published pricing
Where it costs you
Session recordings create a consent obligation you must handle
Fewer integrations than the bigger platforms
Right for
Small Central European ecommerce teams wanting cheap chat hosted in the EU
Wrong for
Companies needing deep CRM or order system integration
CzechiaFree tier; paid per agent per month, published
Dutch shared inbox where website chat is one channel
Ranked #6 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
Trengo treats website chat as one inbox channel among many, which is the correct model for a company where customers also write on WhatsApp, email and Instagram, and where nobody should have to check six tools.
Rules, assignment and reporting work across all of it. Buy it only for the widget and you overpay for scope you do not use, and the per-seat model is awkward when ten people answer occasionally rather than three people answering constantly.
What stands out
Omnichannel inbox
EU hosting
Dutch vendor
Where it costs you
Per-seat pricing is expensive for occasional answerers
Heavier than needed if the website is the only channel
Right for
European teams merging chat, email and WhatsApp into one queue
Genuinely free chat widget, paid only to remove branding
Ranked #7 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
tawk.to is free for unlimited agents and unlimited websites, with payment only for removing the branding or hiring their agents, and there is no volume trap waiting in the licence. That makes it the cheapest way to learn whether chat produces conversations worth staffing.
What you give up is polish, integration depth and a clear commercial relationship, and for a company handling health, financial or other sensitive data the data processing terms deserve a proper legal read before installation.
What stands out
Free
Unlimited agents
Hired agents option
Where it costs you
The business model is selling outsourced agents, not software
Interface and integrations are dated
Right for
Sites testing whether their visitors will use chat at all
Wrong for
Regulated businesses handling sensitive personal or financial customer information
United StatesFree; paid add-ons for branding removal and hired agents
Small, stable chat widget with accessibility taken seriously
Ranked #8 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Published pricingNorth America
Olark's argument is narrow and real: the widget works with screen readers and keyboard navigation, which most competitors treat as a future roadmap item and which is a hard requirement for public bodies in Europe and the United States.
Setup is quick and the product is stable. Beyond that it is thin, with add-ons for transcripts, analytics and visitor insight that rivals include, and a pace of change that suggests the product is being maintained rather than developed.
What stands out
Accessible widget
Simple setup
Published pricing
Where it costs you
Most capability beyond basic chat is a paid add-on
Product development has been slow for years
Right for
Public sector and education websites with accessibility obligations to meet
Wrong for
Teams wanting automation, bots and rich analytics included
Chat, tickets and calls from one Slovak vendor at one price
Ranked #9 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
LiveAgent has one of the faster chat widgets and surrounds it with ticketing, a call centre module and social channels, which for a ten-person team means one invoice instead of three integrations. The reason it is not higher is focus.
Every module is competent and none is excellent, the interface shows its age and its feature density, and the modular price list means the chat figure in a comparison table understates what you will actually pay.
What stands out
Ticketing included
Call centre module
Published pricing
Where it costs you
Modules priced separately, so the chat price is not the bill
Interface is crowded and dated
Right for
Small teams wanting chat, tickets and phone from one vendor
Wrong for
Buyers who need the best agent experience for chat alone
Chat plus visitor tracking, cheap if you run Zoho already
Ranked #10 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingAsia-Pacific
SalesIQ costs a fraction of the specialists and delivers visitor tracking, lead scoring and chat that writes straight into Zoho CRM without integration work. For an existing Zoho customer the decision is nearly automatic.
Elsewhere, the picture changes: the agent interface is denser and slower to work in, the configuration takes longer than the price implies, and adopting it quietly pulls the rest of the suite into the conversation, which is exactly the intention.
What stands out
Low cost
CRM integration
Visitor scoring
Where it costs you
Weak case outside the Zoho ecosystem
Agent experience trails the chat specialists
Right for
Zoho CRM customers wanting cheap chat and visitor tracking together
Wrong for
Teams whose CRM and help desk are from other vendors
IndiaFree tier; paid per operator per month, published
Tiledesk is an EU-based open source project with a visual designer for conversation flows and the option to run everything on your own infrastructure, which is a rare pairing. For a technical team on a small budget with data residency to satisfy, it does the job.
Expect rough edges: the agent console is the less-developed half of the product, the community is small, and upgrades occasionally require reading the repository rather than the manual.
What stands out
Open source
EU vendor
Flow designer
Where it costs you
Human agent tooling is secondary to the bot builder
Documentation gaps show up during version upgrades
Right for
Technical European teams wanting self-hosted chat with visual flow design
Wrong for
Support managers expecting a polished agent workspace day one
ItalySelf-hosting free and open source; cloud published per month
Pipeline-focused chat that routes named accounts to sales
Ranked #12 of 12 in Best Live Chat Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
Qualified is a pipeline tool: it matches the visitor to a company record, wakes the account executive, and lets them jump into the conversation or book a meeting on the spot.
