LiveAgent

Name: LiveAgent
Brand: LiveAgent
Price: 1510 USD

Flat per-seat help desk with a real phone system built in

LiveAgent is a help desk from Quality Unit, a bootstrapped Slovak company founded in 2004, that combines a universal inbox for email, live chat, and social messaging with a genuinely native call centre including IVR, call routing, and unlimited call recording. It is sold per agent from $15 a month on annual billing, and its defining commercial feature is that AI agents are included in every paid plan with no per-resolution or per-session meter attached.

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Overview

LiveAgent is the oldest product in this category by some distance and the least venture-shaped. Viktor Zeman and Andrej Harsani were running a small software shop in Bratislava in 2004, losing track of their own customers across email and chat, could not find a tool they liked, and wrote one. Quality Unit has never taken meaningful outside funding, employs somewhere over 100 people across Bratislava, Kyiv, and New York, and now says LiveAgent serves more than 40,000 businesses. Twenty-two years of bootstrapped compounding produces a very particular kind of product: unglamorous, wide, and priced like the vendor expects to keep the customer rather than to be acquired.

The feature surface is genuinely broad. Email ticketing, live chat with proactive invitations, a customer portal with knowledge base and forums, contact forms, automation rules, time rules, SLA policies, agent ratings, time tracking, audit logs, and social channels across Facebook, Instagram, X, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp. The piece nobody else at this price has is voice: a real call centre with IVR you record yourself, automatic call distribution, attended and consultative transfers, unlimited call recording, and searchable call history, on the Medium tier and above.

The commercial story is where LiveAgent has become interesting again in 2026, because it inverted the direction the rest of the category went. Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, and Help Scout all now meter customer-facing AI by resolution or by session, at somewhere between $0.49 and $0.99 a unit. LiveAgent bundles its AI agents, answer assistant, autoresponder, ticket triage, spam prevention, and ticket summarisation into every paid plan and charges nothing per resolution. List prices are $15, $29, $49, and $69 per agent per month on annual billing (monthly is $19, $35, $59, and $85), and a 33 percent new-customer discount running through 1 January 2027 takes the annual rates to $10, $19, $33, and $46.

The honest counterweight is that the pricing page is a thicket of add-ons and per-tier caps, and the free plan that LiveAgent used to advertise is no longer listed on it. Social channels are $39 a month each. Instagram is $39 plus $19 because it rides on the Facebook integration. WhatsApp is $39. Extra knowledge bases, custom domain parking, and branding removal are $19 each. Every tier caps email accounts, chat buttons, contact forms, and knowledge bases. So the flat-versus-metered advantage is real, but you have to add up the add-ons before you can claim it.

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.

Not the right fit for

Teams that want a modern, opinionated interface; LiveAgent is dense and utilitarian after twenty-two years of accretion, and a designer-led startup will find it visually dated next to Help Scout, Intercom, or Plain.
Anyone whose support is majority social and who assumed those channels were included; Facebook, X, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp are $39 a month each and Instagram effectively costs $58, which can quietly double the bill for a small team.
Engineering-led B2B companies whose customers live in shared Slack or Discord channels; there is no Slack-as-a-channel model here, which is precisely what Plain is built for.
Buyers who need to self-host for data-sovereignty reasons; LiveAgent is hosted SaaS and Chatwoot or FreeScout are the honest alternatives.
Companies that want a large third-party app ecosystem and a deep developer platform; LiveAgent has an API and plenty of native integrations, but nothing resembling the Freshworks or Zendesk marketplaces.

How it works

1
You connect your support email addresses (three on Small, ten on Medium, 150 on Large), paste a chat button onto your site, and everything arrives in the universal inbox as tickets. A single customer's email thread, chat transcript, call recording, and Facebook message sit under one contact record, which is the original reason the founders built the thing.
2
Routing and handling move into rules. Automation rules fire on ticket events to assign departments, set priority, tag, and reply; time rules fire on elapsed time to escalate or close. SLA policies on Medium and above hold different customer groups to different response clocks against business hours, and agent ratings collect the satisfaction signal on the way out.
3
The call centre is set up by pointing a SIP trunk at LiveAgent rather than buying minutes from LiveAgent. It integrates with over 60 VoIP providers and, by supporting SIP trunking, with the large majority of the rest, so you bring your own numbers and your own per-minute rates from whichever carrier you already use. Inside LiveAgent you get IVR menus recorded or uploaded by you, automatic call distribution with priority or random assignment, attended and consultative transfer, unlimited call recording stored and replayable, and call history that filters and exports to CSV.
4
Self-service runs on customer portals: knowledge base articles, community forums, and a feedback and suggestions board, each portal with its own design and content. Small and Medium include one knowledge base, Large includes two, Enterprise ten, and additional ones are $19 a month each. Parking the portal on your own domain is a $19 add-on, and removing LiveAgent branding is another $19.

