Introduction
Customer service is an integral part of any business. In an online business where the session time is low, customers want immediate responses to their queries. Any uncertainty or delay in response and your business may lose a sale. Your loss is your competitor’s gain. In such a scenario, live chat software actively answers customers’ queries and leads to conversion. It also helps to automate replies and solve multiple customer queries at the same time. Live chat software significantly affects your online sales and improves customer satisfaction. Moreover, setting up a live chat platform on your website is easy, fast, and effective.Overview
Live chat isn’t just about those little pop-up boxes anymore. The technology has gotten pretty sophisticated – think smart chatbots that can handle basic questions, detailed visitor tracking that shows you exactly where people are getting stuck, and integrations that let you chat with customers whether they’re on your website, Facebook, or texting you directly. Here’s what’s interesting: companies that add live chat typically see their revenue jump by about 12%. And it makes sense – when customers can get instant help, they’re way more likely to complete their purchase. Most people actually prefer chatting over calling or emailing because it’s so much faster. The bottom line? Whether you’re just starting out or running a larger operation, the right live chat setup can seriously improve how happy your customers are – and how much they spend with you. Here you go:Tawk.to
App: Tawk.to
Ratings: 4.3 stars
Reviews: 14.7k+ reviews
Downloads: 1 M+ downloads on the Play Store
Tawk.to allows you to monitor customer activity in real-time and talk with visitors on your website. You may have a number of agents and add them to as many sites as you want so you can communicate with your customer seamlessly. It runs with a Javascript snippet on your site.
Moreover, you can customise the widget’s appearance like its position, shading, symbol, and the content of gadget headers, texts and forms.
Additionally, you can add inviting messages, chat rescuers or other advanced triggers. You can also use alternate ways like canned reactions for fast responses to frequently asked inquiries. For example, you can set localised messages to chat with some foreign customers in your own native language.
Tidio
App: Tidio
Ratings: 4.2 stars
Reviews: 2.73K reviews
Downloads: 500K plus downloads on the Play Store
With the Tidio live chat application, connect with your customers in real-time. In a single click, you can automate your messages and invest the saved time and effort in other efficient tasks. Tidio gives you minute details of all the visitors on your websites such as their IP address, device type, browser, city and country.
The Tidio app also has a push notification feature that notifies you of the new and unread messages. This surely helps you resolve customer queries quickly.
You can integrate it with platforms like Shopify, Wix and WordPress. It offers a free plan for small and medium businesses wherein it allows up to 3 chat operators. Also, with 100 unique visitors, the chatbot can have unlimited chats. It also supports CRM and email automation tools.
Intercom
App: Intercom
Ratings: 3.7 stars
Reviews: 1.01K+ reviews
Downloads: 100K+ downloads on the Play Store
Intercom is an enterprise live chat software and the first one to bring in messaging software products for sales and marketing, and customer care services all in one place.
No matter where your customers are present, with Intercom, you are able to reach your customers anywhere via email, social media, application or your website. It has bots and in-app messaging features that let you connect with your customers like never before.
It offers a customizable chatbot for personalised human interactions and can also generate in-depth reports. Intercom can be integrated with 300+ other applications. It is an all in one tool for businesses looking to create a multi-channel experience for their customers. The pricing of this user-friendly software starts from $59 per user per month.
Livechat
App: Livechat
Ratings: 4 stars
Reviews: 777+ reviews
Downloads: 100K+ downloads on the Play Store
Livechat application is renowned for providing an ideal sales experience for businesses. It is easy to set up and install with the WordPress plugin. The WordPress chat plugin is effective in reducing the cart abandonment rate. With the help of a live chat plugin on the website, you can generate leads through an AI-powered chatbot. Besides that, Livechat helps you serve your customers 24 x 7 with live chatbot support, enabling you to boost the visitors’ engagement in real-time.
It also integrates with many other services like MailChimp, Google Analytics, and more. Inbuilt ticketing system, easy to share files option while having an ongoing conversation, brand and customization settings and chat ratings for individual users are some of the best features of Livechat software. It is a paid application starting with $16 per user per month.
