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Best Live Chat WordPress Plugins for 2021

If you are looking to add some personal touch to your website this article will help you give you wisdom and shed some light on your decision for the best live chat plugins for your website.
If you are looking to add some personal touch to your website this article will help you give you wisdom and shed some light on your decision for the best live chat plugins for your website.

Best Live Chat WordPress Plugins for 2021

We as humans long for personalization and interaction. And with the rise of social media platforms, live chats are now a necessity for communication, according to the statistics, 53% of people prefer chatting over calling at any time. Websites, especially those who run a business or offer any kind of goods have implemented little chat boxes on the corner to offer their users a place to ask basic information.

Live Chats can help you overcome those obstacles by providing intercommunication between you and our customers or visitors, and the best choice for your WordPress site would be integrating a live chat plugin. These plugins will equip you with sufficient mechanisms to cope with all the requests coming to your website.

Once you gear up with the right live chat plugin you will be able to transmit fast replies and services thus solving any relevant issues, some plugins also support live screen sharing or broadcasting, which makes the process much easier, some plugins support live screen sharing or broadcasting, facilitating you in solving problems with ease, keep track and also initiate business marketing and promotions, most of the live chat plugins also come with a multiple-language support system which helps and automatically translates your conversation with your international users thus capturing a much broader audience.

The process of installing any of the live chat plugins is really easy, you install it just like any other plugin. So is the case with the live chats plugins, what you should consider the most is choosing which one fits your profile. To make sure you choose the right one, you should scrutinize factors like its design whether it will match the layout of your website, usefulness, interface and learning curve.

If you still haven’t made up your mind, we hope this article will be a guiding light for choosing the right plugin.

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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 20.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for: 4.9 or higher

Free Version: Basic capability  of live chat with 1 chat seat and 100 contacts

Premium Version:  Standard package $40 per month Pro package $400 per month

Pros: Chatbots have advanced feature for arranging appointments between the customer and your staff, cool design and Good lead generation features 

Cons: Slow administrative application and lack of trial period for premium features of this live chat plugin.

Drift is a live chat plugin that offers live chat as part of their conversational marketing platform, as well as chatbots, meeting bookings and a handful of integrations. This so-called conversational marketing platform it’s primarily focused on converting leads, so if you plan to grow your business and increase your potential revenue and potential customer list then this live chat plugin will work wonders.

Drift equips you with this really cool feature that grants your visitors or customers to schedule sessions directly with your staff. By using chatbots to preselect leads on your site and qualify them to your sales representatives that will continue the pitch. This method is proved to be very effective as it saves time and gives you better, potential leads that increase conversion rates.

You can set specific paths so that every customer gets their questions answered effortlessly and expeditiously. What differentiates this live chat plugin in correlation to others in this category is its overall focus on the chatbot feature.

Though we would recommend this live chat plugin for websites or companies with an abundant potential of leads and customers and those who intend to have multiple teams for live chat and routing chats amidst departments of branches.

The reason being that the conversational marketing platform feature is only available in the Premium package. The free version of Drift is very basic and does not include chatbots. 

KEY FEATURES:
  • Slack integration (Free version)
  • Customize your Welcome Message (Free version)
  • The chat widget offers an excellent user experience for your customers, both on   mobile and desktop, also the same great experience for you when chatting with customers
  • Leads will be replied to instantaneously with the help of chatbots
  • Chatbots are fully customizable in their messages and target
  • Design and customize your style chat widget to make it fit your site’s appearance (Free Version)
  • Customers reports
  • The learning curve for Drift may not be high at first but it’s very user-friendly
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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 60.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for: 3.0 or higher

Free Version: Basic capability of live chat with 3 chat seats and great potential functionality, 100 chatbot triggers

Premium Version: Chatbots plan starting from 18€ per month and Communicator Plan 18€ per month 

Pros: Fast Installation, Abundant features, and integrations included, All-in-one solution with Messenger chat, Chatbots, and Mailing system. 

