LiveChat Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

The LiveChat software boosts lead generation, sales, engagement, user experience and satisfaction. It’s an easy yet effective technique to expand your company and achieve success.

But with numerous live chat software out there catering to different business needs, how do you know the aptly named LiveChat is the best for you?

Keep reading to find out how the platform adds to the success of a business and if it is the right choice for you.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for LiveChat

SMB Guide employs a broad range of assessment standards for the software we review. If you’re interested in further details, check out the SMB Guide Evaluation Criteria page.

SMB Guide’s overall rating for LiveChat is 9.5 out of 10.

Here’s the detailed breakdown of the scoring for each factor:

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	8
Real-Time Messaging & Canned responses	8.5
Live Chat AI & Natural Language Processing (NLP)	9
Customizable Chat Widgets	9.5
Visitor Tracking and Analytics	9
User Interface and User Experience	8.5
Integrations and Compatibility	9.5
Customer Support	9
SMB Guide Rating	9.5

LiveChat is a strong and versatile tool for communicating with clients via all web channels. It merges chat from numerous services and facilitates collaboration among support agents or across departments. 

While the platform is a bit highly priced, it is still good value for money for businesses given the quality and features offered.

Pricing & Plans

The cost of a LiveChat agent can range anywhere from $19 to $59 per month. Clients who want to sign up for an annual membership can save 15% on the monthly costs.

Additional features like hiring qualified customer care representatives and SEO consulting services are also available.

Three basic options are available from LiveChat, and you can subscribe to any of them on a month-to-month or yearly basis.

Starter Plan

Impressively full-featured, the Starter plan offers all the basic features you need in a live chat. However, your chat history is only stored for 60 days and has fewer reporting and customization options than other advanced plans.

Price

• $24 per month per agent (billed monthly)
• $20 per month per agent (billed annually)

Features

• 60-day chat storing in archives
• Basic widget customization
• Chat support on website, apps, messenger
• Direct chat link
• Default Pre-chat & post-chat surveys
• Multiple website support
• Traffic tracking for up to 100 customers
• 1 recurring campaign

Who it’s for: For home office, small office or businesses

Team Plan

The Team plan enables limitless file sharing via your chat box, chat tagging, and chat archiving. It also lets you generate reports to track your customer support activities and identify trouble points.

A 14-day free trial of the Team plan is available to use before you commit to LiveChat.

Price

• $49 per month per agent (billed monthly)
• $41 per month per agent (billed annually 

Features

• Unlimited chat storing in archives
• Full widget customization
• Chat support on website, apps, messenger, SMS
• Direct chat link
• Pre-chat & post-chat surveys
• Multiple website support
• Traffic tracking for up to 400 customers
• Basic reporting
• Multiple brandings

Who it’s for: Businesses that need a full-time support team

Business Plan

The Business Plan unlocks the full capability of the platform and offers further advanced features. It includes more sophisticated reporting and allows SMS texting from your chat box.

For an extra $20 per agent, you can upgrade to single sign-on in the Business plan.

Price

• $69 per month per agent (billed monthly)
• $59 per month per agent (billed annually)

Features

• Unlimited chat storing in archives
• Full widget customization
• Chat support on website, apps, messenger, SMS, Apple messages for business
• Availability
• Data security
• Advanced reporting
• Agent groups
• Multiple brandings
• Staffing prediction
• Work scheduler

Who it’s for: For customer service departments

Enterprise Plan

Lastly, LiveChat also offers an Enterprise subscription with tailored pricing for larger enterprises and all the features offered by the platform can be availed in this plan.

Price

• Custom pricing

Features

• Unlimited chat history
• Full widget customization
• Availability
• Data security
• Advanced reporting
• Agent groups
• Multiple brandings
• Staffing prediction
• Work scheduler
• Dedicated acc. manager
• Product training
• Software engineer support​
• Security assistance
• HIPAA Compliance
• Single Sign-On (SSO)

Who it’s for: Businesses that need global reach and support

Real-Time Messaging & Canned Responses

With its extensive feature set, LiveChat enables you to analyze your customer support experience over time and seamlessly engage with consumers.

The chat box by LiveChat is incredibly adaptable. LiveChat lets you move chats across support representatives, which comes especially handy if your company has several departments with various specializations.

