Crisp vs LiveAgent
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentLiveAgent compared with Crisp
Crisp is chat-first and messenger-shaped, cheap, modern-looking, and strongest for product-embedded conversational support on a website or in an app. LiveAgent is ticket-and-phone-shaped, better once conversations need statuses, SLA clocks, transfers, and recordings. If your customers are already in your product and chat is where support happens, Crisp is the nicer experience for less money. If a meaningful share of your contacts arrive by telephone or need to be tracked against a response-time commitment, Crisp will not stretch that far and LiveAgent will.
Choose Crisp if
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.
Choose LiveAgent if
Small and mid-sized teams that want one flat, forecastable invoice covering email, chat, and phone, especially any business where inbound calls are a real channel rather than an afterthought: local service businesses, travel and hospitality, ecommerce with returns lines, and B2B teams whose customers still pick up the phone. It suits buyers who would rather pay a fixed seat price than model an AI meter.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crisp | LiveAgent |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available) | $15 per agent per month (Small Business, billed annually; $10 under the current new-customer discount) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted. | Flat per-agent subscription across four tiers, quoted per agent per month with an annual and a monthly rate. AI agents are included on every paid plan with no per-resolution or per-session meter. Social channels, extra knowledge bases, custom domain, branding removal, and time tracking are separate monthly add-ons. |
| Free plan | Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. | None currently advertised. The pricing page lists four paid tiers and a 30-day trial; the limited free plan LiveAgent previously offered is no longer shown, so do not plan around it. |
| Free trial | 14 days, all features, no credit card required | 30 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats. | Small and mid-sized teams that want one flat, forecastable invoice covering email, chat, and phone, especially any business where inbound calls are a real channel rather than an afterthought: local service businesses, travel and hospitality, ecommerce with returns lines, and B2B teams whose customers still pick up the phone. It suits buyers who would rather pay a fixed seat price than model an AI meter. |
| Setup time | Under an hour for a live widget and a connected mailbox, especially through the Shopify or WordPress plugins. Adding WhatsApp and Instagram, writing the knowledge base, training the AI model, and building bot flows is more like one to two weeks, most of it content work. | A working email and chat queue in under an hour: connect your support addresses, paste the chat button, invite agents. The call centre takes longer, typically a day or two, because you have to configure a SIP trunk with your carrier, build IVR menus, record prompts, and test routing before you point a published phone number at it. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents, moderate for the person building bots. The drag-and-drop builder is approachable but the confidence thresholds, fallback paths, and training-source management need deliberate testing before you let a bot answer customers unsupervised. | Moderate. Individual features are straightforward but the interface is dense, and the settings area is large enough that finding a specific option is the main early frustration. Agents pick up the queue quickly; the admin needs a focused afternoon with departments, rules, SLA policies, and portal configuration. |
| Platforms | Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs | Web app, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Customer portal (custom domain available as an add-on) |
| Compliance | GDPR handling as a French company operating under EU law, Formal certification evidence (for example a SOC 2 report or trust portal) is not prominently published on public pages | GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA (available), 2-step verification and HTTPS encryption throughout |
| Founded | 2015 | 2004 |
| Headquarters | Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team) | Bratislava, Slovakia (with offices in Kyiv and New York City) |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned | Privately held and bootstrapped (Quality Unit, s.r.o.) |
Strengths and limitations
Crisp
Strengths
- Flat workspace pricing with included seat blocks, which breaks the per-agent cost curve that makes support software expensive as a team grows.
- AI is bundled as credits rather than metered per resolution, so successful deflection lowers your cost per conversation instead of raising your bill.
- The widget is the most feature-dense at this price: co-browsing, video and audio calls with screen sharing, MagicType, rich media, and 50 languages.
- Genuinely broad scope for one subscription: inbox, chat, bot builder, knowledge base, CRM, campaigns, and analytics, where competitors sell several of those separately.
Limitations
- AI credit consumption is published only as approximate dollar equivalents and conversation counts, which is friendlier than per-resolution pricing but harder to forecast precisely or audit after the fact.
- The free tier has no AI credits and only 2 seats, so it is not a realistic long-term home the way Chatwoot's or Tidio's free plans can be.
- A team of roughly 20 to 30 people cannot match the documentation, help content, or support responsiveness of vendors ten times the size, and it shows.
- Enterprise compliance evidence is thin on public pages: no prominently published SOC 2 report, certification portal, or data-residency options, which will stall a formal security review.