Cons: Not having a fully white-label option, you can only remove the powered-by logo as an extra request if you purchased a service for a minimum of  $55 per month.

Tidio Live Chat plugin is a communication application for businesses that keeps chatbots, live chat, email, and Messenger chat centralized. Using this system will cut down the time you use to communicate with your clients thus highlighting customer care and willingness to always be there for their questions as your brand’s aphorism.

Enhancement in sales and customer satisfaction can be reached by this product’s accessible feature with Android and iOS to keep the flow of conversations on all devices. The free plan of this plugin gives you a pack of monthly triggers and gives you all the bot settings to create any scenario you need. The plugin is fully compatible with mobile Responsive Web Design technology and browsers.

This live chat plugin supports a nicely polished automation developer that enables you to enclose various automated scenarios to add to your website, like welcoming your visitors to the page, this is arguably the simplest but nonetheless effective chatbot to use and it lets you configure it to greet your visitors on different languages based on their residency.

Or you can write custom messages to returning customers in which you can include the customer’s name and that way start building trust and loyalty among your clients.

And if you are running a shop one feature that might be of great interest is Recover Abandoned Carts. With this bot, you can reach out to them and ask them what made them discharge their cart giving you a second chance to change your customer’s mind and convince them. Use your best pitch here.

KEY FEATURES:
  • Offers a benevolent free plan perfectly functional with 3 agents + unlimited chats to get you started
  • Integrations of Live Chat, Email, and Messenger (Free Version)
  • HubSpot/Salesforce/Pipedrive/Zapier/Google Analytics are some of the famous tools Tidio integrates with (Free Version)
  • Mobile and Desktop Apps (Free Version)
  • CRM integrations
  • Sneak peek of customer’s texts (Paid Version)
  • Provides a list of visitors that are currently on a page (Paid Version)
  • Sends notifications of new visitors  (Paid Version )
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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress : 70.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for : 3.1 or higher

Free Version: Zendesk Lite starting from €0 with 1 current chat and a 14-day chat history 

Premium Version: Team Plan starting from €14 per month/agent with unlimited chat and 2 triggers, Professional Plan €29 per agent/month with unlimited triggers and Enterprise Plan starting €59 per agent/month including all other plans with additional features all of the plans provide a free trial period.  

Pros: Conditional and Custom Ticket Fields allowing your agents to gather information on customers and give more personalized solutions to their issues, Automated Ticket Sharing allowing to share chars between agents or departments on paid plans.

Cons: Relatively expensive if you want to use all features of Zendesk

Zendesk Live Chat plugin previously known as Zopim Live Chat is a versatile chat and communication widget ideally for websites and businesses looking to step up in competitiveness. Zendesk offers live chat functionality with a severe focus on flexibility that can help you observe insights that are provided in a range of metrics and reports withholding information like customer satisfaction, agent performance, problem resolution progress and other info relating to increasing conversion rates.

This platform integrates with Facebook Messenger and offers an application to download for mobile and other devices, that way always staying in touch with your customers and replying to their requests. One thing you can also do with this live chat plugin is monitor customer behavior and record those actions to transmit you better leads.  

Overall, Zendesk comprises several customer service features in its help desk system. From easy ticket tracking options to complex pre-configured automation rules, undeniably this support ticket system ensures better customer satisfaction. The free version of Zendesk Live chat offers one agent with unlimited chat capabilities, although it can not have multiple chats at the same time so if you are just getting this would be a nice place to start, the transition to other paid plans is seamless. 

  • It offers centralized support, sales, and general inquiries. This promotes togetherness, conclusiveness, and effective attendance to its customers.
  • Automatically send request and emails to groups or departments categorized on values and features
  • Automatic Multilingual Experience
  • Admin Features to assign chats to specific agents or manage their online schedule
  • Visitor’s tracking and monitoring 
  • Chat analytics and metrics to show chat volume and monitor agent response times
  • Ticketing system and integration of social media for insight 
  • Customize chat windows as per your liking 
  • Offline chat automation so visitors can still ask questions even if there are no agents on schedule 
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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress : 20.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for : 4.0 or higher

Free Version: No Free Version Available

Premium Version: Starter Plan $16 per month/agent 60 day chat history, Team Plan $33 per month/agent unlimited chat history, Business Plan being the most popular one $50 per month/agent alongside with customer service department 

Pros: Centralize all the conversations including those from different websites in one dashboard, view full chat history for each customer, great design in the interface, remove branding once you upgrade to the Team Plan. 

