LiveChat

LiveChat is a live chat widget and agent workspace for talking to people while they are still on your website. A chat bubble sits on your pages, visitors start a conversation, and your team answers from a shared app that shows who the person is and what they were looking at. It is built primarily around real-time selling and support rather than asynchronous email tickets, and it is part of a wider family of products from the same company that includes a chatbot builder, a help desk and a knowledge base tool.

What you can actually do with it

Most of the value sits in the agent app and what it tells you about the person on the other end.

• Answer website visitors in real time. A customisable widget handles the conversation, and agents work from a desktop, web or mobile app with a queue of active chats.
• See context before you reply. Agents can see which page the visitor is on, their location, referral source and past conversations, which is useful for sales as well as support.
• Start conversations proactively. Targeted messages can fire based on behaviour such as time on a page, cart value or repeat visits, rather than waiting for someone to click the bubble.
• Pull in other messaging channels. Conversations from Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp Business and similar channels can be routed into the same inbox.
• Hand off to and from bots. The companion chatbot product handles routine questions and passes anything it cannot resolve to a human, and AI assistance can suggest or tidy up agent replies.
• Connect it to your stack. There is a large integration directory covering ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, CRMs, Slack, Zapier and WordPress.
• Measure chat performance. Reports cover chat volume, agent availability and response times, satisfaction ratings and goal or conversion tracking.

Who it fits best

LiveChat suits ecommerce stores and B2B websites where a conversation at the right moment changes whether someone buys. If you have a small sales or support team that can realistically be online during business hours, and your traffic includes people who hesitate before converting, it earns its keep.

It also works for service businesses that field a lot of pre-sales questions — clinics, agencies, software vendors — where the alternative is a contact form and a two-day wait. It is less appropriate if support is mostly slow, complex and email-based, or if nobody is available to staff the chat.

Things worth knowing before you commit

• Priced per agent seat. Costs scale with the number of people who need to answer chats, and higher tiers unlock things like advanced reporting and security features rather than more volume.
• The suite is modular. The chatbot, help desk and knowledge base are separate products with their own subscriptions, so a complete setup can cost noticeably more than the chat widget alone.
• Live chat needs staffing. An unattended widget is worse than no widget. If you cannot cover your posted hours, plan for bots or clear offline messaging from day one.
• Ticketing is not the strong suit. It handles chat well, but if you want a single queue for email, phone and chat with SLAs and formal escalation, you are combining products rather than buying one.
• Widget performance and design matter. Test the widget on mobile and on your slowest pages before rolling it out sitewide, and check it does not clash with cookie banners or other overlays.

Alternatives to compare it against

If chat is one channel inside a broader support desk you already need, Zendesk or Freshdesk bundle chat with ticketing and may be simpler to consolidate on. If your emphasis is in-product messaging, onboarding tours and lifecycle campaigns rather than website sales chat, Intercom is the closer match. Tidio and Crisp are worth a look for very small teams that want chat plus basic automation cheaply. And if you mainly want deflection rather than conversation, a standalone chatbot or AI answer tool bolted onto your existing help centre may cover it.

Pricing, plan limits and which features sit in which tier change regularly. Check LiveChat’s own pricing page for current details before you decide.

Further reading

• 10 Proactive Chat Best Practices ‘ Examples 2024 — how to set the behavioural triggers behind LiveChat’s targeted messages without annoying visitors.
• Ultimate Guide to Chat KPIs and Metrics — explains which of the numbers in LiveChat’s reports actually indicate a healthy chat operation.
• How to Integrate Live Chat with CRM Systems — practical detail on wiring the widget into the CRM so chat context survives the conversation.
• 10 Best Practices for Chat Agent Training — addresses the staffing problem that decides whether a live chat rollout works.
• 10 Live Chat Security Best Practices for 2024 — relevant because a chat widget runs third-party script on every page of your site.

Have you used LiveChat?

One sentence is enough. Would you pick it again, and why or why not? We publish the critical reviews too — that is the point.