You exchange files with clients, set up automated responses to promptly address frequently asked issues or send links or a calendar to arrange a meeting.  

Additionally, you can monitor visitors to your website in real time with LiveChat. Any user can start a chat with you, and you can customize your message based on the pages they’re looking at at the moment.

Instead of needing to recall the specifics of a chat and tag it after it’s archived, you can add tags to a chat at any time for archiving purposes.

The predefined tags can be used to quickly access canned responses. LiveChat also offers a set of pre-made canned responses list and suggested responses that you can quickly access during the chat.

Live Chat AI & NLP

LiveChat makes it easier for businesses to maintain consistently excellent customer service over time. In addition to allowing Team and Business users to generate unique surveys, the platform includes a number of preset questionnaires that you can send to clients following a chat.

You can also access reports to see how long it takes agents to answer new chat requests and determine if the chat help is resulting in more sales.

A useful schedule prediction tool is also available to business users. It makes use of historical chat data to predict how many agents would be needed in case of an impending spike in online traffic.

The AI-driven chatbot analyzes your business when you join and detects the questions it can answer automatically. When you get started with the chatbot, it takes you through a comprehensive guide to understand how it works.

You can customize the name of your chatbot, set the routing priority and add several integrations.

Customizable Chat Widgets

When users visit your website, they communicate with customer support agents via a chat window known as a widget.

It is incredibly easy to customize the widget from the settings menu and set it up as per your needs.

There are numerous options for customizing the LiveChat widget, including:

• white labeling
• repositioning the widget on the page- align the widget to the left or right and choose custom side and bottom spacing
• choosing the appearance of the widget- make it dark or light
• choosing windows with bubble or bar minimization
• custom mobile widgets
• color adjustments
• chat buttons
• upload logo
• show agent’s photo

LiveChat’s new feature also allows you to customize the widget on your website to align it with your brand colors and appearance.

Visitor Tracking and Analytics

To make visitor tracking easier, LiveChat enables you to monitor active customers and check customer behavior. You can view traffic to check how many customers are currently chatting, queued, waiting for a reply, invited and browsing.

The Business, Enterprise, and Team plans all come with the dashboard. The dashboard on LiveChat shows a summary of the key performance indicators (KPIs) for business along with a visual representation of site analytics.

The reporting aspect of LiveChat is rather extensive, especially for the Business and Enterprise plans, which come with sophisticated statistics like staffing forecasts.

LiveChat reports are updated in real-time and can be accessed quickly compared to reports from other applications that can take hours to update.

The capability to drill into specific metrics is a great feature offered by LiveChat that makes LiveChat’s Reports stand out.

Comprehensive reports are available from LiveChat for ticketing, customers, agents, chats, summary and e-commerce. You can track how well your live chat and customer service are doing with LiveChat’s real-time reports.

User Interface and User Experience

LiveChat has a pretty straightforward and easy-to-navigate interface. Onboarding is made easy with the settings options and checklist you need to complete to set up your profile.

The messaging system looks a lot like Facebook Messenger. All the features are clearly listed on the left and the settings are quite simple to change.

You can easily access chats, engagements, archives, reports, view teams and check settings from the homepage.

When you join the platform, it takes you through basic settings to set up your account and chat widget. The options you choose while setting can be changed and customized later in settings.

While exploring a significant feature like the chatbot, the platform takes you through a guide to understand how to use the feature to its full potential.

Integrations and Compatibility

LiveChat integrates messages from every platform your company uses with ease. Even with a Starter membership, you can use LiveChat on various websites and mobile apps.

Compared to most other live chat software, LiveChat offers a much higher number of integrations.

To make handling support requests simpler, you can also import messages from Facebook Messenger, email, SMS, and Apple Business Chat into your LiveChat system.

