The Best Live Chat Software in 2026

Every live chat tool looks roughly the same on its pricing page: a monthly per-agent figure, a bubble in the corner, a long list of integrations. The differences show up in month three. That’s when you find out the AI answers are billed per resolution, or that the ticketing you assumed was included is a separate product with its own subscription, or that your $29 plan caps chat history at 30 days and last quarter’s conversations have quietly gone.

So this comparison leads with cost structure rather than feature checklists. Ten tools, what each is genuinely good at, and the specific point where each one starts to hurt.

One disclosure first. EasyChatDesk is our own product and it’s top of this list, so read that entry with the scepticism it deserves. The other nine are assessed on published pricing and documented capability as of August 2026. We haven’t run a lab test on all ten, and any roundup claiming its author wins on every axis is worth ignoring.

Quick comparison

Tool	Best for	Starting price	AI chatbot	Ticketing included
EasyChatDesk	Chat + AI + tickets on one bill	$17/agent/mo yearly	From Professional	Yes
Intercom	Funded SaaS teams	~$39/seat/mo	Fin, per resolution	Yes
LiveChat	Chat-first teams at volume	~$20/agent/mo	Add-on	Separate product
Tidio	Small ecommerce stores	Free / ~$29/mo	Lyro, tiered	Light
Crisp	Startups watching cash	~$25/mo flat	Included	Shared inbox
Zendesk	Existing Zendesk shops	~$25/agent/mo	Add-on	Yes
Help Scout	Human-first support	~$25/user/mo	Limited	Yes
Tawk.to	Zero budget	Free	Weak	No
Gorgias	Shopify stores	~$10/mo, ticket-capped	Included	Yes
HubSpot	Teams already on HubSpot CRM	Free / paid tiers	Paid tiers	Service Hub

Prices move. Treat these as the right order of magnitude rather than a quote, and check the vendor’s page before committing to a year.

EasyChatDesk

The pitch is narrow: live chat, an AI chatbot trained on your own content, and CRM ticketing on a single bill, without per-resolution AI fees that make costs hard to forecast. An agent can turn a live conversation into a tracked ticket without leaving the chat, assign it, and follow it to resolution. Plans start at $17 per agent per month billed yearly, $21 month to month. The trial runs 14 days: card details up front, $0 charged today, nothing at all until it ends.

The AI chatbot arrives on the Professional plan at $33 per agent per month yearly, not on Starter. If you want AI, budget for that tier rather than the headline figure.

Where we’re weaker: reporting is thinner than Zendesk’s, there’s no co-browsing, and the integration list is shorter than LiveChat’s marketplace. If you need workforce management or a hundred pre-built connectors, this isn’t the tool. The CRM ticketing and AI chatbot pages have the detail.

Intercom

Intercom is the most capable product in this category and it isn’t close. The Messenger is the best-built chat widget on the market, the automation depth is real, and Fin resolves a large share of routine tickets without a human touching them.

It’s also the easiest way to end up with a support bill that surprises your finance team. Seats start around $39 and climb by tier, and Fin is charged per resolution on top. That model is fine when volume is predictable and painful when it spikes. A Black Friday that triples conversations triples the AI line on your invoice, which is precisely when you least want a variable cost.

Buy Intercom if you’re funded, your volume is steady, and you’ll use the automation depth. Most teams paying for it use maybe a fifth of what they buy. If that stings, our Intercom alternatives roundup covers cheaper routes to most of the value.

LiveChat

LiveChat has been at this since 2002 and it shows in the parts that are boring to build: uptime, agent tooling, a large integration marketplace, keyboard shortcuts that make sense. If real-time chat is the job and you have agents doing it all day, this is a safe, unglamorous choice at around $20 per agent per month.

The catch is architectural. LiveChat is chat. The help desk is HelpDesk, a separate product on a separate subscription, and AI sits in another add-on. Buy all three and the economics stop looking friendly. Teams that need chat and only chat get a good deal. Teams that need chat and tickets should price the whole bundle before comparing it against anything else here.

Tidio

Tidio is built for small online stores and it fits them well. The free tier is real, the Shopify integration is solid, and Lyro handles common product questions competently. For a store doing modest volume with one or two people on chat, it’s hard to fault at around $29 a month.

Growth is where it bites. Conversation caps and AI limits are tiered, and climbing tiers costs more than the gain justifies. Reporting stays basic. A good first live chat tool and a poor last one. More in our Tidio alternatives comparison.

Crisp

Crisp bills per workspace rather than per seat, roughly $25 a month flat, and that single decision makes it the best value here for one specific team shape: five or six people who all answer chat occasionally, none of them full-time. Under per-agent pricing that team is expensive. Under Crisp’s model it’s cheap.

You get a shared inbox, a knowledge base, co-browsing and a workable chatbot. Reporting and routing are lighter than the enterprise tools and large operations will hit the ceiling eventually. For a startup counting subscriptions, that ceiling is far enough off not to matter yet.

Zendesk

Zendesk is the default enterprise answer, and defaults exist for reasons. Ticketing, routing, SLAs, analytics and messaging in one suite, and at scale the workflow engine does things smaller tools can’t.

