Olark versus Live Agent

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.

LiveAgent offers an all-in-one support helpdesk. What started out as a simple software development company from Slovakia, turned into a hyper focused customer service company. It all started when they couldn’t find any software with the functionality they believe is essential for customer support.

Since their start in 2006, they have improved their products to offer a staggering 175+ features and more than 220 integrations, plugins, and apps.

A unique feature of LiveAgent is gamification to increase your agents’ engagement and promote healthy competition. You can award badges and rewards based on the evaluation of an agent’s performance.

LiveAgent offers a free plan that includes the bare necessities for live chat support on your website. Of course, the deployment and features in this plan are limited.

The paid plans range from $12 to $59 per seat per month for a monthly based subscription. The plans are suited for all business sizes, from a special deal for startups up to custom configurations for enterprise.

All paid plans have a 7 day or 30 day free trial, depending on the type of email address you want to use.