LiveChat offers integrations with:

• Analytics such as AgentTrainer, Google Analytics, Chat Assistant, Mixpanel, Supervision, Google Tag Manager and more
• Chatbots such as AlphaBot and Chat Automation by Ultimate
• CMS integrations such as WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Elementor, Drupal, Joomla, Tumblr, Wishpond and more
• Contact management such as Twilio, Talkdesk, Helpmonks and more
• CRM Connectors such as HubSpot, Salesforce, LeadSquared, Pipedrive and more
• Desktop sharing such as Teamviewer, Zoho Assist, Google Hangouts, Upscope and more
• E-commerce such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Square Online, PayPal, Google Ads and more
• Email marketing such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Autopilot and more
• Files Sharing such as Dropbox and Google Drive
• Help desk such as KnowledgeBase, ZenDesk, Bugpilot, Freshesk and more
• Lead generation such as WhatsApp Business, Calendly, Google Business, Stripe, Slack and more
• Social media such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Twitter

Customer Support

LiveChat provides great customer service, as one could expect from a business that focuses on customer support. It offers live chat help around-the-clock using its own solution.

The customer service offered by LiveChat is among the most accessible, with phone, email, and chat help offered around-the-clock, 365 days a year.

The self-help resources offered by LiveChant include comprehensive guides for agents and managers and other guides to understand how to use the platform and get tips and tricks.

Additionally, you can also check out FAQs, video tutorials, webinars, case studies and subscribe to their monthly newsletters.

LiveChat — Unique Features

Here are the most unique features of the app to know about.

Security

LiveChat takes great measures to keep the platform secure. It uses 256-bit encryption to safeguard every chat as it takes account security very seriously.

Team and Business users can implement two-factor authentication to enhance security and protect their accounts. 

Administrators can also restrict the number of IP addresses that can connect to LiveChat at once to prevent illegal use of support.

Interactive analytical reports

LiveChat offers a unique interactive reports feature with the Team, Business, and Enterprise plans. This feature enables you to open relevant chats or tickets by clicking on data points in various reports.

What the Experts Say About LiveChat

LiveChat has a 4.5 rating on G2 with 747 reviews and a 4.7 rating on Capterra with 1,649 reviews. It is praised for its lead-engaging capabilities and ease of use.

Livechat allows for instant, one-on-one interaction with customers, increasing the likelihood that they will become paying clients. Live chat takes a customer-centric approach and equips your company with useful tools.

Laura H., Human Resources – Verified Capterra review

Overall the experience has been good, this tool helps us to handle the customers in a fast and effective way, it makes our jobs easier and optimized while providing the customers with more than a channel to get to us, while allowing my coworkers the best options to assist the customers.

Laura M., Quality Analyst – Verified Capterra review

LiveChat Alternatives

While LiveChat offers a great set of features to boost customer service and engagement, there may still be better options for your business needs.

Let’s check out these alternatives to LiveChat that may be a better fit for you.

Tidio

Tidio is a live chat software that unifies email, Messenger, and live chat for businesses. Its primary goal is to automate the many phases of client engagement that occur on the website.

If you want sophisticated chatbots and automation, Tidio is a great option because these features are free of charge. The free plan is available for a maximum of three agents and the paid plan for Tidio starts at $29 per month.

It is best for small and medium-sized businesses since it has all the necessary chat tools for them to interact with customers.

Get started with Tidio for free!

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk enables organizations to manage client communication via phone, email, live chat, SMS text, social media, and other channels.

It also facilitates the assignment of calls to agents according to their teams or departments, assigns calls to agents and helps keep up a consistent level of customer care.

You can connect your customer support number to Zoho Desk so you can place and take calls within the app. You can avail the free plan with basic features or go for the paid plan starting at $7 per month.

It is best suited for businesses that already use Zoho or are looking for affordable support options.

Sign up to Zoho Desk for free!

JivoChat

JivoChat is a comprehensive online retail messenger that focuses on conversion and retention. It enables you to interact via chat, phone, callback, email, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Viber with visitors and customers from anywhere.

Impressive features offered by JivoChat include internal team conversations, CRM, triggered chats, one-click calling, email, and social media integration, and one-click calling.

The starter plan is a free plan and the paid pro plan starts at $19 per month.

It is a great option for businesses looking to provide site visitors with real-time support.

Sign up to JivoChat for free

Other options: Best LiveChat Alternatives

Getting Started with LiveChat

With hundreds of integrations and fantastic customization options, LiveChat provides a solid set of features with all of its plans.

If you’re in the market for a robust, customizable, AI-powered live chat and support software, this one is a fantastic choice.

Sign up to LiveChat for free today!

FAQs