A live chat feature allows businesses to interact with their customers directly or handle their grievances better. This in turn helps increase the traffic and responsiveness of a website and results in the business gaining a good reputation too. The website owners can also increase the conversion ratio for their products / services with the help of the live chat software.
There are several software providers for live chat. Some of these are free and some are open-sourced. So if you’re looking for live chat software, we bring you a curated list of the top free and open source chat software.
Table of Contents
Top free live chat software
Most of the live chat software have a free version that businesses can use without having to pay. The basic package does have some limitations, but it lets website owners utilize the chat features that can help them improve communication with the audience.
Zendesk
Zendex is a reliable live chat software that has a free plan, which is known as Lite. The paid plans on the other hand, come with a slew of additional features. Some of the features that Zendesk offers are:
1. Concurrent chats: Businesses can have a single concurrent chat at a time from the website. A person at the back end is necessary to initiate the chat.
2. Chat history: The admin can access the chat history for up to 14 days. This provides them the opportunity to follow up on a situation or problem.
3. Chat Rating: Zendesk Lite shows the chat rating as the admin is able to check the frequency of chat activities.
Businesses get access to the features of the most expensive Zendesk Enterprise plan initially. Once the trial period gets over, Zendesk Lite is activated till the customer upgrades to a paid plan.
The payment process is seamless too as Zendesk supports multiple forms of online transaction.
Pure Chat
Pure Chat also is a trending live chat software that has a free plan. One can choose this to ensure more traffic on a website dealing with small or medium scale business. Business owners should look at the key features of Pure Chat.
1. Unlimited Chats: The free plan for Pure Chat gives businesses the ability to manage unlimited chats. This helps to reach several people at a time. Naturally, the leads and sales increase to a great extent.
2. Works with up to 3 websites: A single free live chat plan works with up to 3 different websites. So, you get more exposure. With live chat, you can also track visitors.
3. Support: Pure Chat supports only for business hours. However, given it’s free, it remains a fair deal.
Small business site owners can rely on Pure Chat as it provides user-friendly access to the chatting platform and ultimate security.
EngageBay
EngageBay is reliable software that helps businesses run seamlessly. It has a free pack that offers many features. A business owner can access these features and assure outstanding performance of their website. The EngageBay software allows customers to change the subscription anytime, either by upgrading or downgrading.
To enjoy the features of the free pack, all one needs to do is to make an account. Apart from the above conveniences, EngageBay claims 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime. All maintenance and updates occur only after notice.
1. Live chat: The live chat feature is quite useful as it offers businesses access to triggers and go for multiple chats at a time.
2. Email marketing: Email marketing is another vital feature that comes free with EngageBay. This helps the business increase the traffic properly.
3. CRM: The cloud-based CRM setup is available with EngageBay for free. This software offers a well-designed CRM setup that helps to track leads and then turn them into sales.
4. Helpdesk: Helpdesk is a platform that resembles the live chat feature. Here the customers can enter their problems and the website admins can respond to it.
Top open source live chat software
Open-source live chat software provides more exposure to the sales for a website. This is possible because the original source code of the software is easily modifiable. These days, most open-source live chat software offers a free plan. Some top-ranking open source live chat software are:
Odoo Live Chat
Odoo Live Chat is one of the leading open source software that provides live chat features. It comprises automated features that makes it active 24×7. Customers will get total support on a real time basis. Here are its salient features.
1. Efficient tracking: Accessibility through several modules appear in this software to provide high-end tracking of all the chats.
2. Presence of shortcut templates: The shortcuts and templates on this software ensure the chatting executives save time. They can easily upload generic answers on the chat against the questions while chatting.
3. Chat review and evaluation: Both chat review and evaluation features are present on the service level for Odoo Live Chat software. This helps business admins place well-framed answers with all necessary information to the customers. Moreover, the customers can put smileys on the chats to make the communication approachable.
Tawk.to
The key benefit that Tawk.to software provides is proper segregation of the website’s traffic. Moreover, it efficiently monitors the activities of the visitors on the website. With the Tawk.to software, the website owners get a seamless means to communicate with the customers. These are the key features of Tawk.to.
1. ‘Call Me’ option: The ‘Call Me’ option feature allows the end-users to have a voice chat with the customer executives directly. This feature helps retain several customers who aren’t comfortable to chat with the executives.
2. Offline form: Specific business websites can give offline forms to the customers while using the Tawk.to live chat software. This gives the customer a chance to fill up a form while being offline and send it afterwards. In these forms, they can write about the problems they are facing.
3. Visitor tracking: Just like many other free and open-source live chatting software, Tawk.to offers the executives the opportunity to track the number of visitors and their activities on the website.
Userlike
Userlike is an open-source live chat software that has an active chatbot. Moreover, the charges for this software are quite less compared to the others. A free pack is also available that comes with some basic features. The easy payment setup and instant activation make this software quite prominent in the market.
1. Website chatting: Basic website chatting feature of Userlike makes it user-friendly. Both the customers and back-end personnel of the website can use the software easily.
2. Presence of chatbots: The presence of chatbots makes Userlike unique. These chatbots can give generic answers to the customers even during the absence of the chatting personnel.
3. Customer messaging: Proper customer messaging ensures more traffic and sales for a business website. Customer messaging also helps to disseminate information to the customers from the website’s end.
4. WhatsApp compatibility: WhatsApp compatibility makes this live chat software desirable among business owners. They can expect higher traffic due to the presence of real-time WhatsApp chatting features for customers’ convenience.
Bottomline
Live chat software ensures that potential customers can reach out to you without any hesitation. Not only this ensures a better connection with the website’s users, but also increase sales and authority. And with these free and open source live chat software, you don’t necessarily need to invest anything up front.
Do let us know in the comment box below for which software did you go for.
