Best free live chats for your website
What if you don’t want to spend dozens or even hundreds of dollars each month just to have a chat window installed at your website? There are many solutions which can provide you with basic or sometimes even more advanced functionality for no money at all. Today, we take a look at the most interesting free or very cheap live chats:
Smartsupp enables you to use chat window with unlimited number of operators, completely for free. It is easy to use and install, can be managed in bigger teams and you would easily integrate it into many other services like Shopify, Wordpress or Presta Shop. Without any price, it even lets you use the video recording functionality. Unfortunately, in the free version you don’t get any reporting and analytics about chats’ and operators’ performance. And finally, the major drawback is that Smartsupp does not provide you with native iOS / Android applications.
Tawk.to’s idea is completely based on free model as the software does not even offer any premium version. It means that you get the full functionality, including ticketing system, reporting, chat rating and triggered messages for a full price of 0$. How does the company earn money? You can pay a small sum of 15$ monthly for removing tawk.to branding or use the company’s chat support service to outsource responding to your visitors’ queries. The only things which might deter you from tawk.to is quite stiff chat window’s design and lack of extension possibilities into more advanced features.
Even though Olark’s free functionality is limited to only one operator, its live chat is worth to look at, due to its outstanding chat’s design and very transparent pricing giving you instant access to all the functionalities, including branding removal, for one price. In premium version, it also lets you create personalized customer surveys facilitating feedback collection process.
Just like Olark, Chatra offers a free version for only one operator but the major difference is that if you plan on upgrading to have a larger team of visitors’ support, its pricing is much more affordable. For no price, you get all the basic stuff including well-designed chat window, offline messaging or basic visitor’s analytics to be used on multiple websites. In the premium version, for $19 monthly, you get unlimited number of operators with more advanced functionality including: chat ratings, file transfer and reporting / analytics.
Drift’s free solution is limited to only one operator and 100 tracked visitors but it is way more than only live chat window. Drift has marketing automation functionality enabling you to collect and effectively manage data about you customers. However, if you are looking for a long-term free communication solution for your website, Drift’s free version is more a teaser to its premium well-priced version ($50 a month).
Chat Pirate is not a free solution but its pricing is based on a per access model ($9 per month), meaning you will not have to pay for each operator. At the same time, it is worth a look thanks to its uncanny user-friendly interface and sleek design. Integrated with the most popular e-commerce services, it is one of the best value-for-use solutions on the market available.
You can find out all free live chat solutions in our -> live chat catalogue
Originally published at picksaas.com.