Cons: A bit expensive especially if you are planning to have multiple agents at the same time 

LiveChat is yet another accomplished communicator amidst you and your customers and it proves to be a very handy widget chat solution. LiveChat is a feature-rich live chat plugin that provides in-depth analytics steered to expand and intensify your online omnipresence and sales results but also including proactive chat invitations, as well as multiple live chat sessions.

All those awesome features make this chat service a strong and powerful weapon to have by your side. But the number of facilities doesn’t stop just here, LiveChat allows for feedback from your customers regarding your service, thus giving room for improvements, embedded social media within the chat so customers can spread the word about your website/business, integration with third-party apps and services will be a breeze with LiveChat and it also supports a build-in ticketing system so you can manage inquiries in one place easily.

LiveChat has its own marketplace within the platform, if you want to expand the chat’s features you can connect it with other integrations, modules or other plugins, some of which may be billed separately. 

Even though this live chat plugin doesn’t offer a free version, you can have a 14-day free trial to any of the plans with no credit card requirements and get the chance to try all its features and see if it is a good fit for you and your business.

On matters of design, this live chat plugin service is distinguished for a polished, beautiful layout but also handing you the customization tools to design it yourself. A cool and exceptional feature can be the Ee-catchers which are graphical elements that draw attention to the chatbox.

You can upload our own eye-catcher or choose one from the ready-made library available in the premium Team plan and above. Worth mentioning that this plugin is responsive and retina-ready that adjusts automatically to every screen and device. 

Key Features:
  • Easy installation process
  • Preview what customers are typing before they hit send
  • Surveys before and after chat experience 
  • Eye-catchers to draw attention to your chat 
  • Build audiences through customer data that is stored and filtered
  • Good Admin features that help you manage your team
  • Automated triggers 
  • Share files via chat 
  • Third-party integrations including Mail Chimp, Facebook Messenger and Slack
  • Customize and design the chat boxe
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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 3.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for: 3.1 or higher

Free Version: Very limited free plan 

Premium Version: $19 per agent/month billed monthly, $15 per agent/month billed yearly, and $12 per agent/month billed every two years 

Pros: Chat Reports track chat frequency, operator responsiveness, and customer satisfaction, perfect for E-commerce stores since it allows agents to see what shoppers have in their cart 

Cons: Absence of sending PDF files of images

Olark is a live chat plugin that can act as a standalone live chat SaaS but it can be seamlessly integrated with WordPress with an embed piece of code. It represents a suitable live chat plugin advanced solution because it offers a comprehensive set of features and you can integrate it with CRM, help desk and other pertinent components to make your business flourish in potential leads.

What gives this live chat plugin a run for their money is the features included starting from automated messages, team management system run by the admin panel, real-time reporting, transcripts that can be searched for better optimization, targeted chats, chat monitoring and analytics conducted for research purposes.

You can create automated chat messages and set on what conditions they will show to give your customers the nudge to trigger their behavior, all this based on the criteria of location, preferred URL and browsing behavior. It gives you easy access to your data and reports like chat volume, satisfaction ratings, and agent activity, so you can make prioritization arrangements in real-time.

Olark Live Chat plugin will offer you a limited free plan with 1 seat which can be particularly useful for low-traffic websites and offers 20 chats per month, but you can always upgrade for a premium based plan and gain access to the wealth of features it has to offer.

As of design capabilities, you can customize your chat box to match your website, you can also profit from their selection of holiday themes chats, which frankly is a nice touch, and a set of attention-grabbers that can be put on top of the chatbox, as the name suggests it draws attention to to the chat in a non-intrusive way.

