Crisp vs LiveChat
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 assessmentLiveChat compared with Crisp
Crisp charges a flat workspace fee starting at $45 for the Mini plan with four seats included, which makes it the cheapest option here for any team above two or three agents and by far the most predictable. LiveChat's answer is depth: better reporting, staffing prediction, a wider channel set, a much larger integration marketplace, a full developer API, and a public company behind it. The crossover is roughly at the point where reporting and API access start mattering more than the invoice. A five-person team that just needs a good shared chat inbox should run the Crisp numbers first, because LiveChat Team at five seats is $245 a month annually against Crisp's flat fee. A team that needs agent performance data, work scheduling, or programmatic access should accept the premium and take LiveChat.
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 LiveChat if
Sales-led and support teams of roughly 3 to 50 agents that want a fast, dependable chat widget with proactive campaigns, real reporting, and a broad developer API, from a profitable public company with a twenty-year operating record, and that are comfortable paying a fixed per-agent price rather than chasing a usage meter.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crisp | LiveChat |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available) | $19 per person per month billed annually ($25 monthly) on the Starter plan, limited to one user (14 days trial) |
| 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. | Strictly per person per month, billed annually or monthly, with annual materially cheaper. There is no usage meter on the classic LiveChat plans and no free tier. The autonomous AI Agent is not included and is sold on Text's separate platform plans, metered by resolution. ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase are separate subscriptions rather than modules of a LiveChat plan. |
| Free plan | Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, all features, no credit card required | 14 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. | Sales-led and support teams of roughly 3 to 50 agents that want a fast, dependable chat widget with proactive campaigns, real reporting, and a broad developer API, from a profitable public company with a twenty-year operating record, and that are comfortable paying a fixed per-agent price rather than chasing a usage 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 widget takes under thirty minutes through a script tag or the Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow app. Getting to a properly configured deployment (groups, routing rules, chat limits, canned responses, targeted message campaigns, knowledge sources for reply suggestions, and reporting tags) realistically takes one to two weeks. Some verified reviewers describe initial setup as convoluted and difficult to get working correctly, so budget more than the marketing implies if your routing is non-trivial. |
| 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. | Low for agents and moderate for administrators. The agent application is conventional and a new hire is productive within a day. The administrative surface is larger than most chat tools because of routing rules, groups, campaign targeting, and the reporting suite, and the two genuinely tricky parts are designing targeted message triggers that help rather than annoy, and understanding which capabilities live on which tier before you commit to a plan. |
| Platforms | Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs | Web application, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget with native apps for Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow |
| 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, as an EU company operating from Poland, HIPAA compliance offered on the Enterprise tier per the published pricing page, Formal SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation not verifiable from the vendor's own published pages at the time of review |
| Founded | 2015 | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team) | Wrocław, Poland, with an office in Boston, Massachusetts |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned | Publicly listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange as Text S.A. (ticker TXT, ISIN PLLVTSF00010), a WIG30 index component. Renamed from LiveChat Software S.A. in 2023. |
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.
LiveChat
Strengths
- Exceptional vendor stability: founded 2002, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since April 2014, consistently profitable, with audited quarterly results and group ARR above $89.5 million as of mid-2026. Almost nothing else in this category can be diligenced that thoroughly.
- The agent experience is genuinely refined after twenty years, with message sneak-peek, fast canned responses and tagging, chat supervision and whisper, transfer between groups, and per-agent concurrent chat limits all working the way an experienced chat team expects.
- A complete developer platform available on standard plans rather than gated to enterprise: Customer SDK, webhooks, chat widget JavaScript API, chat APIs, configuration API, and a Reports API, alongside a marketplace of over 200 integrations.
- Deeper reporting than most chat-first competitors, including ecommerce attribution, a per-conversation revenue counter in LiveChat 2.0, agent performance metrics, and Business-tier staffing prediction that forecasts required coverage by time slot.
Limitations
- Strictly per-person billing with no shared licences. Multiple verified Capterra reviewers name this directly, one noting they now need a licence per user rather than a chosen number of licences shared across unlimited users as before. For a rota of part-time agents this is the single most expensive structural choice in the product.
- The autonomous AI Agent is not included in LiveChat plans. Text's own AI page states it is not automatically included and that customers move to the Text platform to get it. Buyers comparing LiveChat against Intercom's Fin or Tidio's Lyro on the LiveChat pricing page are comparing the wrong thing.
- The $19 Starter tier supports exactly one user and keeps only 60 days of chat history, so the advertised entry price is unavailable to any actual team. The step to Team at $49 is a 158 percent increase.
- Repeated price increases are a recurring complaint in verified reviews, with one long-standing customer stating the price has increased dramatically over recent years and the tool is becoming less viable, and another that it is not affordable for small businesses. The September 2025 increase and the end of grandfathering are documented in Text's own investor communications.
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.
LiveChat
Strictly per person per month, billed annually or monthly, with annual materially cheaper. There is no usage meter on the classic LiveChat plans and no free tier. The autonomous AI Agent is not included and is sold on Text's separate platform plans, metered by resolution. ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase are separate subscriptions rather than modules of a LiveChat plan.
- Starter$19
- Team$49
- Business$79
- EnterpriseQuote
Judged as a live chat product on its own, LiveChat is fairly priced in the middle of the market: $49 per person on Team buys unlimited history, unlimited campaigns, full widget customisation, a broad channel set, and a developer API that several competitors reserve for their top tier. Judged as a customer support platform, the arithmetic is less kind. The $19 headline is a one-seat price, the real team entry is $49, ticketing and a help centre are separate subscriptions, the AI agent lives on a different product line, and SSO is quote-only. A five-agent team wanting chat, tickets, and AI deflection is realistically looking at a LiveChat or Text plan plus a HelpDesk plan plus resolution overage, which lands well above Crisp's flat $45 workspace fee and above what Zoho Desk or Freshdesk charge for a bundled equivalent. Buy LiveChat when chat itself is the point, when the reporting and API depth earn their keep, and when a twenty-year-old profitable public vendor is worth something to your procurement process. Do not buy it as the cheap option, because on total cost it is not.
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 profileLiveChat
LiveChat is the most institutionally solid product in small-business live chat, and that is both its argument and its limitation. Twenty-four years of continuous development, a Warsaw Stock Exchange listing with audited quarterly results, consistent profitability, and $89.5 million of group ARR make it the easiest vendor in this category to diligence, and the product earns the reputation: the agent experience is refined, the proactive campaign tooling is genuinely good for sales-led chat, the reporting goes deeper than chat-first rivals attempt, and the developer platform is open on standard plans rather than held hostage to an enterprise contract. What holds it back is commercial structure rather than craft. The $19 headline buys one seat, the real team price is $49 per person, ticketing and a help centre are separate subscriptions, the autonomous AI agent lives on a different product line entirely, SSO and HIPAA are quote-only, and price rises plus the end of grandfathering are a live grievance in verified reviews. Buy LiveChat when chat itself is a staffed, measured function, when reporting and API depth pay for themselves, and when vendor stability is worth a premium. If you want a bundled support stack, a free tier, or AI deflection as the centrepiece, the better answers in this category are elsewhere.
Read the full LiveChat profileCrisp profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; LiveChat last reviewed 2026-08-30. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.