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14 Best Live Chat Software Plugins Compared (2019)

Best Live Chat Software

Do you want to communicate with your website visitors while they’re on your site? Adding a live chat box on your site helps you point your website visitors in the right direction by providing instant assistance. In this article, we’ll compare some of the best live chat software and help you decide which one is the right solution for your needs.

Using a Live Chat Software for Your Website

Adding a live chat box on your site helps you get in touch with your website visitors. With a live chat box, you can provide instant answers to your visitors’ pertinent questions that keep them from taking a desired action, like buying your product.

There are a few things to keep in your mind while choosing a live chat software for your website.

Purpose:

You need to figure out why you’re adding a live chat box on your site. Some of the uses are:

  • Increase sales: Communicate with your customers and understand what keeps them from purchasing your products. Provide instant assistance to generate more sales and revenue.
  • Lead generation: Integrate your chat box with your email marketing service and capture leads. Even if your users aren’t ready for doing business with you immediately, you can still follow up with them to convert them later.
  • Measure net promoter score (NPS): NPS is an important metric that measures your customers’ loyalty. After a chat, persuade your users to submit an NPS survey to understand how likely it is your customers will recommend your products to their friends.

Features:

Compare various features offered by different live chat software to determine which one perfectly fits your needs.

Integration:

Before choosing a WordPress live chat plugin, you need to make sure that it offers seamless integration with your favorite web apps. You might also want to check if there’s a native integration that helps you add a WordPress live chat box onto your WordPress site.

1. Live Chat

live chat

Live Chat is the best live chat tool. It lets you get in touch with your website visitors and point them in the right direction.

The pricing is based on the number of agents that can log into your Live Chat account at the same time. However, you can create as many agent accounts as you need for organizing your team members. Everything that customers are typing in is visible instantly in the chat window, which helps you provide quick assistance to your customers.

The tool also comes with powerful built-in reports and analytics. You can even integrate it with your Google Analytics account to measure the impact Live Chat has on your business. They also offer a free WordPress live chat plugin to install on your website.

Live Chat, Inc. supports integration with all your favorite web apps.

Get started with Live Chat today.

2. Olark

olark

Olark is one of the simplest live chat tools, yet comprehensive enough to offer a seamless chatting experience for your visitors and your team. Olark enables you to customize your chat box widget in a way that matches your brand, so you can offer a consistent experience across your site.

With its automated messaging functionality, you can send messages based on your visitors’ behavior. That way you can deliver the right messages at the right time with minimal effort on your end.

The pricing is based on the number of agent accounts you want to set up.

Get started with Olark today.

3. Zendesk Chat

zendesk chat

Zendesk Chat, formerly known as Zopim, is one of the leading live chat services on the market. It gives you the ability to talk to your customers over live chat. It comes with a free plan with limited features that allows anyone to add a live chat box on their website.

You can easily set up automated chats and provide a custom-tailored chat experience to your visitors based on their individual behaviors.

You can also monitor your website visitors in your Zendesk Chat dashboard or integrate it with your Google Analytics account for further analysis.

Get started with Zendesk Chat today.

4. Comm100 Live Chat

comm100

Comm100 is an enterprise-level live chat service that helps you convert your website visitors into customers by offering real-time support.

With its Chatbot feature, you can provide automated responses to regular queries and have full control over the questions and answers your Chatbot handles. Chatbot helps you shorten your handle times, lower service costs, and upskills your agents.

You can even offer audio/video chats during a live chat session, offering the best pre-sale customer experience on your site. On top of all that, Comm100 allows you to remotely access and control a visitor’s desktop after being granted their permission.

5. SnapEngage

snapengage

SnapEngage is yet another live chat service that you can easily set up on your website. It offers seamless integrations with hundreds of third-party services, including CRM, help desk, project management, and marketing solutions.

Aside from offering live chat on your website, it gives you the ability to offer excellent customer service through SMS. When a customer sends a text message, your agents can respond via SnapEngage chat portal.

You can also get a sneak peek into what customers are typing instantly before they hit the send button.

Get started with SnapEngage today.

6. Chat Room

chat room

Chat Room is a WordPress live chat plugin that allows you to create a chat room on your WordPress website and have live conversations with logged in users.

Compared to other WordPress live chat solutions featured here, Chat Room works differently. It’s not built around offering live support for all your visitors. Instead, it lets you build a chat room on your WordPress website exclusively for logged in visitors.

With Chat Room, you don’t have to create an account on any third-party sites. The Chat Room plugin might be the right solution for you if you’re running a community-powered site and want to set up a live communication channel for your logged in users.

Get started with Chat Room today.

7. Quick Chat

quick chat

Quick Chat is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a live WordPress live chat box on your website and respond to the messages right from your WordPress dashboard. It is a self-hosted chat solution, so you don’t need to create an account on any third-party platforms.

The plugin comes bundled with a quick WordPress live chat widget that you can easily embed on your WordPress sidebar. You can then invite your visitors to communicate with you.

In addition, you can also add an unlimited number of chat rooms on your WordPress website, which is limited only by your web servers’ capability.

Get started with Quick Chat today.