KEY FEATURES:
  • Olark’s capability to integrate with a number of CRM like Salesforce, Highrise, Nutshell, E-commerce and Help Desk – Groove, Desk.com, Zendesk, platforms will lend you with prosperous data and customer observations
  • Receive emails about your live chat reports and an at-a-glance view of your real-time data
  • Access to chat transcripts and offline email in your transcript archive alongside with other info you collect
  • Add pre-chat-surveys to gain customer’s information before your agent starts the conversation
  • Whit labeling- Remove Olark’s branding – available for premium plans
  • Easy to translate in different languages 
  • Create groups of operators assigning them in different groups dedicate to certain profiles of customers  

Intercom

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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 10.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for 4.2.0 or higher

Free Version: The free plugin available on WordPress offers the basic features to set up a live chat for your site

Premium Version: starts at $39 for small businesses and offers only 1 seat, next you have the Grow plan aimed for 5 seats and packed with more feature for $99 per month, and for larger businesses starts at $499 per month, includes 10 seats

Pros: Advanced feature for business communication, automated triggers, and user tracking functionality

Cons: Intercome is more focused on businesses rather than individuals 

Intercom is one of the most popular live chat plugin that offers a plethora of high-end tools and features that not only allow you to communicate directly with your customers but help you boost conversions and attain targetted goals using the top-tier triggers and powerful prospect data. Although the plugin does cost a bit, if you are looking to increase your business, it will be worth the spending. 

Intercome has three business-oriented plans that offer a bountiful of tools of all kinds to help you reach your goals. You have the Conversational Marketing, that has included conversational chatbots, automatic meeting booking, revenue and performance reporting, route conversation to specific team inboxes, and more. 

Next on you have the Conversational Customer engagement and Conversational Support plans that will provide more specific target-oriented features with more automated services. 

Intercom offers the most extravagant features for more complex and grand businesses that need a more compound approach if you are in the search for a live chat software, then Intercom’s advanced features might be overwhelming for small to medium size websites. But on the other hand, large businesses will take full advantage of all the wondrous tools this live chat plugin offers.  

KEY FEATURES:
  • Easily personalize your messages using the powerful behavioral data and attributes
  • Beautiful interface and design of the chat elements thus providing an excellent user experience
  •  Intercome offers chat for both desktop and mobile devices, having both experiences being seamless 
  • Target the chats to specific segments 
  • Self-serve chat, that offers helpful articles and provides automated resolved questions
  • A/B testing, slowing you to customize messages and perform insightful analytics and companions on which campaign is more successful 
  • Available chatbots to free your team’s time 
  • Custom Bots will collect upfront information from your customers, providing a more detailed qualified leads 

Crisp Live Chat

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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 20.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for 3.0.1 or higher

Free Version: The free plugin available on WordPress offers some great live chat features, all easily accessible 

Premium Version: The pro version starts at $25 per month and is suitable for starting businesses and offers 4 seats, and the Unlimited plan offers hence the name unlimited seats and comes at a price of $95 per month suitable for larger companies

Pros: Beautiful design of the chats, thus offering a better customer experience, integration of Facebook messenger, and more

Cons: Crisp Live Chat plugin is a modular-based plugin. This means that if you wish to add more functionality to the live chat you would need to install separate plugins

Crips is another incredible live chat plugin that works wonders with WordPress websites, it offers great flexibility and provides excellent customer support for your site by consolidating all the channel into a joint task force of customer relationship. The live chat will offer the possibility to customize tailored messages that help your users engage with your site and offer them amazing customer service. 

One amazing feature of the Crisp live chat is the ability to communicate internationally with all your customers. You can reply in your native language and the Live Translator feature will automatically translate it onto your customer’s language. 

The builtin feature that Crisp offers, will help you communicate with your customers more efficiently and those conversations to be more productive. One such feature is the Video chat software that allows you to engage with your customers via video or audio and adds a more human touch to the conversation. Which is an added indicator for customer trustworthiness. 

