I tested 7 tools to find the best live chat software for your website in 2025

Let’s be honest, live chat isn’t a flashy extra anymore. Your customers expect answers right away, and if they can’t find them on your site, they’ll just bounce to a competitor. It’s a tough reality. But the thought of adding another tool to your support stack, especially when they’re all screaming about "AI," can feel like a massive headache.

The main problem is that most live chat tools fall into two camps: they’re either too basic to actually help, or they’re so complicated you have to rebuild your entire support workflow just to get them running. How are you supposed to find something that’s powerful, easy to set up, and makes your team’s life easier without creating a month-long implementation project?

That’s exactly why I put this guide together. I’ve gone through the top 10 live chat software solutions that startups and SMBs should target this year, from simple free options to sophisticated AI platforms. The goal is to help you find the right fit for your team, minus the usual stress and sales pitches.

What is live chat software for website?

At its simplest, live chat software is the little messaging window that pops up on a website. It’s a direct line for your visitors to talk to a real person, a support agent or a sales rep, without having to leave the page they’re on.

But the tech has evolved way beyond simple one-on-one chats. Modern live chat often includes AI-powered chatbots that can field questions 24/7, proactive messages to engage visitors at the perfect moment, and integrations that connect with the tools you already use, like your CRM or help desk. It’s less of a standalone gadget and more of a command center for your customer conversations.

Key benefits of using live chat software for your website

Adding a chat widget to your site does more than just make it look up-to-date; it delivers some real, measurable wins for your business.

• Turn more browsers into buyers. Live chat lets you connect with potential customers while they’re in the middle of making a decision. You can answer a quick question about a product, clarify a shipping detail, and guide them toward checkout. That little bit of personal help can be the thing that prevents an abandoned cart.

• Stop making customers wait. Nobody enjoys being on hold or waiting half a day for an email response. Chat provides instant support, which means faster solutions and a much better customer experience. Happy customers tend to stick around and tell their friends about you.

• Catch leads before they disappear. You can use simple pre-chat forms or automated greetings to grab a visitor’s name and email before the conversation even kicks off. Just like that, an anonymous visitor becomes a qualified lead for your sales team to connect with later.

• Make your support team’s life easier. One support agent can manage a few chat conversations at the same time, which is impossible over the phone. Plus, AI tools can handle the repetitive, common questions, freeing up your team to focus on the tricky issues that actually require a human brain.

How we chose the best live chat software for website

To separate the genuinely useful tools from the noise, I focused on a few practical criteria. This isn’t just a list of features; it’s about what makes a tool a genuine asset rather than just another monthly subscription.

• Ease of setup and use: How fast can you get it up and running? I looked for tools you could set up yourself in an afternoon, without needing to talk to a sales rep or book a developer’s time.

• AI and automation smarts: Does the AI do more than just repeat your FAQ page back to people? I wanted to see smart routing, an ability to understand context from past chats, and automation that actually helps with workflows.

• Plays well with others: A good live chat tool should improve the help desk and CRM you already have, not make you ditch them and start over.

• Straightforward pricing: I favored tools with clear, predictable pricing plans. Nobody wants a surprise on their bill because of confusing per-resolution fees or other hidden costs.

• Room to grow: The tool should work for you whether you’re handling ten chats a day or ten thousand. It needs to be able to scale as your business grows.

Comparison of the best live chat software for website in 2025

Tool	Best For	Starting Price (Billed Annually)	Key AI Feature	Standout Integration
eesel AI	AI-powered support that integrates with your existing tools	$239/month	Learns from past tickets & internal docs	Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Slack
LiveChat	All-around live chat for human-led support teams	$20/agent/month	AI text enhancement suggestions	Shopify, HubSpot, Zapier
Tidio	E-commerce businesses needing sales & marketing tools	$24.17/month	AI chatbot (Lyro) for product questions	Shopify, WooCommerce, Mailchimp
Tawk.to	Startups and small businesses on a zero budget	Free	Basic automated triggers	WordPress, Wix, Squarespace
Intercom	Businesses wanting an all-in-one conversational platform	$39/seat/month	AI Agent (Fin) for automated resolutions	Salesforce, Marketo, Stripe
Zendesk	Large teams needing a full help desk suite	$19/agent/month (Suite Team)	AI agents for ticket deflection	Deep integration with its own CRM/help desk
Olark	Small teams looking for a simple, no-frills chat tool	$29/month	Rules-based proactive messaging	HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack

The 7 best live chat software for your website in 2025

Alright, let’s dig into the details. Here are the tools that stood out, each with its own specific strengths.

