Hubspot versus Tawk.to

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries and can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the Free Tools plan of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder and is included in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of which incur an additional fee.

Tawk.To is different. It offers the full app for free. Yes, there is no bullsh*t, a free chat widget.

Tawk.to is the centipede among the chatwidget providers. They offer many features and add-ons. Their Agent software runs on mobile phones as well ask native desktop applications.

The level of supoort on Tawk.to’s website is excellent, especially considering the app is free. For most questions the Help Center will cover you and you can find extensive documentation and code snippets for developers who want to leverage Tawk.to’s JavaScript API and Webhooks.

Free comes often at the price of performance, although this is not necessarily noticeable when top-notch developers integrate the widget.

The few paid add-ons are Video + Voice Chat for $29 per month and to remove the “Powered by tawk.to” branding. The white label will set you back $19 per month.

Tawk.to also has Chat Agents for hire to man your chat for $1 per hour. You can try this service for 7 days for free.