Feature breakdown

38 features in 6 modules

Universal inbox and ticketing

The 2004 idea that still holds the product together: every channel under one contact.

Universal inbox: Email, chat, calls, social messages, and contact form submissions all land as tickets in one queue, with the full history for a given customer visible in one place regardless of which channel each message arrived on.
Departments and ticket routing: Split the queue by team (billing, technical, sales) with per-department agents, rules, and email addresses, which is the structure most small teams reach for first.
Hybrid ticket stream: A customer who emails, then chats, then calls stays on one thread rather than generating three unlinked tickets, which is LiveAgent's oldest and most distinctive behaviour.
Canned messages and predefined answers: Reusable text for the answers you send daily, plus predefined answers that can be inserted into chat as well as email.
Internal notes and collision detection: Private notes on a ticket that customers never see, and a warning when a teammate is already replying, so two agents do not answer the same message.
Custom filters: Saved views over the queue, capped at 300 on Small, 500 on Medium, 1,000 on Large, and 5,000 on Enterprise. The caps are high enough that almost nobody hits them.

Native call centre

The genuine differentiator, and the reason a lot of LiveAgent customers are LiveAgent customers.

IVR you record yourself: Record messages directly or upload pre-recorded audio to build interactive voice menus that route callers to the right department, included on Medium and above at $29 a seat.
Automatic call distribution: Route incoming calls across available agents by priority order or randomly, with ring-all and queue behaviour, which is the part most help desks push you to a separate telephony vendor for.
Unlimited call recording: Every call is stored and replayable indefinitely, with no per-recording or per-storage charge published, which is unusual: most call centre products meter recording storage.
Attended and consultative transfer: Hand a caller to a colleague either blind or after speaking to them first, which is table stakes for a phone team and absent from most help desks at this price.
Call history and CSV export: Searchable, filterable log of every call attached to the customer record, exportable to CSV for reporting outside the tool.
Bring your own SIP trunk: LiveAgent integrates with more than 60 VoIP providers and supports SIP trunking generally, so numbers and per-minute rates come from your carrier at carrier prices. LiveAgent itself publishes no per-minute or per-number charge, which is the commercially important part.

Live chat and social channels

Chat is included; almost every social channel is a separate line item.

Live chat buttons: Embeddable chat widgets with customisable placement and design, capped at 2 on Small, 5 on Medium, 50 on Large, and 100 on Enterprise.
Proactive chat invitations: Trigger a chat offer based on page, time on site, or behaviour, available from the Medium tier, which is how chat stops being a passive button nobody clicks.
Real-time typing view: Agents can see what a customer is typing before it is sent, which shaves seconds off every chat and is one of the oldest features in the product.
Contact forms: Embeddable forms feeding the same queue, capped at 3 on Small, 10 on Medium, 50 on Large, and 200 on Enterprise.
Social messaging add-ons: Facebook, X, and Viber are $39 a month each; Instagram is $19 on top of the Facebook integration; Telegram is $39 for three bots. Social channels are also gated to the Large tier and above, so social support means at least $49 a seat plus per-channel fees.
WhatsApp: $39 a month, covering five numbers on Small and Medium or twenty on Large and Enterprise. Meta's own conversation charges are separate and billed by Meta, as with every vendor.

AI, automation, and SLA

The commercial centre of gravity: AI included, no per-resolution meter.