1. eesel AI: Best for AI-powered support that works with your existing tools

eesel AI takes a different approach. It’s not a whole new live chat platform you have to migrate to. Instead, it’s an AI layer that you add on top of the tools you already use. Its AI Chatbot sits on your website and learns from all your company knowledge, your help center, past support tickets, Confluence pages, and even scattered Google Docs. It uses all that context to give customers instant, accurate answers.

When a question needs a human, it smoothly passes the conversation to your support team inside their current help desk, whether that’s Zendesk, Intercom, or something else. The real win here is that eesel AI improves what you have instead of forcing you to replace it. You can get it live in minutes, not months, and do it all yourself without a single sales call.

What really sealed the deal for me is its simulation mode. Before the AI ever talks to a customer, you can test it against thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a data-backed forecast of how well it will perform and how much it will automate, so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Pros:

• Genuinely self-serve setup with one-click integrations for major help desks.

• The AI learns from your real business context, not a generic script.

• The simulation mode lets you test with confidence before going live.

• Transparent pricing, so no weird per-resolution fees.

Cons:

• You need to have an existing help desk for the live agent handoff.

• It’s designed for teams who want to scale support with AI, not just add a simple manual chat.

Pricing: Starts at $239/month (billed annually) for up to 1,000 AI interactions.

2. LiveChat: Best all-around tool for human-led support

LiveChat is a workhorse in the live chat world. It gives your agents a clean, easy-to-use interface and has a customizable chat widget that looks good on any website. It’s a great pick for teams who want a solid, reliable tool for human-to-human conversations.

It nails all the core features you’d expect, like chat routing, ticketing, and reporting. While it’s starting to add more AI features, its real strength is in making it easy for human agents to provide great service.

Pros:

• Simple to set up and use.

• Good reporting and analytics to track performance.

• Over 200 integrations with other business apps.

Cons:

• Its AI features aren’t as advanced as what you’ll find on AI-first platforms.

• The per-agent pricing can get costly as your team scales.

Pricing: Starts at $20/agent/month (billed annually).

3. Tidio: Best for e-commerce and marketing automation

Tidio packs live chat, chatbots, and marketing automation into a single tool, which makes it a go-to for e-commerce sites. You can use it to engage visitors with product recommendations or automatically send reminders about abandoned carts.

Its main selling points are the deep integrations with platforms like Shopify and a heavy focus on using chat to drive sales. The visual chatbot builder is also pretty straightforward, even for non-technical folks.

Pros:

• Strong set of features built specifically for e-commerce.

• Has a free plan with basic features to get you started.

• The visual editor makes it simple to build automated chat flows.

Cons:

• The free and cheaper plans are quite limited.

• It can sometimes feel more like a marketing tool that happens to have chat, rather than a dedicated support platform.

Pricing: A free plan is available. Paid plans start at $24.17/month (billed annually).

4. Tawk.to: Best free live chat software for website

Tawk.to is known for one huge thing: it’s completely free for unlimited agents. For a startup, blogger, or any small business watching its budget, it’s pretty much unbeatable. It covers all the basics you need, like a customizable widget, agent-to-agent messaging, and a mobile app for answering chats on the go.

Its killer feature is that it’s free forever. You get a fully working live chat system on your site for zero cost. It’s hard to argue with that.

Pros:

• Totally free for all the core features.

• You can have unlimited agents and access your entire chat history.

• Comes with a basic knowledge base and ticketing system.

Cons:

• You have to pay to remove the Tawk.to branding from the chat widget.

• It doesn’t have the advanced automation or reporting you get with paid tools.

• It has fewer integrations than most of its paid competitors.

Pricing: Free. You can pay for add-ons like removing branding ($19/month) or adding voice/video chat ($29/month).

5. Intercom: Best all-in-one conversational platform

Intercom is the premium, all-in-one option that does a lot more than just live chat. It’s built to manage the entire customer journey through its messenger, handling support, sales, and marketing in one place. Its AI agent, Fin, is quite capable and can handle some complex automated chats.

