Is LiveAgent or LiveChat cheaper?

LiveAgent starts at $15 per agent per month (Small Business, billed annually; $10 under the current new-customer discount) (free plan available). LiveChat starts at $19 per person per month billed annually ($25 monthly) on the Starter plan, limited to one user (14 days trial).

LiveAgent 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 assessment

LiveChat compared with LiveAgent

LiveAgent is the value competitor and the one to beat on price: roughly $15 per agent per month with a genuine call centre, ticketing, and live chat bundled into a single subscription, plus a 30-day trial. LiveChat charges $49 per person for chat alone and sells ticketing as a separate HelpDesk subscription, so on raw scope per dollar LiveAgent wins decisively. LiveChat wins on the chat experience itself, on proactive campaign tooling, on reporting depth, on the integration marketplace, and on vendor transparency as a listed company. If you need phone support or an all-in-one help desk on a tight budget, LiveAgent is the correct answer. If chat is the primary channel and you want the best version of it, the premium for LiveChat is defensible.

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.

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	LiveAgent	LiveChat
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$15 per agent per month (Small Business, billed annually; $10 under the current new-customer discount) (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 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.	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	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.	No
Free trial	30 days, no credit card required	14 days, no credit card required
Best for	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.	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	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.	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	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.	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, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Customer portal (custom domain available as an add-on)	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, SOC 2, HIPAA (available), 2-step verification and HTTPS encryption throughout	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	2004	2002
Headquarters	Bratislava, Slovakia (with offices in Kyiv and New York City)	Wrocław, Poland, with an office in Boston, Massachusetts
Ownership	Privately held and bootstrapped (Quality Unit, s.r.o.)	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

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.

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

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.

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

LiveAgent

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 profile

LiveChat

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 profile

LiveAgent 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.