An honest review of LiveAgent in 2025: Features, pricing, and AI

Trying to keep up with customer support can feel like spinning plates. You've got emails pouring in, live chats popping up, social media DMs pinging, and maybe even a phone that won’t stop ringing. It's chaotic, and if one of those plates drops, you've got an unhappy customer on your hands.

This is the exact problem all-in-one help desks like LiveAgent try to solve. The promise is simple: bring all those conversations into one organized place and make your support team's life a whole lot easier. But does it actually pull it off?

In this review, we’re going to take a real, honest look at LiveAgent. We’ll walk through its main features, break down the pricing, and talk about its limitations, especially when it comes to AI. We'll also look at how you can pair a solid help desk with smarter AI tools to fill in the gaps and build a support system that really works.

What is LiveAgent?

At its core, LiveAgent is an omnichannel help desk. That’s just a fancy way of saying it pulls all your customer conversations into a single platform. Instead of your team having to jump between their email inbox, a separate chat app, and social media, LiveAgent puts everything into one unified ticketing system.

It's built with small to medium-sized businesses in mind, offering a ton of features without an eye-watering price tag. The whole idea is to give you one central hub for everything support-related. It's built around a few key pieces: a system for managing tickets, a live chat widget for your website, a built-in call center, and a knowledge base so customers can help themselves. Let's take a closer look at each one.

A closer look at LiveAgent's core features

LiveAgent crams a lot of functionality into one package. Here’s a breakdown of the tools that make up the platform.

LiveAgent omnichannel ticketing system

The heart of LiveAgent is what they call a "hybrid ticket stream." It’s a smart system that stitches together every conversation about a single issue into one thread. So, if a customer starts a live chat, sends a follow-up email, and then gives you a call, all of that history lives in the same ticket. This gives your agents the full story without them having to hunt down information across different apps.

It also has the standard stuff you’d expect, like ticket routing (to send questions to the right person), service level agreements or SLAs (to keep track of response times), and custom tags to help you organize everything. That said, some users have mentioned that the email handling can feel a bit clunky. Awkward threading and slow syncing can sometimes trip up your team when they're trying to fly through a packed inbox.

LiveAgent live chat and customer messaging

LiveAgent's live chat widget is known for being one of the fastest out there, which is great because it won't slow your website down. It also has some neat features like real-time visitor monitoring, which lets you see who is on your site and what pages they're looking at.

You can also set up proactive chat invitations to nudge visitors for a chat before they even ask for help. It’s a solid tool for engaging with people in the moment, but there's a small catch: proactive chat isn’t available on their entry-level "Small business" plan, so you’ll need to upgrade for that. While the live chat works well, it’s still very dependent on your agents being available to answer. It relies on canned responses for speed but doesn't have the kind of 24/7 smart automation you’d get from a modern AI chatbot.

LiveAgent call center and voice support

If your team spends a lot of time on the phone, LiveAgent’s built-in virtual call center is a huge bonus. It's not just an afterthought; it’s a full system with interactive voice response (IVR) menus to direct callers, smart call routing, and unlimited call recordings.

Having this baked right into the help desk means your agents can take calls right next to their tickets and chats, keeping everything tidy. It’s a genuinely powerful feature, but like some of their other advanced tools, it's not in the most basic paid plan. You'll need to be on the "Medium business" plan or higher to get access to it.

LiveAgent knowledge base and self-service portal

LiveAgent also gives you the tools to build a customer portal with a knowledge base, forums, and feedback boards. This is your first line of defense, letting customers find their own answers to common questions. It’s a great way to cut down on repetitive tickets and give your users a bit more independence.

The main downside here is that the knowledge base is just a static library of articles. It doesn't learn or get smarter on its own. Unlike newer AI systems that can scan through resolved tickets to suggest new article topics or point out gaps in your documentation, LiveAgent's knowledge base needs constant manual work from your team to keep it fresh and useful.

LiveAgent's AI capabilities and limitations

Let's be honest, in customer support today, AI isn't just a cool feature; it’s what helps you stay afloat. LiveAgent has started to incorporate some AI, but its features feel a little behind what's now possible with more specialized AI platforms.

LiveAgent's native AI: A chatbot and answer assistant

LiveAgent offers two main AI tools: an AI Chatbot and an AI Answer Assistant. The chatbot is designed to handle simple, repetitive questions by pulling answers from your knowledge base. The Answer Assistant sits inside the help desk and helps agents draft replies, which can be a time-saver.

