Live Chat Guides The Best Customer Support Software
with Live Chat Included

Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support solution that includes live chat as well as customer management, a knowledge base, automated workflows and more. It has a clean design and lots of great reviews and is worth being on your list if you are evaluating customer support solutions.

Pros

Help Scout is smaller than some of the other products on this list, but their customer service focus is clear in everything from their marketing to their cleanly designed products.

Cons

Since they are smaller and more focused, an "enterprise" sized company might want more from a "complete" customer support solution.

Groove

Groove supports live chat through their "Groove Widget", but they are much more than just that - they have a shared inbox for handling customer support as well as a knowledge base for cataloging and sharing FAQs and documentation.

Pros

Groove's prices include unlimited users, so you don't have to worry about your bill going crazy as your team grows.

Cons

Like Help Scout, they are also one of the smaller offerings (in terms of company size and software depth).

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is part of Freshworks and is a complete customer service package. It does cost less than some competitors, but also has additional packages that you may have to purchase to get the functionality you want.

Pros

With an easy buying process and ability to just buy the packages you want, Freshdesk might be a good choice for a company that is just starting to try out a customer service platform and wants to see if it fits their company culture.

Cons

It can be easy to figure out what you need since there are several options for packages - but at least the pricing is straightforward for each of them.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a set of tools all designed to help manage customer service and sales. That includes a Ticketing system (with live chat), a help center, and chatbot abilities.

Pros

They have a history of providing great customer service software, and have an easy and transparent buying process.

Cons

Like HubSpot or Intercom, if you don't want to use their suite of customer service tools, then it's probably worth looking at one of the more standalone live chat widgets.

HubSpot

HubSpot is primarily a CRM that will track all of your customer's data and help you manage the entire customer relationship.

They do also include a pretty good live chat widget with that! It integrates well with their CRM backend, so if you want to use HubSpot for customer management, then make sure you check out their live chat widget as well.

Pros

They have many features and modules for customer service, tracking, and management. They also have a huge customer base of both small and large companies, so they definitely know what they're doing.

Cons

If you don't want to use their entire CRM platform, then it's not worth it to just use them for a live chat widget - you're better off choosing one of the more standalone live chat options.

Intercom

The original live chat widget which is now so much more.

Intercom breaks their offerings into three categories: "Support", "Engage", and "Convert", and live chat is now just one part of this larger product offering that can manage your customer support, conversion, and success.

Features

There's too many list, but the features include everything that you'd expect from a live chat widget provider and more:

• Team management and question routing
• One-click customer responses
• Code-free answer bot

Pros

They've been around for a long time and have support for almost any customer support use case you can think of. They also have great reviews

Cons

Intercom can get expensive. The biggest complaint I hear about Intercom is that you can start at $74/mo, but it easily goes past $1k/mo as your team size and use cases grow.