Where there is a target account list and a Salesforce instance behind it, that is measurably different from generic chat. For support use it is the wrong shape and the wrong price, and the absence of published pricing means every evaluation starts with a sales process.
What stands out
B2B pipeline
Salesforce-native
Quote only
Where it costs you
Priced for enterprise sales teams, with no published rate
Effectively requires Salesforce to work as intended
Right for
B2B sales teams chasing named accounts on a marketing website
Wrong for
Customer support teams answering questions about existing orders
Live chat software places a messaging widget on a website and routes those conversations to human agents in a shared queue, keeping transcripts, visitor context and history. The differences that matter are rarely in the feature list, so this is
the order we would work through them.
01
Decide whether you need a published price
11 of the 12 tools here publish what they cost; the other 1 quote per organisation, which means a sales conversation before you can compare anything. If you are buying without a procurement function, start with the ones that publish: LiveChat, Userlike, Chatwoot, Tidio, Smartsupp, Trengo, tawk.to, Olark, LiveAgent, Zoho SalesIQ, Tiledesk.
02
Work out what the first ninety days cost in time
Licence cost is the number in the contract; setup effort is the number that surprises people. Ask every shortlisted vendor who does the configuration, how long it took the last customer of your size, and what happens if that person leaves halfway.
03
Check the exit before the entry
Ask for an export of your own data in a format you can open, and ask whether it is included or billed as a project. A vendor that hesitates here is telling you what renewal negotiations will feel like in three years.
04
Match the tool to the size you are, not the size you plan to be
Most regret in this category comes from buying for a headcount that never arrived. The entry-level products here are not worse; they are aimed at a different company.
05
Decide how much the jurisdiction matters
These 12 vendors are established in 8 countries across 3 regions (Europe 7, North America 4, Asia-Pacific 1). Where a vendor is established decides which government can compel access to what it holds, which is a different question from where the servers are. For most buyers that is a factor, not a veto.
06
Consider whether you want the source
2 of these are open source, which means you can host them yourself and read what they do with your data. That control is real, and so is the maintenance it hands you.
Live chat is a staffing decision wearing a software badge
The widget takes an afternoon. The commitment is that somebody answers within a minute during the hours it is visible, and an unanswered chat does more damage than no chat at all, because the visitor asked and was ignored. Work out the hours first, then the rota, then the tool.
A site with two hundred visitors a day generates a manageable trickle; a campaign can produce forty conversations in an hour, and Tidio's conversation-based pricing means that hour also costs more. Hide the widget outside staffed hours and show an email form instead, rather than promising a person who is not there.
Decide the staffed hours and put them in the widget before launch.
Measure first response time weekly and act when it drifts past a minute.
Route the out-of-hours widget to a form or a promise of a reply time.
Where live chat stops and the AI agent starts
These are two products and two budgets. Live chat is a person; an AI agent answers without one and is usually metered per conversation or per resolution. Most vendors here sell both, and the bot sits on a separate meter: Tidio prices its AI answering apart from the chat plan, and LiveChat sells the chatbot as its own subscription.
The sane order is to run human chat first for a month, read the transcripts, and only automate the questions that repeat. Buying automation first means automating questions you have not read yet, which is how the bot ends up answering things nobody asks.
Run chat with people for a month and categorise the transcripts before automating.
Price the bot meter separately; it is never included in the per-seat figure.
Keep a visible route to a human in every automated conversation.
What the pricing unit counts, because it is not always seats
Comparison tables assume per-agent pricing, and the market no longer agrees. LiveChat, Userlike, Olark and Trengo bill per seat. Tidio bills by conversations reached in a month. tawk.to charges nothing for agents at all and sells services instead. Chatwoot costs nothing per agent if you host it.
The unit matters most for teams where many people answer occasionally: a shop with eight staff who each take a few chats a week pays eight seats at the specialists and nothing extra at tawk.to or a self-hosted Chatwoot. Count the occasional answerers before shortlisting.
List everyone who might answer a chat, including weekend and holiday cover.
Re-price the shortlist at twice your expected conversation volume.
Check whether a supervisor who only watches conversations needs a paid seat.
Transcripts are customer data, and the widget is a third-party script
Installing chat means putting someone else's JavaScript on every page and sending them what visitors type, which can include an order number, a health question or a complaint about an employer. Two things follow. The processing agreement and the hosting location are not paperwork: Userlike, Smartsupp and Trengo host in the EU, Chatwoot and Tiledesk can run on your own servers, and the American vendors here cannot offer either.
And session recording, which Smartsupp bundles, is a separate processing purpose that needs its own notice and lawful basis, agreed with whoever signs off privacy in your organisation before the recording starts rather than after a visitor asks about it.
Check where transcripts are stored and how long the vendor keeps them.
Set a retention period yourself instead of accepting the default forever.
Mask card numbers and other sensitive fields in the transcript before it is stored.