Drift
App: Drift
Ratings: 4.4 stars
Reviews: 1.2K+ reviews
Downloads: 50K+ downloads on the Play Store
Drift live chat plugin for websites is a powerful combination of live chat and an automated chatbot. By creating a refined sales pipeline, Drift allows your business to capture qualified leads.
It comes in with premium business-friendly and customer-friendly features. Anonymous visitor intelligence, meeting scheduling, drift chatbot, account-based marketing, transferring customer chats from one department to another, tracking chat status, creating multiple inboxes for different conversations, dropping private messages for team members and many more.
Drift is easy to integrate with different types of CRM software and email marketing services. It is a paid platform with a standard plan starting from $50 per month.
Hubspot Live Chat
App: Hubspot
Ratings: 4.5 stars
Reviews: 10K+ reviews
Downloads: 1M+ downloads on the Play Store
With Hubspot super live chat plugin, you can run your business from anywhere. It can manage your emails, contacts, meetings, tasks, notes on your phone and help you boost your sales forward. With Hubspot, you can stay connected with your customers on the go even when you are offline.
With Hubspot, you are able to personalise your business messages, prepare canned welcome messages for different target audiences, set up meetings for your customers and easily create chatbots for common questions.
It has easy to use chat builder and slack integration. This allows you to receive live chat notifications and messages from your customers directly. All the live chat conversations will be stored in a centralised inbox which can help you for future references.
Hubspot is free software with limited services. It offers paid services for content and marketing plans that can help extend your live chat functionality into an all-inclusive CRM software.
Freshdesk Messaging (formerly known as Freshchat)
App: Freshdesk Messaging
Ratings: 4.2 stars
Reviews: 8.3K reviews
Downloads: 100K+ downloads on the Play Store
With Freshchat, you can fluently automate the support lineup with the help of a chatbot. If your customers are from different regions, you can now offer them multi-lingual support in more than 30 languages.
You can set up automated answers for the customers with built-in FAQs. With the bulk actions option, it allows you to add, delete or edit multiple conversations in a single go.
It helps you ace conversations by viewing, assigning the chats, replying to them, and managing them anytime, anywhere.
What makes Freshdesk Messaging one of the best choices for live chat apps is that you can set proactive campaigns to respond to your customers before they reach you for any kind of inquiry or support. Showing that you are always on your toes for the customers automatically boosts customers’ loyalty.
Purechat
App: Purechat
Ratings: 3.6 stars
Reviews: 3.8K+ reviews
Downloads: 1M+ downloads on the Play Store
Adding PureChat snippets to your website enables you to connect with your website visitors instantly. It offers unlimited chats with a robust dashboard and customizable widget. It helps you track real-time visitor analytics and contact history to get every detail of the interactions happening on your business website.
Data integration is one of the major aspects of any organisation and hence, PureChat has created a number of channelized integrations with popular software like Google Analytics, Infusionsoft and Hubspot.
Also, you can use Zapier to integrate with 1000+ other applications. All the data generated from these integrations can help you boost your sales, marketing and customer support processes. Pure chat is a paid application with a pricing of $39 per user per month billed annually.
Zendesk
App: Zendesk
Ratings: 4.2 stars
Reviews: 7.6K reviews
Downloads: 500K+ downloads on the Play Store
Zendesk streamlines your communication process by enabling you to give quick responses, thereby improving your customer retention rate. It is trusted by many small businesses and enterprises worldwide.
Zendesk can also check the previous chat history of a visitor and also find the web pages recently visited on your website. By engaging with your real-time visitors, it improves your conversion and lead generation. It facilitates better agent-to-agent chat collaborations.
Your productivity can improve if you use the shortcut features of Zendesk as it improves the agent response time. For example, you can set the ticket status, set tags for the tickets, and also set ticket responses.