AI agents included in every plan: The customer-facing AI chatbot, answer assistant, and autoresponder ship with all four paid tiers with no per-session or per-resolution charge, which is the opposite of how Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, and Help Scout price the same capability.
AI ticket triage and categorisation: Incoming tickets are classified and routed automatically rather than by a rule you wrote by hand, which is the automation most small teams get the most value from.
AI ticket summarisation: Long, escalated threads compress into a readable summary so whoever picks the ticket up next does not read forty messages first.
AI spam and irrelevance filtering: Filters junk and off-topic submissions before they reach the queue, which matters most for public contact forms.
Human handover: AI conversations escalate into the normal agent queue with history attached when the bot cannot resolve them, so a failed deflection is not a dead end.
Automation rules and time rules: Event-triggered rules handle assignment, tagging, priority, and auto-replies; time rules handle escalation and closure of stale tickets. Time rules require Medium.
SLA policies and business hours: Response and resolution targets per customer group against defined working hours, with alerts on high-priority tickets approaching or breaching a target. Available from Medium at $29 a seat.

Knowledge base and customer portal

Self-service, with the custom domain sold separately.

Knowledge base articles: Categorised articles published to a customer portal, with WYSIWYG editing and search. One knowledge base is included on Small and Medium, two on Large, ten on Enterprise, and extras are $19 a month each.
Multiple branded portals: Run separate portals with distinct design and content for different products or brands, which is the reason the multi-knowledge-base pricing exists.
Community forums and suggestion boards: Customer-facing forums plus a feedback and suggestions board attached to the portal, a channel most competitors at this price dropped years ago.
Internal knowledge base: A private article space for agent-facing process documentation, kept separate from the public portal.
Custom domain parking: Hosting the portal on your own domain is a $19 a month per account add-on rather than an included feature, and removing LiveAgent branding is a further $19. Budget $38 if you want the help centre to look like yours.

Reporting, admin, and developer surface

Reporting is deeper than the price suggests; the API is functional rather than a platform.

Performance and channel reports: Reporting across agent performance, department, channel, and time period, available from the Medium tier, covering the volume and speed metrics a support manager actually reviews.
Agent ratings and CSAT: Customers rate individual agents and interactions, feeding satisfaction reporting by person and by channel. Included from Medium.
SLA compliance reporting: Breach rates and time-to-first-response measured against your policies, which is what turns an SLA from a promise into something you can show a customer.
Time tracking: Log time spent per ticket, included on Large and above or available as a $19 a month add-on, which makes LiveAgent workable for agencies billing support hours.
Audit log: A record of configuration and account changes on Large and Enterprise, for teams that need to answer who changed what.
SSO and custom roles: Single sign-on and custom agent role definitions arrive on the Medium tier, which is unusually early; most competitors gate SSO behind their top plan.
REST API and integrations: A documented API for tickets, contacts, and agents, plus native integrations and Zapier for the rest. There is no large third-party marketplace, so treat the API as the extension path.
Data export: Tickets, contacts, and call history export to CSV, with the API available for full programmatic extraction, so moving out is a scripting job rather than a hostage negotiation.

Use cases

4 documented

Ecommerce brand with a returns phone line

Half the contacts are 'where is my order' by email and the other half are people who call because a return went wrong, and the current setup is a shared Gmail plus a mobile phone on someone's desk.

Medium at $29 a seat puts email, chat, and a real IVR-routed call centre in one queue, with unlimited call recording, so a disputed return has a recording attached to the customer record instead of a memory.

Agency support desk billing hours to clients

Five clients, each with their own support address and their own branded help centre, and support hours that need to be reported back monthly.

Large at $49 a seat gives 150 email accounts, two knowledge bases plus extras at $19, included time tracking, and per-department reporting, so each client gets a branded portal and a defensible hours report.

Founder who got a surprise AI invoice elsewhere

Deflection worked, volume grew, and the per-resolution AI charge on the previous help desk quietly became larger than the seat charge.

LiveAgent's AI agents are included in every paid plan, so a move from 500 to 2,000 tickets a month changes the invoice by exactly zero. The bill is a function of headcount and add-ons, not of how well the bot performs.

Travel or hospitality operator with phone-first customers

Bookings, changes, and cancellations arrive by phone, and the customers are not going to use a chat widget no matter how nicely it is designed.

IVR menus route callers to the right department, automatic call distribution spreads load, transfers work properly, and every call is logged against the same contact record as their booking confirmation email.

