LiveChat
Premium live chat and help desk software for sales and support teams.
What is LiveChat?
LiveChat is a premium live chat and customer service platform for sales and support teams, built by the company now known as Text. It offers real-time website chat, ticketing, and agent tools with a large integration marketplace.
Best known for: Premium live chat software for sales and support
Key features
- Real-time website live chat
- Ticketing and shared inbox
- Canned responses and chat routing
- Sales tracking and product cards
- 200+ app integrations
- Analytics and reporting
Who LiveChat is best for
- Sales-and-support teams wanting a polished, feature-rich chat platform
- Growing SMBs and mid-market that will layer on AI and chatbots
- Teams that want visitor tracking and campaigns alongside chat
Ideal team: Sales-and-support teams at growing SMBs and mid-market companies that want a polished live-chat platform with optional AI automation.
LiveChat pricing
Starter
$19/per agent / mo
- Text intelligence
- 60-day chat history
- Track up to 100 visitors
Team
$49/per agent / mo
- Unlimited campaigns
- Full widget customization
- Track 400 visitors
Business
$79/per agent / mo
- Work scheduler
- Advanced reporting
- Track 1,000 visitors
Costs to watch before you commit
- No permanent free plan, trial only; ongoing use requires a paid seat.
- ChatBot (AI) is a separate add-on starting ~$52/mo (billed annually).
- Advertised per-agent prices assume annual billing; monthly adds ~$6–10/agent/mo.
- Visitor-tracking caps (100/400/1,000) push high-traffic sites to higher tiers.
LiveChat pros and cons
Pros
- Genuinely fast to deploy: paste a snippet or install a plugin and a polished, customizable chat widget is live on your site within minutes, with no developer required for basic setup.
- Sales-oriented feature set that goes beyond reactive support, including proactive chat invitations, visitor targeting rules, and a 'message sneak-peek' that lets agents see what a visitor is typing before they hit send.
- Strong agent productivity tooling: canned responses, tags, chat routing and transfers, file sharing, and a shared inbox that pulls website chat together with channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, email, and SMS.
- One of the largest integration marketplaces in the live-chat category, with connectors for major CRMs, help desks, e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce), and marketing tools, plus a documented developer API for custom work.
- Detailed, practical reporting on chat volume, agent activity, response and resolution times, staffing prediction, and post-chat satisfaction surveys, which makes it easy to manage a team against real metrics.
- Consistently high user-satisfaction ratings across third-party review sites, reflecting a mature, stable product that rarely surprises teams in day-to-day use.
Cons
- There is no capable AI chatbot included in the core product; automated deflection means subscribing to the separate ChatBot product, so the sticker price understates what an automated setup actually costs.
- Pricing is per agent and stacks quickly once you add seats and bolt on sibling products (ChatBot, HelpDesk, KnowledgeBase), making it pricier than lean SMB-focused rivals at comparable feature levels.
- The Text ecosystem is deliberately modular, which means live chat, ticketing, knowledge base, and AI are four distinct subscriptions rather than one unified suite, adding billing and administrative overhead.
- It is fundamentally a live-chat and messaging tool, not a full CRM or help desk, so teams wanting deep case management, SLAs, or a customer database will outgrow it or need to integrate additional systems.
- Advanced routing, security, and reporting controls are gated to higher tiers, so smaller teams may find the entry plan feels feature-limited relative to the marketing.
LiveChat review: a closer look
Ease of use and setup
LiveChat is one of the easiest tools in this category to get running, which is a large part of its appeal. Installation is a copy-paste snippet or a one-click plugin for platforms like WordPress and Shopify, and the widget can be themed, positioned, and localized without touching code. The agent app is available on web, desktop, and mobile, and new agents tend to become productive within an afternoon thanks to a clean, familiar chat interface.
Live chat and proactive selling
The core strength is real-time conversation designed with conversions in mind, not just support tickets. Proactive chat invitations can be triggered by URL, time on page, or visitor behavior, and targeting rules let you greet high-intent shoppers at the right moment. The message sneak-peek feature, canned responses, and quick access to visitor context (pages viewed, location, referrer) let agents respond fast and personally, which is why LiveChat is often chosen by e-commerce and sales teams rather than pure cost-center support desks.
