Olark versus Gosquared

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.

Gosquared, started in 2006, defines itself as a provider of growth software for subscription businesses. Their services consist of customer engagement, live chat, and web analytics.

GoSquared live chat has integrations with platforms like WordPress, Zapier, and Zendesk. It offers the possibility to import customer data from a.o. Intercom and Salesforce. The number of available features for live chat is relatively limited.

The prices of their plans for live chat are based on the number of seats. Additional subscriptions are available to add more advanced analytics or a team inbox.

All plans include a basic set of features, starting at $29 per month for 1 agent. It’s possible to subscribe to a 7 day free trial on all plans.