Olark versus Boei

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.

Boei is a Dutch one man company founded in 2021. Their main focus is turning website visitors into leads. When someone makes contact through Boei they automatically become a lead. Leads can then be ansewered in another app or in the official apps (e.g. WhatsApp).

Boei aims to serve as the frontend for customers to contact you, offering many integrations and plugins with that specific goal in mind. You can communicate through other platforms from a single button on your website.

Boei has a free plan for two communication channels on your website, limited to 50 conversations per month for 1 agent. Their paid plans start at $8 per month with Essentials, which includes all their communication channels, and is limited to 1000 conversations per month for 1 agent.

• Pro starts at $20 per month.

• Agency starts at $75 per month.

• All plans have a 14 day free trial.