Omnichannel inbox and ticketing
Beyond website chat, LiveChat consolidates messages from social and messaging channels into a single agent inbox, so a small team can cover Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, email, and SMS without switching tools. When a conversation needs follow-up after the visitor leaves, it can be converted into a ticket, though full ticket and knowledge-base workflows really live in the companion HelpDesk and KnowledgeBase products. This modular design is powerful for teams that want to assemble exactly what they need, but it does mean the complete support stack is spread across separate subscriptions.
Automation, AI, and the ChatBot add-on
LiveChat has layered in AI assistance for agents, such as reply suggestions and summarization, but meaningful automated deflection still relies on ChatBot, a distinct product in the Text family. ChatBot offers a visual, no-code flow builder and can hand off to a human when it gets stuck, and it integrates tightly with LiveChat. The trade-off is cost and complexity: teams expecting a bundled AI agent out of the box will need to budget for and configure a second subscription to get there.
Integrations and ecosystem
This is where LiveChat clearly outpaces most competitors, offering an extensive marketplace of prebuilt integrations spanning CRMs, e-commerce, email marketing, analytics, and help desks, plus a well-documented API and webhooks for custom development. For an SMB already running Shopify, HubSpot, or Mailchimp, the odds are high that a supported connector exists. The breadth of the ecosystem, combined with the maturity of the platform, makes LiveChat a safe long-term bet that is unlikely to leave you stranded on integrations.
Who should use LiveChat?
A good fit
LiveChat is a strong fit for small and mid-sized e-commerce stores, SaaS companies, and service businesses that treat website chat as a revenue channel, not just a support queue, and want proactive selling, visitor targeting, and solid analytics without hiring a developer. It suits teams of a few to a few dozen agents who value polish, reliability, and a deep integration marketplace, and who already run tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, or a mainstream CRM that LiveChat can plug into. Businesses that appreciate a modular approach, adding ChatBot or HelpDesk only when they actually need them, will get the most out of it.
Look elsewhere if…
Very small teams or bootstrapped startups watching every dollar may find LiveChat's per-agent pricing and add-on model expensive, especially once AI automation is required; Tidio bundles live chat with an AI chatbot at a more SMB-friendly entry point, and tawk.to offers a genuinely free live-chat option if budget is the overriding concern. Teams that want an all-in-one support suite with robust ticketing, SLAs, and a built-in knowledge base under one roof should look at Zendesk or Intercom, both of which unify more of the workflow (and, in Intercom's case, lean heavily into AI) rather than splitting it across separate subscriptions. If deep case management or a full customer database matters more than proactive chat, LiveChat will feel narrow.
The verdict
LiveChat is a mature, dependable, sales-minded live-chat platform that does the core job exceptionally well: it is quick to deploy, pleasant for agents, rich in proactive and targeting features, and backed by one of the best integration ecosystems in the category. The catch is the ecosystem strategy and the pricing that comes with it. What looks like a simple chat tool is really the front door to a family of separately billed products, and getting a modern AI-automated setup means paying for ChatBot on top of your seats. If you want website chat that helps you convert visitors and you are comfortable assembling (and paying for) the pieces you need, LiveChat is an easy recommendation. If you want an all-in-one help desk or the cheapest possible path to AI-driven deflection, weigh Tidio, Intercom, or Zendesk before committing.
Top LiveChat alternatives
Popular Customer Support & Help Desk tools teams evaluate alongside LiveChat.
Re:amazeIntegrated support helpdesk, chat, and chatbots built for ecommerce brands.
Zoho AssistRemote support and unattended access, priced per technician rather than per endpoint.
FrontThe customer service platform built on the world's most powerful shared inbox.
TidioLive chat plus the Lyro AI chatbot that automates SMB and ecommerce support.
HiverThe Gmail-based, multichannel help desk that turns shared inboxes into a support desk.