3 Famous and Low-Budget Live Chat Apps for SMEs and Startups

The digital world of the twenty-first century demands us to be really quick and swift. Speed is the king of the digital world. Prompt and fast replies from companies entice their clients. In such a situation, phone calls may cause the problem of time zones of clients from different countries, and emails may take too long to respond. Live Chat Apps are the best possible alternative to this heck. They allow you to connect your website visitors directly.

You all might already be aware of what live chat is and why you should have it on your website. This blog is a step forward to your previous knowledge. Here, we will discuss three of the famous and economical live chat applications for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and startups. The blog is written after experimenting with three online chat applications. These are Tawk.to, Jivo, and Tidio. I hope that it will help you to find out the befitting Live Chat App for your newly started business or your SMEs.

Let us all first have a look at the basic features of all three apps. Later, we will compare all of them with each other (refer to TABLE: COMPARISON OF TAWK.TO , JIVO, AND TIDIO) to have a better understanding. Remember that if a caterpillar is transformed with care, it transforms into a beautiful butterfly. But if left unintended, it dies as a caterpillar. Therefore, it is highly recommended to study these features carefully and choose the best fit for your business.

Tawk.to

Tawk.to is one of the famous live chat applications for websites. It offers you most of its services for free to monitor your website and talk directly to your website visitors. Around 3.6+ million are using this chat app across the world. It works on all the devices so that you never miss a chance to reply to your visitor even if you are away from your laptop and respond to them using your mobile phones. Its FREE Features are as follows:

Features of Tawk.to

• Real-time monitoring of the website
• Message translation in 27 languages
• Pre-Chat buttons (Quick responses with shortcuts)
• Proactive Chat option
• Customizable according to your branding 
• Departments to divide your support team into different departments
• Availability to create Tickets. Tickets are there for your support and let you save the problem/query of your client and solve it later in the future. You can assign these tickets to any of your support team members.
• Unlimited Support Team members for FREE!

Besides, tawk.to offers various add-ons to increase its functionality. It renders them as paid features. They include the following:

• Removal of tawk.to Branding from your site ($12/month)
• Voice, Video, and Screen sharing ($27/month)
• Hire a live agent (worth $1/hour)
• Hire a virtual agent (worth $7/hour)

These live/virtual agents are professionally trained, and they assist you by answering to the questions of your clients on your behalf. 

Tawk.to also provides a large number of integrations (refer to TABLE: INTEGRATIONS). It offers real-time site visitors insights whereas in Jivo & tidio it is a paid feature. But it doesn’t support integration with Facebook messenger or WhatsApp business account as it has some issues in its CDN used for third-party apps.’

It doesn’t translate the IP address of the visitor into the exact location of the visitor in the free account. It may show you the country to which the visitor belongs, unlike jivo or tidio, but it will not show the city of the visitor.

Jivo

Jivo is a widely used live chat app used by almost more than 270k websites all around the world. Like, tawk.to, Jivo also works on all devices and enables you to respond to your website visitors by your handheld device.  It is optimized for all of the Operating Systems and modern browsers. Also, it has a native mobile menu that looks perfect on the mobile screen. It offers a very economical package with a long list of features. By paying just $13 per month per agent, you can get a long list of features listed below:

Features of Jivo

• Real-time monitoring of your website visitors
• Message translation in 20 languages
• Perfectly designed as its widget fits into the side-bar
• Shows the name of the person visiting the website along with the translation of the IP address of the visitor to the city he/she belongs to
• Proactive chat Messaging Trigger feature
• Pre-chat buttons 
• Pre-chat / in-chat contact information collection
• Reminders for the team
• CRM to see previous chats. Also, to create and assign queries to a particular support agent.
• Removal of branding
• Can integrate with Omni channels like Fb messenger, Viber, etc 
• Departments to divide your support team
• Service quality ratings by customers
• SSL Encryption
• Multi-agent chats

And the list goes on…….

Jivo has a vast range of features that it’s impossible to list all the features here. It categorizes them into three major divisions. These are: Chat with Website Visitors; Agent Productivity; and Analytics and Reporting. You can see all the features at JIVO FEATURES.

It helps you manage your chat history, your support team, and a record of analytics. It supports integration with a wide number of platforms (refer to TABLE: INTEGRATIONS). The best part is, you can integrate it with Fb Messenger and Viber as well. In this way, it gives easy access and helps to reach out to your customers.

To use all these Jivo features, you have to pay $156 annually per support agent.

Tidio

Just like Tawk.to and Jivo, Tidio is also a commonly used live chat application used by more than 300k users around the globe. Following the trends of the market, it also enables you to connect to your customers via mobile phone. Tidio has a paid plan of $18 per month per agent. It has the following features:

Features of Tidio

• Response in less than 3 minutes
• Real-time monitoring
• Customizable according to your brand
• Shows the name of the person visiting the website along with the translation of the IP address of the visitor to the city he/she belongs to
• Chat automation using AI
• Pre-Chat options
• Proactive Chat Feature
• Can integrate with Facebook Messenger
• Removal of Branding

Tidio supports integration with WordPress, Shopify, Fb Messenger, and many others (refer to TABLE: INTEGRATIONS).

One of the main problems with Tidio is that sometimes live messages are not sent to Support Agents even if they are live. Rather than that, they are sent as emails to the agents. 

Tidio charges $18 per month for the first Support Agent, but it offers discounts as you grow the Support Team.

Integrations of Live Chat Apps

All these three online chat apps (Tawk.to, Jivo, Tidio) provide integration with following platforms listed in the table below:

Live Chat Apps – Reviews & Ratings

We have collected about these applications using third Party reviews. Here, we are going to list some of the reviews and ratings from TRUSTPILOT.

Support by Live Chat Apps

From our experience of using all of these three apps, we found that Support Staff tawk.to works best. It promptly replies and solves our queries. Jivo’s staff also responds in time, but Tidio’s staff replies a bit late. If someone asks me to rate support staff of these apps, it will be in  the following manner:

Tawk.to>Jivo>Tidio

Bugs in Live Chat Apps

Bugs are present in all of these three online chat applications. But their intensity differs in all of them. Our experience with these three apps shows that Tawk.to has the least number of bugs in it. Maybe it is because of the limited number of features in it. The next is Jivo, and at the end is Tidio. The major bug in Tidio is that sometimes rather than notifying support agents by messages, it sends them email despite them being online. The number of bugs in these apps are as follows:

Tawk.to<Jivo<Tidio

Comparison of Live Chat Apps: Tawk.to | Jivo | Tidio

Here is a comparison table of all three apps:

Conclusion

From the above discussion, we conclude that Jivo has the most number of features with $156 per annum per Support Agent. But there is a bit of issue with its Support Staff, and some bugs are also there in this app. You can neglect these metrics and go for it if your SME or Startup can afford to pay $156 annually per support agent since it provides a wide range of features. It has outstanding ratings and reviews on Trustpilot. It makes your live chat app incredible and allures clients.

But if there are financial issues in your company, you can go for free features of Tawk.to. It gives you almost the same features as Jivo but, it is free of cost (excluding the paid features discussed above). Tawk.to is best to start with as most of its features are free.

You can also go for Tidio. It is almost the same as Jivo, but why pay more if Jivo provides you the same features by paying less?

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