LiveChat 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 assessmentLiveChat compared with tawk.to
Tawk.to gives away an unlimited-agent live chat product permanently, which makes it the honest first question for any business that has not yet decided chat is worth paying for. What you give up is real: LiveChat's reporting suite, staffing prediction, proactive campaign tooling, the developer API set, ecommerce attribution, EU data storage guarantees, and a vendor with published financials and SLAs. Tawk.to monetises through paid removal of branding and hired agents, and its interface shows its price. The rational path is to run Tawk.to until chat demonstrably drives revenue or until the reporting gap starts costing you decisions, then move to LiveChat, and to skip Tawk.to entirely if you already know chat is a staffed, measured function.
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.
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 | LiveChat | tawk.to |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $19 per person per month billed annually ($25 monthly) on the Starter plan, limited to one user (14 days trial) | $0 (unlimited agents, unlimited chats, permanently) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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 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 | No | 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, no credit card required | Not applicable; the full product is free with no time limit and no credit card |
| Best for | 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. | 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 | 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. | 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 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. | 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 application, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget with native apps for Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow | Web dashboard, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, JavaScript widget for any website |
| Compliance | 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 | GDPR, CCPA |
| Founded | 2002 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Wrocław, Poland, with an office in Boston, Massachusetts | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States |
| Ownership | 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. | Privately held and bootstrapped |
Strengths and limitations
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.
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
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.
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
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 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 profileLiveChat profile last reviewed 2026-08-30; tawk.to last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.