What goes wrong most often when buying live chat software
Showing the widget twenty-four hours a day while staffing it from nine to five. The visitor at eight in the evening learns that you ignore people.
Judging the tool on the proactive invitation feature. Automatic pop-ups raise conversation counts and annoyance in equal measure, and the count is what the vendor reports.
Letting sales and support share one queue with no routing. The pre-sales question and the angry order chase need different people and different answer times.
Never reading the transcripts. They are the cheapest research the company owns, and they say exactly which page on the website is unclear.
07
Frequently asked questions
11 answers
What is the best live chat in 2026?
LiveChat leads our ranking of 12. Twenty years of doing one thing shows in the agent interface, the routing and the reporting, which are better than anything else at this price.
Transcripts export cleanly and the API is documented. The catch is the family: the chatbot, help desk and knowledge base are separate products with separate subscriptions, so the shortlist price is rarely the final one.
How did you rank these live chat tools?
On what separates products after the demo: how much setup the first ninety days take, what the price becomes once the modules a normal buyer needs are added, how your data comes back out, whether you can buy and leave it without a partner engagement, and who the product is genuinely for.
That fourth test is why the large platform suites usually sit lower here than their market share would suggest. Not on feature counts, and not on a score we invented.
Which live chat tools publish their pricing?
11 of the 12, with the pricing model each one publishes:
LiveChat: Per agent per month, published.
Userlike: Free tier; paid per seat per month, published.
Chatwoot: Self-hosting free and open source; cloud per seat per month, published.
Tidio: Free tier; paid by monthly conversations reached, published.
Smartsupp: Free tier; paid per agent per month, published.
Trengo: Per seat per month, published.
tawk.to: Free; paid add-ons for branding removal and hired agents.
Olark: Per seat per month, published.
LiveAgent: Per agent per month, published, by module.
Zoho SalesIQ: Free tier; paid per operator per month, published.
Tiledesk: Self-hosting free and open source; cloud published per month.
The other 1 quote per organisation.
Is there a free live chat tool?
Userlike, Chatwoot, Tidio, Smartsupp, tawk.to, Zoho SalesIQ, Tiledesk offer a free tier or a free self-hosted edition. Read what the free tier excludes before you plan around it.
Which live chat tools are open source?
Chatwoot, Tiledesk. Open source means you can read what the product does with your data and run it yourself. It does not mean the hosted edition is free.
Which live chat tools can you host yourself?
Chatwoot, Tiledesk. The other 10 are sold as a hosted service only, which means the question of where your data sits is answered by the vendor, not by you.
Where are these live chat vendors established?
In 8 countries across 3 regions: Europe 7, North America 4, Asia-Pacific 1.
LiveChat is established in Poland.
Userlike is established in Germany.
Chatwoot is established in the United States.
Tidio is established in Poland.
Smartsupp is established in Czechia.
Trengo is established in the Netherlands.
tawk.to is established in the United States.
Olark is established in the United States.
LiveAgent is established in Slovakia.
Zoho SalesIQ is established in India.
Tiledesk is established in Italy.
Qualified is established in the United States.
Establishment decides whose courts and whose disclosure laws apply, which is a separate question from where the data is hosted.
What should you use instead of LiveChat?
Userlike and Chatwoot are the next two on this page.
Userlike is for German-speaking companies needing EU hosting and WhatsApp in one inbox; Chatwoot is for Technical teams that must keep conversation data on their own servers. All 12 are ranked here with what each one is bad at.
Who should not buy LiveChat?
Sites with a handful of conversations a week. Chatbot, help desk and knowledge base are separate subscriptions.
Do you get paid for these rankings?
Vendors can pay for visibility, which affects where and how prominently a product appears. It does not change a word of what the entry says about that product, including the criticism, and it cannot buy inclusion for something that does not belong in the category.
We take no commission when you click through to a vendor and we do not know whether you bought anything. The full arrangement is on our disclosure page.
How often is this live chat guide updated?
Whenever the facts move: a price change, an acquisition, a product that stops being maintained. The published and updated dates at the top of the page are real, and a review means someone went back to the vendor documentation rather than bumping a date.
These 12 products are the ones we judged worth ranking in live chat. If yours belongs here and is missing, tell us what it does and who it is for, and we will look at it. Inclusion is an editorial call and it is not for sale — but nobody gets considered for a list they were never put in front of.
People land on this page with a shortlist to make, not a browsing habit to feed. That is a narrower audience than a banner reaches and a far more decided one.
Written by us, about you
We describe the product in our own words, say who it suits and say who it does not. A vendor never writes the entry and never sees it before it goes up.
A correction costs nothing
If a fact about your product is wrong here, tell us and we fix it, whether or not there is any money between us. That offer is older than any commercial arrangement on this site.
Placement is separate, and disclosed
Where a product sits in the ranking can be paid for, and the notice above the list says so on every page. What the entry says about the product is not for sale at any price.
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