The problem is, these tools are pretty basic. The AI feels more rule-based than truly intelligent. It can handle a straightforward "how do I reset my password?" query, but it gets stuck on more complex questions or conversations with a lot of back-and-forth. It can't learn from your thousands of past support tickets to give context-aware answers, and it can't actually do anything besides share information. This often means agents have to step in anyway, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of automation.

The alternative for LiveAgent: Plugging in a smarter AI brain like eesel AI

Instead of relying on limited, built-in AI, you can connect a specialized AI platform to a help desk like LiveAgent. This gives you the best of both worlds: a reliable ticketing system and a genuinely intelligent automation engine working together.

A platform like eesel AI integrates with the tools you already have and acts as a smart layer on top. Here’s what makes that a different ballgame:

• You can go live in minutes: Forget about long sales calls or needing a developer. With one-click connections for help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, you can get set up yourself in just a few minutes.

• It learns from all your knowledge: eesel AI doesn't just read your help center articles. It learns from everything: your past support tickets, internal wikis in Confluence, docs in Google Docs, and more. This gives it a deep understanding of your business and lets it provide answers with amazing context, something LiveAgent's AI can't match.

• You're in complete control: You can do much more than just answer questions. With eesel AI, you can define your AI's personality and give it custom actions. Think of an AI that can look up an order status in Shopify, automatically triage and tag a ticket, or escalate a tricky issue to the right team member.

• Test it out with zero risk: Worried about an AI going rogue and talking to your customers? eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have replied and get a good idea of its resolution rate before it ever interacts with a live customer.

A look at LiveAgent's ecosystem: Integrations and mobile app

A help desk is only as good as the other tools it can connect with. LiveAgent offers over 200 integrations, which is decent and covers many popular apps. But it's a much smaller library compared to a platform like Zendesk, which has over 1,500 integrations. This could be a problem if your team depends on a lot of different niche tools to get work done.

A bigger issue, though, is the mobile app. With an App Store rating of just 1.7 out of 5 stars, the user feedback is pretty rough. People complain about constant bugs, an outdated interface that doesn't work well on modern phones, and missing features. For teams that need to manage support while they're away from their desks, this is a major roadblock.

This is where a different way of thinking about tools can really help. Instead of making your team learn another clunky app, eesel AI improves the tools you already know and use. It works right inside your main help desk, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, meeting your agents where they already spend their time.

LiveAgent pricing plans in 2025

Figuring out the pricing is crucial for deciding if a tool is a good fit. LiveAgent's plans are definitely affordable, but you have to look closely at what's included in each tier.

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Features Included
Small business	$4/agent/month (limited time)	Ticketing, Live chat, Knowledgebase, 3 email accounts, 2 chat buttons
Medium business	$7/agent/month (limited time)	Everything in Small + Call center & IVR, Proactive chat, Reports, SLAs
Large business	$12/agent/month (limited time)	Everything in Medium + Social media integrations (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), Time tracking
Enterprise	$17/agent/month (limited time)	Everything in Large + Dedicated account manager, Priority support, Custom roles

By contrast, eesel AI's pricing is built to be predictable. It’s based on the number of AI interactions, not how many agents you have, and there are no surprise fees for each resolution. This means your bill won't suddenly jump just because you had a busy month.

This video gives a comprehensive tour of the LiveAgent platform, showcasing its key features and user interface.

Is LiveAgent the right choice for you?

So, what's the final word? LiveAgent is a solid and affordable all-in-one help desk, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. It does a good job of bringing all your main support channels under one roof, and its built-in call center is a real standout for any team that still relies on phone support.

But its weaknesses are starting to show, especially in a world where efficiency is everything. The AI features feel dated, the mobile app is a big letdown, and the pricing structure keeps important tools locked away in the more expensive plans. While LiveAgent can be a good starting point, ambitious teams that are serious about automation will likely find they outgrow it pretty quickly.

Upgrade your LiveAgent support without replacing your helpdesk

Instead of going through the headache of switching your entire support system, you could add a powerful AI layer to the tools you're already using. eesel AI connects to your help desk in minutes to handle frontline support, help your agents draft better replies, and bring all your company knowledge together into one smart, searchable brain.

Try eesel AI today and see how you can reduce your ticket volume and make your support team far more efficient.