LiveChat versus Hubspot

LiveChat, originally from Poland, has been in the online customer service software business since 2002, being one the first companies to provide a live chat function to websites.

As one of the largest providers they offer a large number of app integrations and customization possibilties, ranging from CRM to e-commerce and help-desk software.

Their cheapest plan starts at $16 per month for one agent. A lot of features, analytics, and plugins are paid options or only available in their more expensive plans. They don’t offer a free plan. However, a 14 days free trial is available.

LiveChat has a substantial customer base consisting of over 35,000 companies worldwide. Among their customers are titans of industry like Adobe, Atlassian, PayPal, and Unilever.

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 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 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, in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of them paid.

Free plans, with limited functionality for most tools, are available for all Hubs for an unlimited number of agents. The paid plans for the Service Hub start at $18 per month for 2 agents to use the included paid tools and features.

Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries.