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LiveChat helps about 33,000 users worldwide to get their questions answered every day. Unlike email or FAQ support, having live chat software installed provides users with a live and direct experience.
Of course, you could also offer telephone support, but chat support has some advantages that telephone support can’t offer. First of all, you don’t need an expensive telephone line or a complicated technical setup, and since you are working on a screen, LiveChat allows you to share links, images, and videos. What’s the saying? A picture is worth a thousand words.
Some notable LiveChat features
LiveChat is brimming with features and add-ons. It can be integrated on any website. All you have to do is copy and paste a piece of code. If you use a popular CMS like WordPress, Shopify, or Weebly etc., there are even plugins and apps available to integrate LiveChat without fiddling around with your code.
In fact, integrations are one of the things LiveChat does best. You can connect the Facebook Messenger directly with LiveChat and WhatsApp, meaning your agents don’t need a Facebook account, and you won’t miss any messages, because you can handle everything from one place. Integrations with top CRMs and email marketing services are also available - in fact, there are over 200 tools you can connect LiveChat with.
But perhaps LiveChat’s standout feature is the fact that it offers its own helpdesk, knowledgebase and chatbot solutions. So, for an added cost, you can have all these features integrated into your LiveChat platform - meaning you can manage your business’s customer service functions entirely out of LiveChat.
How much does Live Chat cost? (Spoiler: it's not the cheapest)
LiveChat offers a 14-day trial for their Team plan (no credit card required). You can either pay per month or per year. If you choose per year, you’ll see a discount applied to your bill.
There are four different pricing tiers to choose from: their most affordable package "Starter" is priced at $16 per month per agent, which comes with 1 targeted greeting (automation), a 60-day chat history, and the ability to track up to 100 visitors in real time.
If you need full chat history, unlimited greetings and analytics, you should take a look at the "Team" ($33) plan. The "Business" ($50) tier is designed for larger teams and adds a staffing prediction as well as a work scheduler module. Find out more about LiveChat pricing here.
As you can see, it's certainly not the cheapest live chat software around. Let's find out if it's worth the high price tag!
Screenshots
LiveChat Pricing
| $16 |
Starter For small businesses. |
| $33 |
Team For a full-time support team. |
| $50 |
Business For a customer service department. |
| $149 |
Enterprise A solution for Fortune 500 corporations |
*Monthly prices based on a 1-year contract for 1 agent.
Pros / Cons of LiveChat
Well designed
Not just from an aesthetic point of view – it’s a pleasure to use LiveChat.
Lots of features
They have their own helpdesk, knowledgebase and chatbot solutions, which can be easily integrated with LiveChat.
Apps
For iOS, Android as well as PC and Mac. Compared to the browser console they even have a few special features (like an automatic time-out).
Pricing
LiveChat is more expensive than most other live chat tools, especially if you want to set up different agent groups or need more than one automatic trigger. Unfortunately their chat bot isn’t cheap either ($50 per month).