Moreover, you can easily pick up the conversation with the visitor from the same point where you left off even if you are switching from an online dashboard to a mobile application. More than 2 lakh websites are already taking advantage of Zendesk live chat application to improve their customer support and sales operations. It is a paid software starting from $49 per user per month with annual billing.
Jivochat
App: Jivochat
Ratings: 4.6 stars
Reviews: 22K+ reviews
Downloads: 1M+ downloads on the Play Store
If you are looking for a budget-friendly live chat application with all the features that your customer support team can need, Jivochat can be your preferred choice. Jivochat is one of the top-rated applications in the Play store. It allows the support team to handle chats from different platforms like websites, Facebook, email services, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, video calls, and more.
It has some powerful features like the ability to see user type before you click ‘send’ on the message, call back option, digging out customer information like name, location, email addresses.
It can attract any visitor with cool features like colour coded chats, hotkeys, proactive chat and a sneak peek into messages. It offers forever free services for up to 5 agents with unlimited chats on your website, two months of chat storage, 24 x 7 support, basic CRM functionalities, team chats for unlimited team members, also customizable multilingual chats in 25 languages.
Its paid prices are $8 per agent per month billed annually with advanced features like canned responses, smarter triggers, and more.
Chatra
App: Chatra
Ratings: 3.2 stars
Reviews: 370 reviews
Downloads: 50K+ downloads on the Play Store
Integrating Chatra live chat plugin on the website can help to start a conversation with your visitors automatically. It has typing indicators to know when your customer is responding and also has a read recipients feature.
Chatra also has an offline chat widget, so when your team is unavailable, you can immediately let your customers know with transparency that you will get back to them soon. It can connect you with your customers via email and Facebook and its free version is a perfect choice for small businesses.
Clickdesk
App: Clickdesk
Ratings: 3.7 stars
Reviews: 4.51K reviews
Downloads: 100K+ downloads on the Play Store
Clickdesk is an easy web-based live chat solution that can be integrated with social media, help desks like ticket management, email support, reporting, mobile access and more. With an easy to adapt front end theme, it can be set up quickly and has great reliability.
Clickdesk offers great features in a free package. Moreover, the email transcription and map information for every conversation are very interesting.
With Clickdesk, you can add voice to your website by making it easier for your visitors to call you from their browser. You can have easy social integrations, manage your offline chats with an integrated help desk, manage all your emails and proactively customise your pop up messages in any other language.
Clickdesk offers a free version with minimal features used by small and medium businesses while its paid version starts from $14.99 per month.
Olark
App: Olark
Ratings: 4.55 stars on Software Advice
Reviews: 459 reviews on Software Advice
Olark is a cloud-based live chat solution that helps you learn and resolve your customers’ queries in a more effective manner. With this live chat application, you make it easier to customise the forms, automate the frequently asked questions with the help of a chatbot, manage multiple teams, get real-time visitor insights, searchable transcripts and more.
By integrating with the HTML code of the website, the Olark live chat app allows the users to add live chat options across all the pages of the website. It provides a trigger-based chat feature, meaning, it helps the sales representative or the customer support team proactively begin a chat session with the visitor. It offers full-featured live chat starting at the price of $29 per month.
Haptik
App: Haptik
Ratings: 4.41 stars on Software Advice
Reviews: 22 reviews on Software Advice
With Haptik, you can deliver amazing customer experiences with flawless live chat integration. As of summer 2021, Haptik ranked as the 1st live chat app on an international level for enterprises in the Bots Platform Category.
With its innovative features, you can track the performance of an agent, their status, online hours, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score and much more in a single interface. You may scrutinise abandoned chats to fix the chats that are drifted off, set auto-responses for the hours you are offline, and also recognize the real-time chat disposition trends.
Haptik is your live chat support agent blended with artificial intelligence. It is specifically designed to help businesses in the travel, hospitality, telecom, financial services and eCommerce industries to manage their customer experiences via omnichannel virtual assistance.
