BestChat review 2026: the Shopify AI chatbot and live chat, priced per chat

What is BestChat?

BestChat is a live chat and AI chatbot app built only for Shopify, listed since January 5, 2022 by a developer also called BestChat, with an address in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The same developer makes SmartBot, its newer AI shopping assistant, and an AI product quiz called PickWhy, per its partner page. BestChat is the older of the two and the one built around people answering chats.

That screenshot is the product in one picture. The left rail splits chats into Visitors, AI bot chats, My chats and Offline chats. The middle panel lists who is on the store right now, and for each visitor you can start a chat, jump into one, or watch what the AI bot is saying. It is a classic live chat tool with an AI answering first, which puts it in a different aisle from a ticketing helpdesk.

Its closest neighbor is Tidio, with Chatway in the same aisle. Shopify's own free Shopify Inbox is the baseline to beat.

How BestChat works

Under the marketing copy, BestChat is three pieces: a bot that reads your store, an inbox where people answer, and a takeover button between them. Each piece is worth looking at separately, because the reviews praise the first and argue about the third.

What the AI learns from

BestChat's AI syncs from Shopify. The listing graphic shows five sources feeding the bot: pages and policies, collections, discounts, products, and orders.

On top of the sync you add your own entries, which the listing calls "AI knowledge entries" and the pricing page calls "AI training items": 20 on Free, 100 on Starter, 400 on Basic, unlimited on Growth. Products learned are capped too, at 80, 300, 1,000 and 3,000. A store with 1,200 products on Basic has 200 products the bot does not know, which is worth checking before you trust its recommendations.

What is not on the source list is your past support conversations. That's fine for a new store and a gap for one whose best answers live in two years of agent replies, as my guide to training AI on past tickets explains. Merchants who fed it well say it picks things up fast:

"It learns quickly, took about 3-5 days to learn my entire site and products as well as the most commonly asked questions."

Custom Plate Pros, Shopify

What the AI does in chat

The bot answers product questions, recommends items with product cards, checks order status and sends proactive messages, like a welcome discount prompt. A US store liked that it "shows you each interaction," which helped them add answers to questions they hadn't thought of. That habit of reading the transcripts is the cheapest quality check you have.

Order lookups are the useful part for support. Most "where is my order" questions don't need a person, and a bot that reads Shopify order data clears them before they reach your inbox, the pattern I cover in connecting Shopify order data. The recommendations are the sales part, the territory of my guide to pre-purchase questions. For the upsell side, see my note on upselling in live chat.

Note the small "Designed by BestChat" line under the chat box in that screenshot. Per the pricing page, the "No BestChat branding" line first appears on the $30 Basic plan.

Taking over from the AI

This is where BestChat differs from its sister app. When a chat needs a person, an agent clicks "Take over from AI" and the chat shows that a named agent has taken over. SmartBot routes people out to WhatsApp, email or a Gorgias ticket instead; BestChat keeps the conversation in its own inbox.

The agent also gets a sidebar of Shopify context: the product the visitor is looking at, their cart, recent orders with status, a live timeline of browsing events, and a product search with "Send to visitor" and "Add to cart" buttons. For a small team answering pre-sale chats, that sidebar is the most practical thing in the app.

The mobile app gets praise too. Another US store wrote after 11 months that "you can reply to customers in time even if you are not in front of the computer." If you are the whole support team, that matters more than any AI feature.

BestChat pricing

BestChat bills by usage. Each plan caps how many AI chats you get per month and how many products the AI learns, and bundles a set number of agent seats. These are the vendor's prices from BestChat's pricing page, in USD and billed every 30 days. The Shopify listing shows the same four self-serve plans.

Every plan includes the "AI Insights" and "AI help me write" features. Enterprise appears on bestchat.com but not on the Shopify listing, and its card lists an "Independent Data Model," "Tuning by Data Scientists" and a "High-Performance GPU" rather than seat or product counts. Neither page says what happens when you pass your monthly chat cap, so ask BestChat before you pick a plan that sits close to your volume.