Rating Details
| criterion | rating | comments |
|---|---|---|
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Ease of use |
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We love the clean menus and also the loading speed of the backend. But as there are a lot of features, the tool can be overwhelming at first. Some of the options can be a bit tricky to find at times. But overall it’s a user-friendly option. |
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Setup |
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About as simple as you can get. Sign up (no credit card required), paste a piece of code onto your website and it’s ready to go. There are plugins with platforms like WordPress and Weebly, too. Changes in the backend will show without any additional code change on your website. |
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Themes and Style Options |
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Their basic widget looks modern, although choices are limited (you only have 2 templates to choose from, and a handful of options to customize). However you can use images and animations as ‘eye catchers’ with triggered messages – more on that in the Automations section below. |
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Chat client |
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Show your company’s logo and a photo of the operator (optional). There are buttons to let visitors rate the chat, and also add emojis or upload files (file sharing). |
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Chat agent console |
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Extremely nice and clean web interface that works perfectly. You can switch between chats, add canned responses and tags, and send files with ease. There is also an installable software for Mac and Windows. The advantage of it is that you can set a specific time after which the tool goes offline and you show no activity. |
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Automatic messaging |
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One of their best features. The ‘greetings,’ as they call them, can be customized with rules that you define, including ones based on custom values pulled in from your CRM. You can also use animations to make greetings more visually appealing, let visitors choose from a number of button options, and trigger advanced actions (e.g. opening a link, letting the visitor call you). |
|
Offline mode |
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The chat bar turns into a contact form when agents are not available, and a ticket gets created. The ‘Work Scheduler’ feature can be used to schedule agents’ online/offline hours (available on Business + Enterprise plans). ‘Messaging Mode’ (currently in beta) allows you to enable asynchronous chat, meaning a conversation can continue between an agent and visitor even when one of them is offline. |
|
Shortcuts / canned messages |
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Define any kind of phrases as tags for quick access. |
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Tracking & live analytics |
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Shows basic information, such as country, IP address, technology used, and visited pages. |
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Multiple languages |
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The chat window is available in close to 50 languages (with customizable text), and routing rules based on URL/domain visited can be set up. Unfortunately, routing based on a visitor’s location is only available on Business and Enterprise plans. Setting it all up is fairly simple – you just need to create language groups. |
|
Ticketing system |
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LiveChat includes a simple help desk system that allows you to convert live chats straight into tickets. (Their more comprehensive support solution, creatively called HelpDesk, is a separate product that can be integrated with LiveChat at an additional cost). |
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Integrations and add-ons |
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One of the few tools to offer its own help desk, knowledge base and chatbot products, which can be added on for an extra cost. There are also over 200 third-party integrations in their marketplace: CRMs such as Highrise and Salesforce, as well as Facebook Messenger, are all offered. An API is available, and through their marketplace, it’s also easy to add an opt-in checkbox for newsletter services like Mailchimp.
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Team Management |
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Options depend on your plan but they are generally good. Transfers, takeovers, supervision, smart chat assignments and work scheduling are all possible. It also supports agent groups, where users can choose which department they want to talk to. |
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Mobile support / apps |
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Mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Android are available. |
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Voice/video calls |
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Available via integrations with apps like SnapCall. |
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Cobrowsing |
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There are only screen sharing options available. |
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Ban users |
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You can define how many days you want to ban the person. |
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Log creation |
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Creates a searchable chat history. The Starter plan keeps a 60-day history; the Team plan and above offer unlimited chat history. |
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Support |
|
They offer an excellent support section and their live chat agents are most helpful. |
|
Overall rating |
4.4/5 |
LiveChat provides a fantastic user experience due to its polished interfaces and great features. Thanks to the Marketplace, it’s easy to add extra functionality. |
A more detailed look into the live chat software
Seats vs. Agents
In the past, LiveChat limited the number of seats and not agents, whereby you could add as many agents as you wanted, but a seat could only be occupied by one agent at a time. Now, unfortunately, you’ll have to pay per agent, thus making it a fair bit more expensive for companies with numerous agents.
Adding additional agents is quite flexible. You can add them on-demand to any plan.
How do agents work with LiveChat?
As an agent, you log in and decide when you want to accept live chats. From then on you can decide whether chats will get distributed automatically or manually.
To make the chat experience more efficient, you can automate welcome messages, pre-chat questions and use canned responses for repetitive sentences. If a chat agent runs into a difficult question, (s)he can transfer the visitor to another agent to solve the problem.
At the end of each chat, users can leave their feedback. In case you couldn’t solve the problem, LiveChat opens a ticket and sends a follow-up email to the client automatically. This will help buy you time, and even more importantly, will avoid an angry customer because you forgot to get back to them!
Chatbot Integration
It’s unlikely your chat agents can be online 24/7. So what do you do if you don’t have the staff to work around the clock? You can either reply by email for any missed chat or you can use a chatbot, which LiveChat offers as an add-on service.
Setting up a story in LiveChat’s Chatbot solution
Another advantage is that a chatbot can handle several customers at the same time. Of course, it’s not very personal, but it could help your visitors to get an answer immediately.
So what’s the downside of adding a chatbot? Basically, it means extra costs. Chatbots aren’t part of any LiveChat plan. They start at $50 per month and need a free seat. If you’re after a more affordable alternative for chatbots, we’d recommend Tidio.