Comparison Table: Top Live Chat Software Features
| Software | Rating | Key Features | Best For |
| Tawk.to | 4.3/5 | Real-time monitoring, unlimited agents, customizable widget, Javascript snippet | Small businesses, startups |
| Tidio | 4.2/5 | Push notifications, visitor analytics, Shopify/WordPress integration, automated messages | E-commerce sites |
| Intercom | 3.7/5 | Enterprise features, omnichannel messaging, 300+ integrations, in-app messaging | Large enterprises |
| LiveChat | 4.0/5 | AI chatbots, WordPress plugin, cart abandonment reduction, file sharing | E-commerce businesses |
| Drift | 4.4/5 | Sales pipeline, lead qualification, account-based marketing, meeting scheduling | B2B companies |
| HubSpot Live Chat | 4.5/5 | CRM integration, offline messaging, canned responses, centralized inbox | Growing businesses |
| Freshdesk Messaging | 4.2/5 | Multi-language support (30+ languages), proactive campaigns, bulk actions | Global businesses |
| PureChat | 3.6/5 | Real-time visitor analytics, contact history, Google Analytics integration | Small to medium businesses |
| Zendesk | 4.2/5 | Ticketing system, chat history, previous visitor tracking, shortcut features | Customer service focused |
| Jivochat | 4.6/5 | Multi-platform support, video calls, 25 languages, call back option | Budget-conscious teams |
| Chatra | 3.2/5 | Typing indicators, offline chat widget, read receipts, Facebook integration | Small businesses |
| ClickDesk | 3.7/5 | Voice integration, social media integration, help desk features, offline chat management | Web-based businesses |
| Olark | 4.55/5 | Trigger-based chat, customizable forms, chatbot automation, searchable transcripts | Customer support teams |
| Haptik | 4.41/5 | AI-powered virtual assistance, agent performance tracking, omnichannel support | Enterprise/Travel/Finance |
Conclusion
Look, if you’re still running a website without live chat, you’re basically telling customers “figure it out yourself.” That’s not great for business. The good news? You don’t need to break the bank getting started. Tools like Tawk.to won’t cost you anything and work perfectly fine for most small businesses. Once you start seeing results (and you will), you can always upgrade to something more robust like Intercom. For businesses with unique requirements, partnering with a custom software development company can create a bespoke live chat solution that fits your exact workflow and branding. Here’s the thing – more than half your visitors actually want to chat with a real person before they buy. They’re literally asking for this feature. Give it to them, and watch what happens to your sales. Start simple, see what works, then build from there. Your customers will thank you, and your conversion rates definitely will too. If you are building your website, do add live chat support to boost your brand’s trustability.FAQs
1. How do you actually set up live chat on your site?
It’s way easier than you’d think. Most chat tools give you a little piece of code to drop into your website – just copy, paste, and you’re done. If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins that make it even simpler. Shopify users can grab apps straight from their store. Seriously, we’re talking 10 minutes max, and you don’t need to be a tech wizard.
2. Which live chat platform should I pick?
Honestly, it depends what you need. Tight on budget? Tawk.to is free forever and does the job well. Want something that plays nice with your existing customer data? HubSpot’s your friend. Need to chat with people across multiple platforms? Jivochat gets rave reviews for that. Think about your team size and what features actually matter to you.
3. What exactly is live chat software anyway?
Think of it as having a conversation with your website visitors in real-time. But today’s tools do way more than just chat – they can answer common questions automatically, show you what pages people are stuck on, and even help guide visitors toward buying something. It’s like turning your website into a helpful store assistant.
4. Can I get a free chatbot?
Absolutely. Tawk.to gives you everything for free – unlimited team members, works on as many websites as you want. HubSpot has a decent free version too. Jivochat lets 5 people use it without paying a dime. These free versions aren’t stripped down either – you get auto-replies and visitor tracking included.
5. What about chatting on mobile?
Every decent platform has mobile covered these days. Your team can respond from their phones, and your customers get a chat experience that actually works on mobile. Jivochat’s app gets great ratings, and both Tawk.to and HubSpot have millions of downloads. Just make sure whatever you pick sends notifications and saves messages when you’re offline.
