Formilla versus Olark

Formilla has been in business since 2012, mainly focusing on live chat and marketing automation. They also offer Managed Live Chat, which you can use to backup or outsource your customer service and let Formilla handle your chats by their highly-trained live chat agents. Managed Live Chat starts at $69.00 per month for up to 10 chats.

Their live chat integrates with WordPress, Weebly, Shopify, Wix, Joomla, and more. It includes features like AI and custom chatbots, language support, and custom branding.

Formilla’s plans start a $24.99 per month. All paid plans have 2 seats (they call it agents) included, extra seats can be added for an additional fee. They have a free plan for small businesses with up to 30 chats per month and 1 seat. A 15 day free trial is available.

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.