At the cap, the math is cheap: about 3.3 cents a chat on Starter, 3 cents on Basic, 2 cents on Growth. A hard cap also sidesteps the "what counts as a resolution" question my deflection vs resolution explainer gets into, though it gives you a new one: what the bot does in the last week of a busy month. The jump from Growth at $60 to Enterprise at $450 is the cliff: a store doing 3,500 AI chats a month is past Growth, and the next listed step is 7.5 times the price.

BestChat vs SmartBot: same developer, opposite meters

This is the decision most buyers on this listing are actually making, because the developer sells both and a 2024 reviewer found they don't run together: "we cannot have two chats on one website."

Per SmartBot's pricing, every paid SmartBot plan has unlimited AI chats and the price steps up with catalog size, from $30 for 500 products to $300 for 20,000. BestChat flips that. So a store with 300 products and 5,000 chats a month pays $30 on SmartBot and is past every self-serve BestChat plan, while a store with 2,000 products and 600 chats pays $60 on BestChat (Basic covers the chats but not the catalog) and $100 on SmartBot. The other difference is people: BestChat includes agent seats and an inbox, SmartBot hands the conversation out to another channel.

Plug in your own numbers. The widget finds the cheapest plan in each app and tells you which limit decided it.

What Shopify merchants say in their BestChat reviews

The headline is strong: 125 of 141 reviews are five-star and only 3 are one or two stars. The praise is consistent across years. Merchants like the setup, the clean interface, the mobile app, accurate product recommendations and a support team that answers. One 2023 review spent most of its length thanking a BestChat support agent by name for "very fast response and immediate solution," per Brilani. A US skin care store put the accuracy case well:

"Most AI chat are surface level and I found them get most answer wrong when it comes to the skin care we sell on SkinCareBYSuzie.com but Best chat AI is amazing I have yet to find an AI answer that wrong or even could have been better."

Skin Care By Suzie, Shopify

When the reviews were written

Each Shopify review shows how long the store had used the app when it wrote the review, so I went through all 141. 98 were written within the first week, 75 of them within the first day, and only 17 came from stores past six months. That's normal for the App Store, which prompts reviews early, but it means the 4.7 mostly rates setup and first answers.

The dates tell a second story. BestChat collected 45 reviews in 2023, 43 in 2024 and 44 in 2025, then 3 so far in 2026, the newest on June 1. Over the same months its sister SmartBot was getting reviews every week. I read that as the developer's attention and marketing moving to SmartBot, not as BestChat breaking, but it's a fair thing to weigh if you want an app that keeps shipping features.

What long-term users flag

The critical reviews skew toward stores that used the app for months or years, and they cluster around the handoff between AI and people. The most serious one, from an Estonian store after about two years:

"It promised an immediate reshipment to a customer (even committed to delivery time!) when we were offline without any consent from us or notification afterwards - this has caused a big customer frustration and related financial loss."

Lansei China, Shopify

BestChat replied that it would review the issue. A US store on its second try in two years liked that the AI had improved, but not the handoff:

"the chat app doesn't work well still and needs much improvements especially taking over from AI on live chats (we lost many customers because of this)"

Que Shebley, Shopify

Other recurring points: a New Zealand surf shop after almost two years said the widget "gets in the way of customers using the store, way worse on mobile" (Blitz Surf Shop), and a US store found the AI "can be EXTREMELY slow" (CandyFavorites).

On the setup side, a Canadian store got no visitor notifications and hit glitches translating English to French (DistrictX); and a Hong Kong store selling to the Middle East asked for Arabic (Nimall). If you sell in several languages, my notes on multilingual live chat cover what to test.

Why the reshipment review matters most

The Lansei review is the one I would plan around, because it isn't about accuracy. The bot may well have read the policy right. The issue is that it made a commitment (a reshipment and a delivery time) that only a person should make, with nobody online to stop it. Store content can't fix that; it is a rule about what the AI is allowed to say alone.

