Chatra versus Olark

Chatra, a live chat solution targeted mostly at small and medium-sized businesses, bought by Sendinblue in 2021. It’s been announced that Chatra will merge into Sendinblue’s complete digital marketing and e-commerce suite.

The company profiles itself with their personal approach to customers, although they report having over 45,000 customers. Chatra hosts a self published book and guides section on the website to help you improve your customer relation game.

Integrations with popular platforms like Wordpress and Shopify are free, Others, like Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Help Scout, and email integration are only included in the paid plans.

Chatra offers a free plan for a single seat. The features are limited but that is to be expected for a free plan. Their paid plans start at $21 per seat per month. Free 10 day trials are available for the paid plans, which is useful to test all features before purchasing.

Founded in 2008, Olark has seen the rise of chat software for over a decade. After getting funding from the famous YCombinator incubator Olark launched their first live chat platform.

Olark is committed to developing accessible software and is actively testing improvements of assistive technologies. It’s awesome to see a provider care about this often overlooked aspect of customer service.

Besides live chat, Olark also markets as customer metrics company. Since putting a widget on your platform gives you a lot of valuable data.

To ensure that every user always gets the right answer, the chatbot can transfer to a human employee at any time. This Human Handover is possible via Live Chat or E-Mail.

Olark offers a free plan that offers little features and is limited to a single seat and 20 chats per month, which will not be sufficient for most use cases.

Their paid plans start at $29 per month per seat. Free trials are available. Unfortunately, credit card information is required for the trial and you will be billed automatically if you don’t cancel the trial in time.

As a customer-focused company, Olark may want to consider offering a no-credit-card-required trial so potential customers are more likely to fully experience all their features.

Additional subscriptions are available for “Powerups” like co-browsing, live chat translation, and visitor insights.