Pricing

from $15 per agent per month (Small Business, billed annually; $10 under the current new-customer discount)

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Small Business	$15 per agent per month, billed annually ($19 monthly)	AI agents, ticketing, and live chat Knowledge base and customer portal Contact forms and automation rules 3 email accounts, 2 chat buttons, 3 contact forms 1 knowledge base, 300 custom filters No call centre, no SLA, no reports, no SSO. This tier is email plus chat plus AI, and the caps are tight.
Medium Business	$29 per agent per month, billed annually ($35 monthly)	Everything in Small Business Call centre and IVR SLA policies and time rules Reports, proactive chat, and agent ratings SSO and custom roles; 10 email accounts, 5 chat buttons The realistic buying tier. Voice, SLA, reporting, and SSO all arrive here, and $29 a seat for a native call centre has no equivalent in this category.
Large Business	$49 per agent per month, billed annually ($59 monthly)	Everything in Medium Business Social channels (Facebook, Instagram, X, Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp) unlocked Time tracking included Audit log 150 email accounts, 50 chat buttons, 50 contact forms, 2 knowledge bases Social channels are unlocked here but still cost $39 a month each on top.
Enterprise	$69 per agent per month, billed annually ($85 monthly)	Everything in Large Business Dedicated account manager Priority support Assisted integrations 500 email accounts, 100 chat buttons, 200 contact forms, 10 knowledge bases Buys service and capacity limits rather than new features. Most small businesses never need it.

Add-ons

Facebook, X, or Viber channel ($39 per month each): Per channel, not per agent. Requires the Large tier or above.
Instagram ($19 per month): Added on top of the $39 Facebook integration, so Instagram effectively costs $58 a month.
Telegram ($39 per month): Covers three bots per tier.
WhatsApp ($39 per month): Five numbers on Small and Medium, twenty on Large and Enterprise. Meta's own per-conversation charges are billed separately by Meta.
Additional knowledge base ($19 per month per knowledge base): Beyond the one included on Small and Medium, two on Large, ten on Enterprise.
Custom domain parking ($19 per month per account): Required if you want the help centre on your own domain rather than a LiveAgent subdomain.
Branding removal ($19 per month per account): Removes LiveAgent branding from customer-facing surfaces.
Time tracking ($19 per month): Included on Large and Enterprise; an add-on below that.

Billing notes

There is no AI meter. This is the single most important commercial fact about LiveAgent in 2026: AI agents, the answer assistant, autoresponder, triage, spam filtering, and summarisation are included in every paid plan with no per-resolution or per-session charge, while every major competitor now bills that capability separately at roughly $0.49 to $0.99 a unit.
Annual rates are $15, $29, $49, and $69; monthly rates are $19, $35, $59, and $85, so annual saves roughly 20 percent. A 33 percent discount for new customers runs through 1 January 2027, taking the annual rates to $10, $19, $33, and $46. Confirm what happens at renewal before you budget on the promotional number.
Seats are per full agent and there is no day-pass or light-agent mechanism, which is where Freshdesk is genuinely better for teams with weekend or rotation cover. A contractor who answers tickets needs a full seat.
Voice is bring-your-own-carrier. LiveAgent publishes no per-minute rate and no per-number charge; you connect a SIP trunk from any of 60-plus supported VoIP providers and pay your carrier's rates directly. That is cheaper and more flexible than a bundled telephony product, and it means you own the number.
Worked bill, 500 tickets a month, 3 agents on Medium: seats are 3 x $29 = $87, plus WhatsApp at $39 and custom domain parking at $19, so $145 a month all in, plus whatever your SIP carrier charges for minutes. No AI line at all.
Worked bill, 2,000 tickets a month, 5 agents on Large: seats are 5 x $49 = $245, plus WhatsApp $39, Facebook $39, custom domain $19, and branding removal $19, so $361 a month. The four-fold increase in ticket volume added exactly nothing to the invoice; only the extra seats and channels did.
Assumptions in both figures: annual billing at list price without the promotional discount, and carrier telephony charges excluded. Compare against Freshdesk at the same volumes, where 2,000 tickets with 40 percent AI containment adds $392 a month of session charges on top of seats.
Add-ons are the real trap. Facebook, X, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp at $39 each plus $19 for Instagram means a team on all six social channels is paying $214 a month before seats. Price your channel list before you price your seats.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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.
Bootstrapped and profitable since 2004 with no investors demanding a repricing event, which is a real and underrated form of vendor stability for a small business making a multi-year commitment.
Unusually wide channel and feature coverage for the money, including community forums, suggestion boards, internal knowledge base, and time tracking, all of which most competitors dropped or never had.
A 30-day free trial with no credit card, which is long enough to actually run your support through it rather than click around for a week.