LiveAgent
Strengths
- A genuinely native call centre with IVR, automatic call distribution, attended and consultative transfer, and unlimited call recording, on a $29 seat. Nothing else in this price band ships real voice.
- AI agents included in every paid plan with no per-resolution or per-session meter, which makes the invoice forecastable in a category that has spent two years making invoices unforecastable.
- Bring-your-own SIP trunk across 60-plus VoIP providers means you pay carrier rates for minutes and you keep ownership of your numbers, rather than renting telephony from your help desk vendor.
- SSO and custom roles arrive at the $29 Medium tier, which is unusually early; most competitors reserve single sign-on for their top plan.
Limitations
- The interface is dense and dated. Twenty-two years of feature accretion shows, and teams coming from Help Scout, Intercom, or Plain will find it visually and ergonomically behind.
- Social channels are per-channel add-ons at $39 a month each, and Instagram requires the Facebook integration on top of its own $19, so a socially active brand can pay more in channel fees than in seats.
- No free plan is currently listed on the pricing page, and no light-agent or day-pass mechanism exists, so part-timers and contractors cost a full seat each.
- Per-tier caps on email accounts, chat buttons, contact forms, and knowledge bases mean the Small tier at $15 is genuinely small: three email addresses and two chat buttons.
Pricing compared
Crisp
Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted.
- Free$0
- Mini$45
- Essentials$95
- Plus$295
- EnterpriseCustom
On raw capability per dollar Crisp is the best value in this category and it is not particularly close. Essentials at $95 a month covers ten seats, every channel, a knowledge base, a trained AI bot, and campaigns; the equivalent team on a per-seat platform with per-resolution AI would spend three to five times that. The bundled AI credits are the sharpest contrast: Help Scout charges $0.75 for every AI resolution while Crisp includes roughly 450 automated conversations in the $95 tier. What you trade away is polish, documentation depth, enterprise compliance evidence, and the reassurance of a large vendor. If your evaluation is a spreadsheet, Crisp wins; if it is a procurement review, it may not survive one.
LiveAgent
Flat per-agent subscription across four tiers, quoted per agent per month with an annual and a monthly rate. AI agents are included on every paid plan with no per-resolution or per-session meter. Social channels, extra knowledge bases, custom domain, branding removal, and time tracking are separate monthly add-ons.
- Small Business$15
- Medium Business$29
- Large Business$49
- Enterprise$69
Judged on capability per dollar, Medium at $29 a seat is one of the strongest offers in customer support software, because it is the only tier at that price anywhere that includes a functioning call centre with IVR, ACD, transfers, and unlimited recording alongside SLA policies, reporting, agent ratings, and SSO. Add unmetered AI on top and a phone-heavy small business will struggle to build a cheaper stack from parts. The value erodes in two specific directions: social channels at $39 apiece can double a small bill, and there is no light-agent or day-pass concept, so irregular cover is expensive. If your support is phone plus email plus chat, this is the best price in the category. If it is Instagram and WhatsApp with three part-time agents, do the arithmetic carefully first.
Editorial verdict on each
Crisp
Crisp is the value play in customer support software, and its flat per-workspace pricing with bundled AI credits looks better every quarter that competitors push further into per-resolution billing. The widget is genuinely the best in this price range, the scope covers products that other vendors sell separately, and being bootstrapped means the pricing is unlikely to be re-engineered against you. The costs are real too: thin compliance evidence, a support and documentation operation sized for a 25-person company, and a steep jump to the $295 tier for features small teams reasonably expect. If you are a chat-led team of five to twenty who will never face a formal security review, Crisp is the shortlist leader. If your buyer is a CISO, look at Help Scout instead.
Read the full Crisp profileLiveAgent
LiveAgent is the flat-rate option in a category that has spent two years converting itself to meters, and for a phone-heavy small business it is the best value on the board. Medium at $29 a seat is the only price anywhere that includes a working call centre with IVR, ACD, transfers, and unlimited recording alongside SLA policies, reporting, agent ratings, and SSO, and the AI agents come with it rather than on a separate invoice line that grows as they succeed. The counterweights are real: the interface is dense and dated, social channels are $39 a month each, custom domain and branding removal cost $38 more, and there is no light agent or day pass for part-timers. Buy it if your support includes a phone number, if you want to forecast next year's invoice without modelling a containment rate, and if you would rather have a bootstrapped vendor of twenty-two years than a venture timeline. Look elsewhere if your support is Instagram and WhatsApp with three part-time agents, or if the way the product looks matters to you as much as what it does.
Read the full LiveAgent profileCrisp profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; LiveAgent last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.