Zoho SalesIQ
Live chat, visitor tracking, and chatbots for websites, with a genuinely usable free tier.
What is Zoho SalesIQ?
Zoho SalesIQ combines website live chat, visitor tracking, and chatbot automation in one product priced per operator. It leans further toward sales engagement than most help-desk chat tools, scoring and profiling visitors as they browse so conversations can be prioritized, and it offers an unusually capable free tier.
Best known for: Live chat with visitor intelligence at a low per-operator price
Key features
- Website live chat with routing and transfer
- Visitor tracking, lead and company scoring
- Codeless chatbot builder plus Answer Bot
- Messaging channels including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram
- Audio calls, video calls and screensharing
- Mobile SDK for in-app support
Who Zoho SalesIQ is best for
- Small teams adding live chat without a per-seat help desk contract
- Sites that want visitor tracking and lead scoring alongside chat
- Businesses layering chatbots over human agents on a budget
Ideal team: Small support and sales teams that want website chat, visitor intelligence, and basic bot deflection in one tool, priced per operator rather than per conversation.
Zoho SalesIQ pricing
Free
$0
- 3 operator licenses
- 10,000 visitors tracked per month
- 100 operator chat sessions
Basic
$7/per operator / mo (billed annually)
- 50,000 visitors per month, 1,000 chat sessions
- 1 chatbot with 25,000 bot sessions
- Chat routing, translation and messaging channels
Professional
$12.75/per operator / mo (billed annually)
- 100,000 visitors per month, unlimited chat sessions
- 5 chatbots with 50,000 bot sessions
- Real-time reporting and conversation monitor
Enterprise
$20/per operator / mo (billed annually)
- 200,000 visitors per month
- 10 chatbots with 200,000 bot sessions
- Train bots on web URLs, audit logs, PBX integrations
Costs to watch before you commit
- Listed prices are per operator per month billed annually; month-to-month costs more
- Visitor tracking beyond the plan allowance is a significant add-on, from US$90 per month for 100,000 up to US$900 for 5 million
- Extra chatbots are US$8 per month each and extra bot chat sessions US$8 per 5,000
- Each additional brand is US$16 per month
- Local taxes (VAT, GST) are charged on top of the listed prices
Zoho SalesIQ pros and cons
Pros
- Free plan covers 3 operators and 10,000 tracked visitors a month: genuinely usable, not a teaser
- Priced per operator rather than per conversation, so busy months don't produce surprise bills on the base plan
- Visitor tracking with lead and company scoring, so conversations can be prioritized before anyone types
- Chatbots included from the $7 tier rather than sold as a separate AI product
- Messaging channels (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram) plus audio and video calls and screensharing
- Mobile SDK for in-app support, which most chat tools at this price don't offer
Cons
- Visitor-tracking overages are the real cost: $90/month for 100,000 up to $900 for 5 million, well above the per-operator base
- Extra chatbots are $8/month each and additional bot sessions $8 per 5,000
- Each additional brand is $16/month, which adds up for agencies or multi-product businesses
- Sales-oriented framing means it's a weaker fit for pure post-sale support than a help desk
- Only 98 third-party reviews, a thinner evidence base than the established chat platforms
- Listed prices assume annual billing; monthly costs more, with local taxes on top
Zoho SalesIQ review: a closer look
What Zoho SalesIQ is
Zoho SalesIQ combines website live chat, visitor tracking, and chatbot automation into a single product priced per operator. The name is the giveaway: this leans toward sales engagement more than post-sale support. It watches who is on your site, scores them by behavior and firmographics, and lets you open a conversation with the ones worth talking to, with bots handling the rest. That's a different product philosophy from a help desk's chat widget, and it determines whether it fits you.
Visitor intelligence, and what it costs
The tracking is the genuinely distinctive part and also the pricing trap, so treat it as one topic. Knowing that a visitor came from a pricing page, has been on site four times this week, and works at a company matching your ICP changes which chats you prioritize; that's real value for a small sales team. But the tracked-visitor allowance is what you're actually buying: 10,000/month free, 50,000 on Basic, 100,000 on Professional, 200,000 on Enterprise. Beyond that, the add-on runs $90/month for 100,000 rising to $900 for 5 million. A moderately trafficked site will exceed the base allowance long before it exceeds its operator count, so model traffic first and seats second, the opposite of how the pricing page reads.
Bots included, but metered
Chatbots arrive at the $7 Basic tier (one bot with 25,000 bot sessions) rising to 5 bots and 50,000 sessions on Professional and 10 bots with 200,000 sessions on Enterprise. Including bots this far down the ladder is unusual; most competitors either omit them or sell them as a separate AI subscription. Enterprise also allows training a bot on your web URLs, which moves it closer to a retrieval-based assistant. The metering is the thing to watch: extra bots are $8 each per month and additional sessions $8 per 5,000, so a bot that greets every visitor will consume its allowance considerably faster than one that opens only on support pages.
Sales tool or support tool?
This is the question that decides the purchase. If your chat exists to catch buying signals (qualify leads, book demos, answer pre-sales questions) SalesIQ is well aimed and the visitor scoring earns its keep. If your chat exists to resolve customer problems after purchase, you want a help desk with ticketing, a shared inbox, SLA tracking, and agent reporting, none of which this provides. Zoho's own answer to that is Zoho Desk, and the two are designed to work together rather than compete. Buying SalesIQ expecting a support platform is the most likely way to be disappointed by it.
How it compares
Against LiveChat, LiveChat is the more polished dedicated chat platform with a deeper app ecosystem, at a higher per-agent price; SalesIQ counters with visitor intelligence and included bots. Against HelpCrunch, the two are close on price with HelpCrunch leaning further toward support and messaging campaigns. Against Intercom, Intercom is a far broader platform at multiples of the cost. Against Flow XO, they solve different halves of the problem: Flow XO builds multi-channel scripted bots, SalesIQ puts chat and visitor data on your site. And against My AskAI, that's a retrieval-based deflection layer over an existing help desk rather than a chat product. The free tier makes SalesIQ unusually cheap to trial against any of them.
Who should use Zoho SalesIQ?
A good fit
Zoho SalesIQ suits small sales and support teams on sites with meaningful traffic who want to see who is visiting and open conversations with the ones worth having. It's strongest for businesses with a pre-sales motion (SaaS, agencies, considered-purchase ecommerce) and for existing Zoho CRM users, where visitor activity lands on the lead record. The free tier makes it one of the cheapest ways to put credible chat plus a chatbot on a website.
Look elsewhere if…
Teams whose chat is genuinely post-sale support need a help desk with ticketing and SLAs (Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, or HelpCrunch) rather than a sales-engagement tool. High-traffic sites should price the visitor-tracking add-on before assuming the per-operator rate is the cost. Businesses wanting the most refined agent experience should look at LiveChat or Intercom and pay for it. And anyone needing a large independent review base will find 98 reviews thin for something that sits in front of customers.
The verdict
Zoho SalesIQ is a strong-value package for a specific job: knowing who's on your site and talking to the right ones. Visitor scoring plus chatbots from $7 per operator, with a free tier that covers three operators, is hard to match, and the messaging-channel coverage is broader than the price suggests. The critical thing to understand before buying is that you are really purchasing tracked visitors, not seats, the overage runs $90 to $900 a month and will dominate your bill on a busy site long before operator count does. Model your traffic first. And be clear it's a sales-engagement tool: if you need ticketing and SLAs, buy a help desk instead and let this sit in front of it.
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