Olark versus POWR

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.

POWR offers a complete suite of no-code eCommerce solutions with more than 60 apps and plugins, mostly aimed at platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify.

Their live chat plugin connects through Facebook Messenger. Meaning, POWR may not be a good choice for businesses that have concerns about Facebook’s policies and reputation.

The customization tool for the chat widget is easy to use but constrained, even with their more expensive plans.

POWR’s commercial approach is different from their competitors’. They have a dual pricing system for their products that may seem simple at first but can get complicated and costly quickly.

Firstly, they offer complete suites that are billed by a maximum amount of traffic on your website. The plugins will stop working if this amount is exceeded. A free suite with a restricted number of apps is available for sites with traffic up to 250 views per month.

Secondly, they offer subscriptions per app or plugin for a set price. This applies to their live chat plugin as well. A free plan with limited features is available. Their paid plans starts at $5.49 per month. There are no free trials available.

Customers of POWR are mostly small businesses. A few of them share their success stories on the POWR.io website.