LiveChat Reports
You might wonder how your chat sessions actually perform. How long are they? Where are my visitors from? How’s the chat quality of my agents? And so on.
LiveChat can help you with all these questions. Their statistics will tell you if your quality improves or if it’s getting worse. Thanks to real-time metrics you can see immediately how many visitors are online and if you have enough staff to handle them all.
LiveChat will also send you email reports to understand what has happened. For instance, as customers can leave feedback, you can see if this has improved over time. Or were there some tough cases that you could have solved better? Reports are part of their Team plan and higher. It’s also possible to purchase standalone agent performance reports on the LiveChat Marketplace – pricing is per agent, per report.
An agent activity report in LiveChat
How secure is LiveChat?
Since you (can) collect sensitive user data, it’s absolutely essential to have a high-security standard. Therefore, LiveChat secures every conversation with a 256-bit SSL encryption.
To avoid credit card abuse, LiveChat masks the credit card number and doesn’t store the data. Due to different legal requirements, it’s possible to store data in the United States or the European Union.
There are different ways to secure your account: logging in with a Google account if you are tired of remembering new passwords, 2-step verification to add another security layer or access restriction via IP limitation. This means only users with a certain IP address can log in.
Overall, both users and agents benefit from a high-security standard. You can read more about it here.
LiveChat Support
In my opinion, it’s not super complicated to understand the product, once you have added it to your website. However, customer support is always crucial. As you might have expected it, there’s live chat. Also included in all plans are 24-hour email support and phone support. Plus, you have an excellent Help Center and LiveChat Community.
The highest plan “Enterprise” has some exclusive features like a product training for your agents, legal assistance and a key account manager.
Even though you can use LiveChat in different languages, their own customer support is only available in English.
LiveChat Review: Conclusion
LiveChat is one of the products we thoroughly enjoyed reviewing. It just works really well and is fun to use. We were also surprised that compared to most other live chat tools we’ve had running on our site before, the number of chat requests always went up with LiveChat, even though we used the same setup (automatic trigger after 3 minutes).
A feature that sets them apart from their competition is the ticketing system. Offline messages go directly into this channel and can be handled more easily by your team with different statuses (open, pending, solved).
LiveChat’s feature list, in general, makes it an ideal solution for companies who want to proactively employ live chat as a sales or support channel. Its wide list of integrations, engaging ‘rich messages’, advanced team management features and excellent multilingual widgets make it so much more than ‘just another live chat tool’.
It is not the cheapest live chat software, but certainly one of the best. Their customer support is top notch and, at the risk of repeating myself, the user-experience with their software is just fantastic. If Apple were ever thinking of acquiring a live chat software, I think it would be this one.
Try LiveChat 60 days for free (includes a 30% discount on your first year)
FAQ
Can I install LiveChat on multiple websites?
Yes, you can add LiveChat to as many websites as you like without any extra charges.
About Inka Wibowo
Hi! My name is Inka Wibowo. I started using website builders and content management systems over 10 years ago, when I managed websites for clients in my first marketing role. Since then, I've worked on hundreds of web and digital projects. Now, at Tooltester, I'm happy to be able to use my experience to help users like you find the right website builder for your needs.
Latest Review Updates
15 Jun 2022 - Small updates and corrections
03 Mar 2022 - Smaller updates
22 Nov 2021 - Review moved to Tooltester.com
4 Aug 2021 - General update
28 Jan 2020 - Change in their pricing details. Now charge per agent
26 Jul 2019 - General Update
22 May 2018 - General update.
12 Feb 2018 - Change in their pricing structure. "Regular" plan got removed.
12 Oct 2017 - Added pros and cons.
14 Jul 2017 - Cobrowsing is no longer available as the external provider Firefly stopped their service.
19 May 2017 - Longer trial period
23 Mar 2016 - Explanation of "seats" added
06 Mar 2014 - Pricing updates
17 Dec 2014 - Video review added
11 Dec 2014 - Higher rating for Appearance Customization
05 Aug 2014 - Information about the new ticketing system added.
19 May 2014 - Information on cobrowsing added.
01 - 04 Oct 2013 - Initial tests.