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.
Custom domain parking and branding removal are $19 each, so making the help centre look like your own company costs $38 a month that competitors include.
The developer surface is functional but shallow next to Freshworks or Zendesk: a REST API and native integrations, but no meaningful third-party app marketplace to fill gaps.
The 33 percent new-customer discount running to 1 January 2027 makes the headline price look better than the renewal price will be; budget against list, not against the promotion.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

LiveAgent vs Zendesk

from $19 per agent per month (Support Team, billed annually); $55 per agent per month for Suite Team

Zendesk is the incumbent, with Suite Team around $55 a seat plus metered AI resolutions, a huge app ecosystem, and the name that gets approved without a procurement argument. LiveAgent is roughly half the price, includes AI with no meter, and ships a native call centre that Zendesk sells as a separate Talk product. Pick Zendesk if you are scaling toward a large support organisation and need the ecosystem and the enterprise workflow depth. Pick LiveAgent if you have under about 25 agents, phone matters, and you would rather have a flat number than a metered one.

Full LiveAgent vs Zendesk comparison

LiveAgent vs Freshdesk

from $19 per agent per month (Growth, billed annually)

The cleanest illustration of the pricing split in this category. Freshdesk Pro at $55 gives deeper automation, better reporting, a real marketplace, day passes for part-timers, and a public-company vendor, but meters Freddy AI at $49 per 100 sessions and charges $29 a seat for the agent-facing Copilot. LiveAgent Medium at $29 gives voice and unmetered AI and a bill that does not move with volume. At 2,000 tickets a month the Freshdesk AI line alone can exceed LiveAgent's entire invoice. Choose Freshdesk for platform depth and irregular staffing; choose LiveAgent for phone support and predictable spend.

Full LiveAgent vs Freshdesk comparison

LiveAgent vs Helpwise

from $12 per user per month (Standard, annual billing; $15 monthly)

Both are cheap flat-per-seat shared inboxes with no per-resolution AI meter, and both are aimed at small teams that want email to stop being chaotic. Helpwise is the tidier, more modern interface and covers WhatsApp, SMS, and Instagram from its Premium tier. LiveAgent is the wider and more utilitarian product, and it is the only one of the two with a genuinely native call centre rather than a bolted-on calling feature. Choose Helpwise for a clean shared inbox on a budget; choose LiveAgent when the phone is a real channel or you want SLAs, forums, and time tracking included.

Full LiveAgent vs Helpwise comparison

LiveAgent vs Chatwoot

from $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19/agent/mo for cloud Startups billed annually

Chatwoot is open source and can be self-hosted, which makes it the answer whenever data sovereignty, unlimited-seat economics, or the ability to modify the code is the deciding constraint. LiveAgent is closed hosted SaaS with a support organisation attached and a call centre nobody has to assemble. Choose Chatwoot if you have engineering capacity to run it and a reason to keep the data on your own infrastructure. Choose LiveAgent if you want voice, SLA, and reporting working this afternoon and would rather pay $29 a seat than own an operations problem.

Full LiveAgent vs Chatwoot comparison

LiveAgent vs Crisp

from $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included)

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.