8. LivePerson

liveperson

LivePerson is a leading messaging and bots platforms that allow you to communicate with your customers both onsite and offsite.

Your visitors can send messages through the channel of their choice, including your website, mobile web, or app.

With its Facebook Messenger integration, you can offer one-on-one customer service to your customers while keeping track of the conversation. As consumers are already accustomed to Messenger, adding LivePerson to your site is the best way to provide a familiar and seamless chatting experience for them.

Best of all, customer care professionals can view their daily performance KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), like completed engagement and average engagement length, directly from their workspace.

Get started with LivePerson today.

9. Bold360

bold360

Bold360 is a live communication software suite which includes chat, email management, and a click-to-call tool to provide help for your website visitors and customers. It combines artificial intelligence and agent interaction solutions for faster response time.

With its frictionless natural language understanding, Bold360 AI understands your customers intent and either provide a link to useful documentation or connects them to a live agent.

It also allows you to chat with your customers using Facebook Messenger and SMS, so you can provide the best customer service experience.

Get started with Bold360 today.

10. Intercom

intercom-live-chat-software

Intercom is an all-in-one live chat software for sales, marketing, and support. With Intercom, you can use bots and live chat to automatically qualify and convert more leads, send a targeted email, in-app, and push messages to engage customers, and get an integrated help desk and knowledge base to help customers solve issues quickly.

For the live chat software alone, Intercom offers an essential plan for $38/month and a pro plan which includes advanced features like smart automation for $78/month. If you want access to all of Intercom’s solutions for support, lead generation, and customer engagement plans range from $38/month to $153/month.

If you’re just looking for a live chat tool, Intercom might not be the best choice for you because of it’s added marketing features. If you’re not going to use the extra features, you’d be better off choosing a more affordable software that’s designed solely for live chat.

Get started with Intercom today.

11. ClickDesk

clickdesk-live-chat-software

ClickDesk is a live chat software that doesn’t only focus on text-based live chat, but voice and video live chat too. So aside from real-time live chat, your customers can use their voice or video to connect with you. Voice chat and video chat are also browser-based, so no installation is required.

Other features ClickDesk offers include an automatically integrated help desk software, social toolbars, 1-click integrations with your favorite apps and plugins, a mobile app to talk to your customers on-the-go, reporting and analytics, and more.

Unfortunately, with ClickDesk, design customization is limited to several pre-made themes, so you can’t customize your live chat to match your brand.

ClickDesk offers a free version for 30 chats per month per agent. Paid plans with unlimited chat range in price from $14.99/month to $39.99/month.

Get started with ClickDesk today.

12. Freshchat

freshchat-live-chat

Freshchat by Freshworks is a modern live chat software for sales, marketing, and support conversations. With Freshchat you can create multiple chat threads such as delivery, pricing or demo to keep conversations organized and focused. You can also get everything you need to know about your visitor or customer as you’re talking to them with visitor intel such as a full history of your visitor’s navigation on your website.

Freshchat offers a number of other features including bots, multilingual messenger, rich media, ClearBit integration, IntellAssign which routes conversations based on the skill level of your team members, and much more. The only feature Freshchat seems to be lacking is screen-share.

Freshchat offers a free plan as well as paid plans ranging in price from $19/month per team member to $99/month per team member.

Get started with Freshchat today.

13. SmartSupp

smartsupp-live-chat

SmartSupp is a popular European live chat software that makes it easy to build relationships with your customers and it’s used by nearly 300,000 companies all over Europe.

With SmartSupp you can customize the look of your live chat in order to match your brand and you can also upload a personal photo to show your website visitors that there are real people behind your website. They also offer a web dashboard so you can see who’s browsing your site and have all your visitor info in one place.

SmartSupp also comes with features like video recordings, automatic messages, mobile app, eCommerce platform integrations, and more. You can use SmartSupp for free for 3 agents, unlimited chat conversations, and basic features. For more advanced features, you’ll need to upgrade to either the Standard plan for $8/month per agent or the Pro plan for $19/month per agent.

Get started with SmartSupp today.

14. Drift

drift-live-chat

Drift is a conversational marketing platform that offers live chat capabilities as well as chatbots. With chatbots, you can speak to your customers even when you or your agents aren’t around. So, Drift’s chatbot can automatically qualify your visitors, identify which sales rep they should speak to, and book a meeting.

Aside from chatbots, Drift also comes with features like account-based marketing, anonymous visitor intelligence, conversational landing pages, email marketing integration, and more.

Drift may not be the best choice for small businesses though. They do offer a free plan for basic live chat. But, to get more features, the Standard plan costs $50/month. In order to get chatbots, you’ll have to opt for the Pro plan which costs a whopping $500/month.

Get started with Drift today.

Which is the Best Live Chat Software for Your Needs?

After the comparison, we’ve found that Live Chat is the best live chat software that you can have on your website. Live Chat comes with all the features and integrations to make it easy for you to communicate with your website visitors.

We’re using LiveChat on our sister websites and highly recommend it.

We hope this article helped you find the best live chat software for your requirements.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to read 7 best WordPress lead generation plugins compared.

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