A guide to live chat tools for startups (opens in new tab)

Our company recently "graduated" from Intercom's early-stage program. Intercom is a mediocre product but their pricing does not make sense whatsoever. I exchanged about 20 emails (while being very slow) with their account rep only to find out even they don't understand their own pricing.

Here's some hot mess that's going on:

  * They A/B test their pricing page with completely different models. I've seen at least 3 different versions.
  * They charge by "active users" over last 90 days. A person is considered active if they've logged in to the site or was sent an email.
  * The pricing for products and add-ons are all over the place. In some places, they have an add-on listed as $199 (Product Tour) while others places have it as $119.
  * They try different "bundle" packages but yet it's impossible to tell what products or add-ons are actually included in each.

We were probably writing the first few lines of code for Papercups around the time this article was written (in July), but we're another Intercom alternative :)

Like Chatwoot, we're open source and have a free tier on our hosted version for anyone who'd like to give us a try!

Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2].

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[1] https://papercups.io/

[2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

I'm a late stage Intercom customer, very disappointed by their price gouging. I also find their 1 day support response time for existing customers, in contrast to immediate responses for new prospects very telling of their general ethos. This article is welcome.

I'm surprised papercups.io is not evaluated elixir, open source, 2 seats in their free tier. Easy and reliable. (no affiliation)

I've tried a number of chat tools including a few on this list. I'm a big fan of Crisp. Their mobile apps and usability I think is one of the simplest and cleanest to use (in contrast to article). Also the free tier is super generous and I've been running it for free on multiple sites for years.

For me a mobile app was a must and Crisp has one of the best.

Very timely article for me.

I spent most of last week looking at live chat tools and also came to the same conclusion re ChatWoot (ie: good product + open source + lacking some features + but possibly extensible)

We're moving off of Intercom. Great set of features - but the pricing is horrendous.

I think live chat is more important than just the live chat. Using the chat widget for analytics, tracking, and automated messaging is also important.

I want to be able to take screenshots of what my users are looking at when they need support. I want to be able to detect what pages theyre on and provide contextual help when they need it.

It's not surprising intercom has raised their prices so much given intercom has raised close to 300M, they really need to push their pricing up into ACVs where they can pay for the sales organization they've been building, and grow top line revenue.

I expect drift to adopt a similar pricing approach (raised 100M) to justify their valuation and push their ACVs up.

I appreciate the shoutout for http://www.olark.com (raised 85k total including YC) and noticed a few comments about the visitor UI being a bit dated -- I agree with the sentiment, or did, but we recently updated the visitor UI and it's currently live on Olark.com and will be rolled out to all customers by January. Probably time to update that review ;)

Live chat software was instrumental in helping me compete when launching my first hosting company, and a must have for startups, glad we are still hitting that niche well :) --- also have a bunch of really exciting things in the pipeline, I'll drop them on a Show HN when they are ready.

As other people are mentioning Intercom being super expensive - the software over at User.com was partially developed as an affordable alternative to Intercom, and has now evolved into a larger platform for multiple marketing tools with features that are all connected - e.g. chat users integrated into the CRM, and powerful segmentation based on visitor data that you can use on niche targeting campaigns, etc.

Also a shoutout to the other live chat creators in here, you guys also have great products too! @areichert and @bcx

Check out: https://user.com | Live chat: https://user.com/en/live-chat/

I use this video / live chat from a small startup. They have great support and also interesting angle with the troubleshooting. https://www.mavenoid.com/en/

I'm surprised tawk.to [1] hasn't got a mention yet. It was easy to set up and while quite limited, is free so perfect for our small startup.

[1] https://www.tawk.to/

I think the big one everyone forgets about is hubspot. Works just as good as the ones in the list but its integrated with a platform a lot of us already use.

We love having all our chats tied to our CRM by default :)

Anyone know apps that include an SDK for iOS and Android. We've been stuck with intercom because we need to be able to send iOS and Android messages, and push notifications, for support.

Not sure if anyone is interested, but I created an app allowing a company to directly chat with customers via text messaging (rather than a widget embedded on your website). Could be more useful for brick and mortar type businesses rather than web based. https://www.outseed.io/

Drift's does about 10000000 things that Chatwoot doesn't do in terms of it's integration with sales tools and additional products that simplify sales workflows, which is the primary reason anyone should use Drift. If you aren't doing enterprise sales you shouldn't even be considering it.

I really really like Crisp. You can get the full package for $100, but even on the smaller one there is no limit on # of customers or seats (essential as we have a free offering used by many individuals, and we also want everyone to participate in conversations with users).

Wish they would have factored in things like performance impact; Zendesk for example is by far the largest and longest-loading script on my website. I hate it. As soon as I find a truly lightweight live chat solution which doesn't suck balls, I'm gone.

2 years ago I tried Intercom too, to discover their prices. They were charging me more than Google App, Slack, and AWS combined. Very disappointed and I told them back then. It is still the same 2 years later.

Is there a chat product that would allow you to do custom routing? Most chat products are like hubs / stars where all clients get to a central destination.

Is there something that would allow multiple such destinations?

I know it isn't very 'cool', but Zoho SalesIQ works very well for us for only $20 a month, which seems half the cost for the paid tiers for a lot of these.

How has nobody mentioned chatlio? Love it, it integrates into Slack so my Cust Service team doesn't have to use a new interface.

I vote for IRC ;)

Hm I was hoping for waaaay more tools being listed and compared. It doesn't even contain a single tool I would have considered (Signal, Wire, Discord, Riot (I know it got renamed)). I would also like to see unfortunately widespread tools in there like MS Teams or Slack.

These days, building and deploying your own chat from scratch with something like Django Channels can take you just a few hours. But I can see the appeal of getting a ready to use solution for a little fee.

We use kayako.com and it is excellent!