Crisp vs tawk.to
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 assessmenttawk.to compared with Crisp
Crisp charges a flat monthly fee per workspace with AI credits bundled and is a noticeably better designed product with a stronger shared-inbox and campaign story. tawk.to charges nothing at all and gives you unlimited agents. For a business that will pay something for polish, workflow depth, and a proper CRM layer, Crisp is worth the money. For a business whose real constraint is that the budget is zero, tawk.to is the only serious option and Crisp is a future upgrade rather than a competitor.
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 tawk.to if
Solo founders, freelancers, agencies, small ecommerce stores, and any business that needs live chat and basic ticketing on a website and cannot justify a per-seat subscription. It is also the right answer for teams with many part-time or rotating agents, because unlimited free seats make the usual per-agent maths irrelevant.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crisp | tawk.to |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available) | $0 (unlimited agents, unlimited chats, permanently) (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. | Free core product with unlimited agents and unlimited conversations, monetised through optional add-ons: branding removal, credit-metered AI, and hourly outsourced human agents. There is no per-seat charge at any level. |
| Free plan | Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. | Live chat, ticketing, knowledge base with custom domain, contacts CRM, messaging channels, triggers, departments, shortcuts, desktop and mobile apps, and 27 languages, with unlimited agents and unlimited conversations. The only restriction is the tawk.to badge on the widget. |
| Free trial | 14 days, all features, no credit card required | Not applicable; the full product is free with no time limit and no credit card |
| 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. | Solo founders, freelancers, agencies, small ecommerce stores, and any business that needs live chat and basic ticketing on a website and cannot justify a per-seat subscription. It is also the right answer for teams with many part-time or rotating agents, because unlimited free seats make the usual per-agent maths irrelevant. |
| 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. | Under thirty minutes to a live widget: create a property, paste a snippet or install the WordPress or Shopify plugin, set your greeting and business hours, and you are taking chats. A knowledge base with a custom domain and a set of shortcuts is another afternoon. |
| 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, moderate for administrators. The agent view is obvious. The admin area is dense and unfashionably organised, and finding a particular setting is often the hardest part of using tawk.to. |
| Platforms | Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs | Web dashboard, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, JavaScript widget for any website |
| 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, CCPA |
| Founded | 2015 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team) | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned | Privately held and bootstrapped |
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.
tawk.to
Strengths
- Unlimited agents and unlimited conversations at no cost, permanently, with no contact cap and no conversation meter, which removes the pricing question entirely for small teams.
- The free tier includes things competitors charge for: a knowledge base on a custom domain, WhatsApp and Messenger channels, triggers, departments, a contacts CRM, and desktop and mobile apps.
- AI is credit-metered with a perpetual free allowance rather than charged per resolution, so you can measure your real deflection rate before committing any budget.
- The Hired Agents service at $1 an hour is a genuinely differentiated offer: nobody else in this category will simply staff your chat widget for you at that price.
Limitations
- The ticketing and email side is the weakest part of the product; if most of your support arrives by email rather than chat, this is the wrong tool and Help Scout or Zoho Desk is the right one.
- Reporting is thin: there is no meaningful SLA attainment reporting, and nothing you could put in front of an enterprise customer during procurement.
- The interface is dense and dated, with a settings structure that has not been meaningfully rethought in years.
- The free widget advertises tawk.to on your site until you pay $29 a month per property, which is the deliberate mechanism of the business model rather than an oversight.
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.
tawk.to
Free core product with unlimited agents and unlimited conversations, monetised through optional add-ons: branding removal, credit-metered AI, and hourly outsourced human agents. There is no per-seat charge at any level.
- Free$0
- Remove Branding$29
- AI AssistFrom $29
- Hired Agents$1
Model the same four-agent team used elsewhere in this category. At 500 tickets a month, tawk.to costs $29 for branding removal plus roughly $29 for AI Assist, so about $58. At 2,000 tickets a month it costs the same $58 plus whatever additional AI credits the extra volume consumes, because seats and conversations are free and only AI usage scales. The comparable four-agent bills are roughly $1,106 on Intercom and roughly $1,420 on Zendesk once AI resolutions are counted, and $92 on Zoho Desk Professional. Nothing else in this directory is within an order of magnitude. The honest caveat is that you are comparing unequal products: tawk.to has no serious SLA engine, thin reporting, weak email handling, and no compliance story, so a business that needs those things is not really choosing between tawk.to and Zendesk at all. But for chat-led support on a website, the capability you get for zero dollars is not merely good value, it is a category anomaly.
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 profiletawk.to
Best Valuetawk.to is the most generous free product in business software and the only sensible starting point for a company that cannot yet justify a support subscription. Unlimited agents, unlimited conversations, a knowledge base on your own domain, WhatsApp and Messenger channels, visitor monitoring, and credit-metered AI with a free allowance, for nothing, funded by a profitable thirteen-year-old company that sells outsourced chat labour at a dollar an hour. It is also unmistakably free software: the email side is weak, reporting is thin, there is no SLA engine, the compliance story is slim, and nobody owes you anything if it breaks. Install it if support is chat-led and the budget is zero or close to it, keep the $29 branding removal in mind as the real price of looking professional, and understand that the day you need SLA reporting or serious email workflow you will be shopping again. That day may be years away, and until then nothing else comes close on cost.
Read the full tawk.to profileCrisp profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; tawk.to last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.