In addition to that, you can build custom chatbots, triggers, using the integrated chat API, the trick is you must know what you are doing, and for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty with complex stuff, the built-in tools will be more than enough for providing the best customer experience. 

KEY FEATURES:
  • Crisp provides direct communication with customers on your website
  • The Crisp Inbox will help you manage all your customer messages from one place
  • Real-time chat translations between you and your customers
  • Extensive API documentation to help you build custom powerful integrations
  • The co-browsing software helps you provide real-time assistance to your customers with shared browsing extension
  • Crisp offer automated instant messages that help reduce bounce rates
  • Offer a free basic plan 
  • Tailor-made messages to attract customers and provide insightful information on their actions and behaviours 

Tawk.To Live Chat

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STATISTICS FROM WORDPRESS

Active Installations on WordPress: 200.000+ 

Which WP Version works best for 2.7 or higher

Free Version: The free version of Tawk.to provides helpful tools and features to maintain communication with customers and monitor website visitors in real-time.

Premium Version: Tawk.to is a free live chat plugin and offers bountiful of advanced features for free, some additional cost to the plugin can be the removal of “powered by” text at the bottom of the live chat widget for $12 per month, or you could hire people to answer you live chats for $1 per hour per agent. 

Pros: All the wondrous tools and features are offered for free 

Cons: It does not include chatbots, or Facebook messenger integration, or even marketing tools  

Meet one of the most installed live chat plugin in the WordPress repository, Tawk.to is an amazing tool to help you communicate and keep in touch with your customers while being all for free. Stay connected with your visitors wither via desktop or mobile devices and have monitored data stores for more insights on customers and their behaviors. 

The live chat will offer a built-in Knowledge Base and some very handy shortcodes that helps provide quick and consistent replies to your customers. Besides the advanced tools, Tawk.to offers beautiful chat interfaces, as well as the ability to customize their appearance to match it to your site’s aesthetic. 

As we mentioned in the beginning Tawk.to offers merely live chat customer features to provide instant communication, but doesn’t provide CRM or automated marketing solutions like other plugins in the list offer.

Although Tawk.to is an amazing choice for those starting out and looking to expand their website or their business. In the meantime, for the more added volume of customer queries, you could hire agents to answer live chats for you. 

The live chat is translated into 27 international languages that means you could initiate conversations with your clients on a global scale. 

KEY FEATURES:
  • With Tawk.to you get unlimited chat history storage
  • The live chat plugin is translated into 27 languages allowing you to communicate with international customers as the conversation will be translated into the native language
  • Track engagement
  • Shortcuts or canned responses to provide faster and more efficient responses as well as the built-in Knowledge Base
  • Unlimited agents
  •  You can interact with customers either via the web, Windows and Mac desktops, as well as via the mobile apps 
  • Monitor your website and your customers in real-time 
  • Design and customize the chat widgets to appear to your outer layout 
  • Remove the branding ” Powerd By” for an added $12 per month

Final Verdict

Coming to an end with this article, this should be the part where we lay our recommendations, but in fact, there is no all-encompassing solution when it comes to live chats plugins. They surely can play a huge part in converting potential customers and leads and power you with great tools for better insights, it all comes down to our objectives. Budget, the size of our team and business.

As we mentioned below there are alternative free plans if you are on the search for a lightweight solution and nothing too fancy. But if you are keen on integrations and want in-depth analytics, then it would be best if you take your time and counterweight the pros and cons each live chat plugin has to offer. See what you are willing or not to compromise. 

We can set you up with a few basic recommendations. If you are a small-time business, LiveChat or Tidio can be a good choice for you as they offer all the right tools. On the other hand for larger businesses viable live chat services would be Zendesk or Drift due to their analytics, productivity, and consistency. You can’t go wrong with any of them, just make sure to match your aspirations with all one of these alternatives have to offer.

What other live chat plugins you feel would be a good addition to this article. Feel free to add our suggestions in the comments below as we take for consideration any idea/critic from you.

By Team Neuron

Director of product design, Freehand

Introducing Kaon WordPress Theme