Full LiveAgent vs Crisp comparison

Implementation & onboarding

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.
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.
Onboarding: Entirely self-serve on all four tiers, with a 30-day no-credit-card trial that is long enough to run live support through. Enterprise adds a dedicated account manager, priority support, and assisted integrations, which is most of what that tier actually buys.
Migration notes: LiveAgent provides import paths from common help desks and CSV import for contacts and tickets, and the API covers anything unsupported. Plan for ticket history, contacts, tags, and knowledge base articles; automation rules and SLA policies have to be rebuilt by hand in any migration, in either direction. Moving out later is straightforward on the data side, since tickets, contacts, and call history all export to CSV and the API supports programmatic extraction. The two things that genuinely take work to move are your recorded IVR menus, which have to be rebuilt wherever you go next, and a help centre on a parked custom domain, which needs careful redirects to avoid losing search traffic.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web appiOSAndroidEmbeddable chat widgetCustomer portal (custom domain available as an add-on)
API: Documented REST API covering tickets, contacts, agents, and departments, plus native integrations and Zapier. Telephony connects by SIP trunk to 60-plus VoIP providers. There is no large third-party app marketplace, so custom needs are met through the API rather than through apps.
Compliance: GDPRSOC 2HIPAA (available)2-step verification and HTTPS encryption throughout
Data residency: Quality Unit is a Slovak company operating from Bratislava, Kyiv, and New York, with EU and US hosting options; confirm the specific region for your account during signup if residency is a contractual requirement.
SSO: Single sign-on and custom agent roles from the Medium Business tier at $29 a seat, which is earlier than most competitors gate it.
Security notes: HTTPS encryption, two-step verification, role-based access with custom roles, IP-restricted access options, and an audit log on Large and Enterprise. Call recordings are stored within the platform, so review your retention obligations if you record customer calls in a regulated context.

Support & resources

Channels: 24/7 live chatEmail and ticket supportPhone supportDedicated account manager and priority support on EnterpriseAssisted integrations on Enterprise
Documentation: A large documentation and academy library at liveagent.com covering setup, call centre configuration, automation rules, SLA, and the API, plus a substantial glossary and template library.
Community: No large public user forum, but the vendor runs its own support through the product, which is a reasonable proof of concept. Twenty-two years in market means plenty of third-party tutorials and review coverage.

Company

Founded: 2004
Headquarters: Bratislava, Slovakia (with offices in Kyiv and New York City)
Ownership: Privately held and bootstrapped (Quality Unit, s.r.o.)
Founders: Viktor Zeman, Andrej Harsani
Employees: 100+ (per the company's own about page)
Funding: No meaningful outside investment. Quality Unit has been self-funded since 2004 and has taken no significant venture rounds, growing LiveAgent to more than 40,000 business customers on revenue alone.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Bootstrapped	None raised	2004 to present	Quality Unit funded LiveAgent from the founders' own software consultancy revenue and has never taken a significant venture round.

Timeline

2004Viktor Zeman and Andrej Harsani found Quality Unit in Bratislava, running a software shop and losing customer conversations across email and chat.
2006The internal tool they built to hold email and chat in one place becomes LiveAgent, sold to outside customers.
2013The native call centre arrives, adding IVR, call routing, and recording to a product that had been email and chat, and creating what is still LiveAgent's clearest differentiator.
2018Social channels expand across Facebook, X, and messaging apps, sold as per-channel add-ons rather than folded into the seat price.
2023Offices in Kyiv and New York bring headcount past 100, still with no outside funding.
2025AI agents, answer assistant, autoresponder, triage, spam filtering, and summarisation ship across all paid plans with no per-resolution meter, diverging from the rest of the category.
2026Pricing restructured to four tiers at $15, $29, $49, and $69 per agent annually, with a 33 percent new-customer discount running through 1 January 2027 and the previously advertised free plan no longer listed.

Integrations

60-plus VoIP providers plus general SIP trunk support
Facebook, Instagram, X, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp (paid add-ons)
Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and PrestaShop
Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive
Slack
Mailchimp
WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal
Zapier
Google Analytics
REST API for tickets, contacts, agents, and departments

Frequently asked questions

12 questions

What is LiveAgent?

LiveAgent is a help desk built by Quality Unit, a bootstrapped Slovak company founded in 2004. It combines a universal inbox for email, live chat, contact forms, and social messages with a native call centre that includes IVR, automatic call distribution, transfers, and unlimited call recording. It also ships a knowledge base and customer portal, community forums, automation and time rules, SLA policies, agent ratings, and reporting, and is sold per agent from $15 a month on annual billing.

How much does LiveAgent cost?

Four tiers, quoted per agent per month: Small Business $15 annually or $19 monthly, Medium Business $29 or $35, Large Business $49 or $59, and Enterprise $69 or $85. A 33 percent discount for new customers is running through 1 January 2027, which takes the annual rates to $10, $19, $33, and $46. Social channels are separate at $39 a month each, and extra knowledge bases, custom domain parking, and branding removal are $19 each.

Does LiveAgent charge extra for AI?