Before going live, I'd write a knowledge entry that tells the bot to collect details and promise a reply for anything involving reshipments, refunds, replacements or delivery dates, then test it by asking those questions yourself. My guide to chatbot escalation covers the routing rules. For the testing itself, my checklist for testing an AI agent works for a chat bot too. The content side is in my guide to preventing AI hallucinations.

Collecting an email before handoff also helps when you are offline, as in my note on collecting contact details.

Pros and cons

Who BestChat fits, and who should skip it

Pick BestChat if you run a small Shopify store, you or one or two people answer chats yourselves, and you want an AI to take the first pass while you keep an inbox and a phone app for the rest. The agent sidebar is good for pre-sale chats, and the Free or $10 plan is enough to find out whether shoppers use chat at all. If you are also looking at Chatra, note that it does not answer website chats with AI, and neither does 3CX Live Chat. BestChat includes an AI bot on every plan.

Pick SmartBot instead if your chat volume is high and your catalog is small, and you would rather the AI handle everything with handoff to WhatsApp or Gorgias. See my SmartBot review and the SmartBot alternatives list.

Skip both, or pair them, if most of your support is post-purchase email, social DMs and returns in a helpdesk. A storefront chat answers the widget and nothing else. If your team is buried in WISMO tickets by email, an ecommerce helpdesk with AI inside it is the tool that touches that queue. Holiday peaks are the other watch-out, since that is when a monthly chat cap is easiest to hit; my holiday spike guide covers planning for them.

My BestChat verdict: 3.5 out of 5

BestChat does the job of a small-store live chat well: one install gets you an inbox, a phone app, an AI that knows your catalog and orders, and agent seats, for $60 a month at most on the self-serve plans. That's real value, and the five-star reviews are consistent about it. I take points off for three things: the chat cap and the $60 to $450 cliff, the long-term reviews about takeover and notifications, and an AI that, in at least one store's experience, made a promise no one approved. That last one is fixable with setup and testing, but it is on you to do it. Compared with the field in my Shopify AI chatbot list, it's a solid budget pick for stores that staff their own chat.

How eesel compares for Shopify support

eesel is an AI helpdesk teammate rather than a chat widget. It joins the helpdesk where your tickets already live through integrations like the one for Gorgias. The Zendesk integration works the same way, and it connects to Shopify for orders and the catalog.

It can also answer on the store through a chat bubble, so you don't need two tools to cover both. It learns from your past tickets, macros and docs as well as store content, and you decide which topics go to a person.

What that looks like at real eesel customers:

• Question Beauty runs eesel on Gorgias and Shopify. Between August 8 and September 8, 2026 it handled about 990 tickets, sent about 960 replies and looked up about 290 Shopify orders before answering. Refunds, returns, complaints and chargebacks go to a person with an internal note.
• BEAUTEK uses eesel as the website chat and on Zendesk. In the same month it answered 77 website chats live and created 20 Zendesk tickets from chat, and each chat answer is marked as an AI answer with the team's phone number for anything important.
• Cape Coffee Beans runs it on Zendesk and Shopify across a catalog of more than a thousand products, and every answer links the product page, past ticket or Shopify order it used.

On price, I'll be straight: a small store that only needs storefront chat pays less on BestChat than on eesel's $299 plan, where a ticket or a chat is 1 credit. eesel earns its cost when the helpdesk queue is where the time goes.

For that comparison, see my best AI helpdesks for Shopify and the head-to-head of eesel vs Gorgias AI. If you are still choosing a helpdesk, my Gorgias review is a good start.

Try eesel on your Shopify support

If your Shopify support runs through Gorgias or Zendesk, eesel reads the order, checks the policy and drafts or sends the reply inside the ticket, and the reshipment-style requests BestChat's reviewer got burned by go to your team with a note instead of a promise. You can run it against your past tickets first and see what it would have said. You start with 100 free credits, no card.

Try eesel free, or see how the Shopify integration works.