Rocket.Chat versus Olark

Rocket.Chat is a SaaS and genuine Free Open Source Software platform. They are developing an impressive range of communication and collaboration solutions for a wide variety of organizations, catering to industries like financial services, healthcare, and governments.

Rocket.chat, being Open Source, lets you review the code yourself or contribute to the project in their GitHub Repository. Unlike most providers, Rocket.Chat holds an MIT license, granting you full ownership and control over your code, data, privacy, and security. Detailed documentation for developers is available on the Rocket.Chat website, allowing you to build upon their framework and customize integrations.

One of their core products is Team Collaboration which you can set up as a privately hosted alternative to Slack. Of course, the use case for their software highlighted here is Customer Service and Engagement.

With Rocket.Chat you can manage live chat, email, SMS, and social media channels in a single security oriented hub. The options and features at hand are mostly limited by your imagination.

Setting up, self-hosting, and maintaining your own server is free. However, you will need technical prowess or hire developers to leverage most of the possibilities of their stack. Some Enterprise Edition features are only available with a subscription, which you can try out with a 30 day free trial.

A 30 day free trial is also available for their robust and scalable cloud hosted SaaS Enterprise solutions. If your organization requires more strict control, the entire infrastructure can be hosted on premise.

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.