Olark versus LiveChat

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.

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.