No, and this is its most important commercial difference in 2026. AI agents, the answer assistant, the autoresponder, ticket triage and categorisation, spam prevention, and ticket summarisation are included in every paid plan with no per-session or per-resolution meter. Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, and Help Scout all now bill customer-facing AI separately at roughly $0.49 to $0.99 a unit, so LiveAgent's invoice stays flat while theirs grows with the volume the AI absorbs.

What does LiveAgent actually cost at 500 and at 2,000 tickets a month?

Three agents on Medium handling 500 tickets a month, with WhatsApp at $39 and custom domain parking at $19, comes to $145 a month at list annual pricing plus whatever your carrier charges for call minutes. Five agents on Large handling 2,000 tickets, with WhatsApp, Facebook, custom domain, and branding removal, comes to $361. The point is what changed between them: seats and channels, not volume. Quadrupling ticket count added nothing to the bill. On Freshdesk at the same 2,000 tickets with 40 percent AI containment, the session charges alone add roughly $392.

Is there a free plan?

Not currently. LiveAgent's pricing page now lists four paid tiers and a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. The limited free plan the company previously advertised is no longer shown on the pricing page, so treat it as gone and plan around the trial instead. Thirty days is long enough to run real support through, which is a more useful evaluation than a permanently crippled free tier anyway.

How good is LiveAgent's call centre really?

It is a real one, not a click-to-call button. You get IVR menus you record or upload yourself, automatic call distribution across agents by priority or randomly, attended and consultative transfers, unlimited call recording stored and replayable, and searchable call history that exports to CSV, all attached to the same customer record as their emails and chats. It arrives on the Medium tier at $29 a seat. No other help desk at that price includes native voice, and most send you to a separate telephony vendor.

Do I have to buy phone minutes from LiveAgent?

No. LiveAgent integrates with more than 60 VoIP providers and supports SIP trunking generally, so you bring your own numbers and pay your own carrier's per-minute rates. LiveAgent publishes no per-minute or per-number charge of its own. That is usually cheaper than bundled telephony, it means you keep ownership of your numbers if you ever leave, and it means the phone channel does not turn into a second metered bill.

Which channels cost extra?

Email, live chat, contact forms, the customer portal, and voice (on Medium and above) are included in the seat price. Social is not. Facebook, X, and Viber are $39 a month each, Telegram is $39 for three bots, WhatsApp is $39, and Instagram is a further $19 on top of the Facebook integration. Social channels also require the Large tier at $49 a seat. A brand supporting all six social channels is paying $214 a month in add-ons before a single seat.

Can I put the knowledge base on my own domain?

Yes, but it is a $19 a month add-on called custom domain parking rather than an included feature, and removing LiveAgent branding is another $19. That is $38 a month competitors typically include. It is worth paying: articles on your own domain are crawlable and accumulate organic search traffic over time, which is one of the real long-term returns on writing help content, and moving them later to another vendor's subdomain would throw that away.

How does LiveAgent handle part-time agents?

Poorly, relative to the alternatives. There is no light-agent tier and no day-pass mechanism, so anyone who touches a ticket needs a full paid seat. If you run weekend rotations or use contractors for overflow, Freshdesk is genuinely better here: it sells day passes at $2 to $12 and includes 5,000 external collaborator slots on its Pro tier. Factor that in before comparing headline seat prices, because a five-seat LiveAgent bill and a two-seat-plus-day-passes Freshdesk bill can land closer than the price cards suggest.

Should I just use a shared Gmail inbox instead?

If you are one or two people handling a trickle of email, absolutely. Gmail with labels and a shared alias costs nothing. The moment to move is specific: when messages fall through the cracks and nobody notices, when two people reply to the same customer, when you need to prove a response time, or when a phone channel appears. That last one is the clearest LiveAgent trigger, because a shared mailbox cannot route, record, or report on calls at all, and $29 a seat for a working call centre is far cheaper than assembling one from separate parts.

Who owns LiveAgent and is it stable?

LiveAgent is owned by Quality Unit, s.r.o., a privately held Slovak company founded in Bratislava in 2004 by Viktor Zeman and Andrej Harsani, with offices in Bratislava, Kyiv, and New York and over 100 employees. It has taken no meaningful outside funding in twenty-two years and reports more than 40,000 business customers. That is a different stability profile from a venture-backed vendor: no investor pressure toward a repricing event or an acquisition, but also no war chest for a major platform rewrite.

Editorial verdict

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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.