Best free live chat for website: 5 tools and where free stops

Best free live chat for a website: the short list

The best free live chat for a website is tawk.to: its core chat has no cap on agents, conversations or history. Tidio and Crisp cap conversations or seats on their free plans, and HubSpot says its live chat and chatbot builder start free with no credit card. LiveChat Essential, at $25 per user a month billed monthly, has no free plan, as read on 7 October 2026.

LiveChat's pricing page now routes new trials to Text plans, "the next product from the team behind LiveChat". The table lists what is free in each tool, the first paid step and the catch.

Where each free plan stops

tawk.to's free chat has no limit on agents, and no caps on conversations, contacts or chat history. HubSpot's catalog lists live chat among its free tools, caps free accounts at 1,000 contacts and says the free live chat includes HubSpot branding.

Tidio Free covers 50 billable conversations and 10 seats; a conversation counts once it includes a message from a human agent. Crisp Free is free forever with a website chat widget and 2 seats, and no AI credits. A site with three people answering chats outgrows Crisp Free's 2 seats at once, while Tidio Free's 10 seats are not the limit; its 50 conversations are.

What the free tools charge for

tawk.to charges for four add-ons: AI Assist at $29 a month, Whitelabel at $29 a month, Voice Agents from $49 a month plus usage and Data Enrichment from $59 a month. Whitelabel removes the tawk.to badge.

Tidio sells branding removal as a paid add-on. Crisp's paid plans are priced per workspace with seats included, and the price is on Crisp's own page. HubSpot's paid seats start at Service Hub Starter, $20 per seat a month at its list price.

When a paid tool like LiveChat is worth it

LiveChat's own small-business page says a simple site can get by on free tools with unlimited agents. tawk.to's founder letter adds that staffing a 24/7 chat, not the software, is the costly part.

What LiveChat's price buys is an AI Agent in every plan, software that answers chats on its own from the knowledge you give it, with 10 AI resolutions a month on Essential; a resolution is a conversation in which it directly solves a customer question. On Shopify it reads the live catalog.

On the paid side, LiveChat Essential costs $25 per user a month, billed monthly, or $19 billed annually. That is the case for paying: a store that wants the AI Agent answering from its catalog. LiveChat vs tawk.to sets the paid seat against the free one.

Free for a while: trials

LiveChat's trial runs 14 days with no card, and at its end you choose a plan and add a payment method; nothing is charged automatically. Tidio's runs 7 days with no card and then drops the account to the Free plan, and Crisp's runs 14 days with no card. LiveChat free trial covers it in detail. Best live chat software compares the paid tools.