The appeal of Intercom is its unified platform and powerful tools for proactive customer engagement. But all that power comes with a steep learning curve and a much higher price tag. It often requires a "rip and replace" strategy, where you have to move all your workflows into their ecosystem.

Pros:

• Powerful AI and automation capabilities.

• Great for proactive marketing and customer onboarding.

• A very polished and modern interface.

Cons:

• It is very expensive, especially for smaller businesses.

• It can be complicated to set up and often means you have to migrate away from your existing tools.

Pricing: Starts at $39/seat/month, but the final bill can climb much higher once you add the features you need.

6. Zendesk: Best for large teams needing a full help desk suite

Zendesk is a giant in the customer service space. Its live chat is just one part of a massive suite of tools that includes ticketing, a help center, phone support, and analytics. For large teams that need an enterprise-level, all-in-one solution, it’s a major player.

The real benefit of Zendesk is having every customer interaction, whether it’s from chat, email, or a phone call, all in one unified ticketing system. This gives your team a full history of every customer. For teams already on Zendesk, a tool like eesel AI can plug right in to automate support without messing up that unified view.

Pros:

• Powerful, scalable, and built for large, busy teams.

• Integrates seamlessly with all other Zendesk products.

• Advanced reporting and analytics.

Cons:

• It can be overly complex and intimidating for smaller teams.

• Live chat is just one piece of a much larger (and more expensive) platform.

• Its native AI can feel a bit bolted on compared to third-party tools built specifically to enhance it.

Pricing: The Suite Team plan, which includes chat, starts at $19/agent/month (billed annually).

7. Olark: Best for simple, no-frills live chat

Olark is all about doing one thing and doing it well: live chat. It’s easy to set up and straightforward for agents to use. If you don’t need a complicated ticketing system or advanced AI and just want a simple way to talk to people on your website, Olark is a great pick.

Its simplicity is its biggest selling point. It doesn’t try to be an all-in-one solution. It also gives you some handy data with searchable chat transcripts and real-time dashboards.

Pros:

• Very easy to get started with.

• Provides useful customer data and insights from chats.

• Has some decent automation rules for such a simple tool.

Cons:

• It doesn’t have a native mobile app, which is a major downside for many teams.

• The feature set is limited compared to the bigger platforms.

Pricing: Starts at $29/month.

Beyond the widget: a smarter way to think about live chat software for website

Picking a tool is the easy part. The harder part is building a strategy that actually works for your customers and can grow with your company.

Don’t rip and replace, integrate and enhance

One of the biggest hidden costs of new software is the time it takes to retrain your team and move all your workflows. Instead of choosing a platform that forces you to start over, look for tools that plug into the software you already use and like. This approach lets you add new capabilities without throwing your team’s current process into chaos.

Your AI is only as smart as what it learns

A chatbot that just spits out generic answers is more frustrating than helpful. The best AI is trained on your specific business knowledge. Look for platforms that can connect to your past support tickets, internal wikis (like Confluence or Notion), and help center articles. That’s how you get an AI that provides answers that are accurate, on-brand, and actually useful.

Test before you go live to avoid embarrassing mistakes

How do you know if an AI tool will actually help your customers or just annoy them? Rolling it out blind is a risky move. The best platforms offer a simulation mode that lets you test the AI against thousands of your past customer conversations. You can see exactly how it would have responded, giving you a clear forecast of its performance before it ever talks to a real person.

Find pricing that makes sense as you grow

Be wary of pricing models that charge you "per resolution." This creates unpredictable costs and basically penalizes you for having more customers who need help. A straightforward, feature-based subscription lets you budget properly and ensures you don’t get a shocking bill after a busy month.

Choose the live chat software for website that grows with you

So, what’s the takeaway? Choosing the right live chat software for your website is about finding a tool that fits what you need today but is also ready for where you’re headed tomorrow. Simple tools are great for getting started, but the future of customer support is smarter, more integrated, and more automated.

Don’t just look for another chat widget; look for a partner in your support strategy. The best tools use AI not to replace your team, but to make their jobs easier. They handle the repetitive questions so your agents can focus on what they do best: building relationships and solving the tough problems.

If you’re ready to see how AI can improve your current support workflow without the pain of a full migration, try eesel AI for free. You can connect your help desk and see a simulation of its performance on your real customer data in just a couple of minutes.