It’s heavy. Setup takes real time, the interface assumes a support organisation rather than a person, and the price reflects both. Around $25 per agent per month gets you onto a plan most growing teams outgrow, and AI is an add-on. The honest version: choose Zendesk if you already run Zendesk, or if you have someone whose job includes owning the tool. If nobody owns it, you’ll pay enterprise prices for a glorified inbox. Zendesk alternatives covers the exits.

Help Scout

Help Scout optimises for conversations that feel personal rather than automated, and it’s the best tool here at that specific thing. The inbox is calm, the editor stays out of the way, and customers get replies that read like email from a human rather than a ticket notification with a reference number attached.

Beacon, the chat widget, is competent rather than remarkable. AI and automation are deliberately light. At roughly $25 per user per month you’re paying for restraint, which is an odd thing to buy and the right call for agencies, consultancies, and anywhere the relationship matters more than the resolution time.

Tawk.to

Tawk.to is free. Not free-tier free, not free-for-one-agent free. Unlimited agents, no time limit, no card. In a category where free usually means a countdown, that deserves credit.

The model is add-ons. Removing Tawk.to branding costs about $29 a month, and they sell hired chat agents and AI on top. The core product is basic: thin reporting, no real ticketing, AI that doesn’t compete with Lyro or Fin. If your budget is genuinely zero, install it and stop reading comparisons. If you have $20 a month, you can do better. Tawk.to alternatives covers the upgrade paths, and our guide to free live chat software goes through what each free tier actually includes.

Gorgias

Gorgias is built for ecommerce, and really for Shopify. It pulls order data into the conversation, so an agent answering “where is my order” sees the order without switching tabs. That one feature saves more time in a busy store than most AI does.

Pricing is per ticket rather than per agent, from around $10 a month for 300 tickets. That rewards small teams with high volume and punishes you the moment volume passes your plan. For a Shopify store it usually pays. For anything that isn’t ecommerce it makes no sense. See Gorgias alternatives and our Shopify live chat guide.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s live chat is free and drops every conversation onto the contact record automatically. If you already run HubSpot CRM, that’s worth more than most paid features elsewhere, because sales can see support history without asking anyone.

Standalone it’s thin. The chat is basic, real automation sits behind paid tiers, and proper ticketing means Service Hub, which is a significant jump in price. Nobody should adopt HubSpot for the chat. Plenty of people should use the chat because they already adopted HubSpot.

If you’re on WordPress or Shopify

Platform matters less than people expect. Almost every tool here installs as a JavaScript snippet that works on any site, so “best live chat for WordPress” is usually the same question as “best live chat”, with a plugin wrapper for convenience. What changes is the depth of integration behind the widget.

On Shopify that depth is worth paying for, because order lookup inside the conversation removes the single most common support task in ecommerce. Gorgias does it best, Tidio does it cheaply. Our Shopify live chat plugin guide compares them properly.

On WordPress the integration rarely does much beyond installing the script for you, so choose on the platform behind the widget and check the plugin doesn’t drag your page speed down. The WordPress live chat plugin guide covers install and performance.

What actually matters when you choose

Feature lists are close to useless here, because every tool lists the same features. Four things separate a good decision from a bad one.

The first is how AI is billed. Per-resolution pricing makes support costs scale with your success, which is fine until a launch or a shipping delay triples volume. Flat AI credits make budgeting boring, which is what you want from a support bill. Neither model is wrong. Pick one deliberately instead of discovering it on an invoice.

Second, establish whether ticketing is included or sold separately. This is the most common budgeting mistake in the category. Live chat without ticketing works fine until an agent logs off with three unresolved conversations, and then it doesn’t. LiveChat and Zendesk answer this differently and the difference is an entire second subscription.

Third, check the chat history limit against how you actually work. Thirty days sounds generous and isn’t. Customers reference conversations from months back, disputes surface late, and “we can’t see that conversation any more” is a bad sentence to have to write. If a plan caps history, price the tier that doesn’t.

Fourth, and least glamorous: test the widget on a phone. Load your checkout on a 375px screen with the widget installed and see what it covers. Enough tools fail this that it’s worth thirty seconds before you sign for a year.

One thing that matters less than vendors imply is the integration count. A marketplace with 200 connectors is impressive and mostly irrelevant. You need the three or four you actually use — your store platform, your CRM, maybe Slack. Count those and ignore the rest.

So which one

If you want chat, AI and ticketing on one predictable bill, start with EasyChatDesk and its free trial. We would say that, so weigh it accordingly, and note the AI sits on the $33 tier rather than the entry plan.

If budget isn’t the constraint and your volume is steady, Intercom is the better product and you should buy it. If you sell on Shopify, Gorgias will save your agents more time than anything else here. If you have no money at all, Tawk.to, without embarrassment. And if what you want is for support to read like a person wrote it, Help Scout has quietly been the right answer for years.

For adjacent options, the 9 best chat widgets for websites roundup goes deeper on the widget layer, and 15 best help desk and ticketing software covers ticketing properly.

If automation is the priority rather than the chat widget, our best AI chatbots comparison covers the bots specifically, with vertical breakdowns for ecommerce, small business, sales and real estate.