Best Free Live Chat Software in 2026 (Compared)
I started my customer support journey paying $39/month for Gleap. It worked, but when you’re bootstrapping and every dollar counts, paying for a chat tool stings. So I went looking for free alternatives, tried a few, got frustrated with all of them, and ended up building my own.
Along the way I used Chatwoot for over a year and tried Tidio briefly. For the tools I haven’t personally used — tawk.to and Crisp — I’ve pulled everything from their current pricing pages and documentation, and I’ll be upfront about where my experience ends and research begins.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Free seats | Conversations | AI on free tier | Upgrade starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tawk.to | Unlimited | Unlimited | No (paid add-on) | Free — paid add-ons only |
| Chatwoot | 2 (cloud) / unlimited (self-hosted) | 500/mo (cloud) / unlimited (self-hosted) | No | $19/agent/month |
| Crisp | 2 | Unlimited | No | $45/month |
| Tidio | Not clearly stated | Unlimited chat, 100 visitors on Flows | 50 one-off AI conversations | $24/month |
| Receiveo | 10 | Unlimited | Yes — 10 MACs/month | $49/month |
tawk.to — everything free, different business model
I haven’t used tawk.to personally. This is based on their website.
tawk.to is genuinely free. Not freemium, not a trial — the entire product is free. Unlimited agents, unlimited conversations, unlimited history. They make money by selling hired chat agents at $1/hour and charging to remove the “Powered by tawk.to” branding from the widget.
I respect this model even if I wouldn’t pursue it myself. They’re swallowing infrastructure costs to grow the brand, and it’s clearly working — they’re one of the most widely used chat tools in the world. That said, their AI Assist is a paid add-on (pricing isn’t public), so if you want AI handling conversations, the “free” story gets murkier.
Best for: Teams that want a basic chat widget and don’t need AI or a modern interface. If all you need is “someone types, someone replies,” tawk.to does that for $0.
Chatwoot — I used this for a year
I ran Chatwoot’s self-hosted version through 2024 and into 2025. It’s open source, MIT licensed, and when you self-host it, you get unlimited agents and unlimited conversations. That part is great.
What wasn’t great: I kept losing customers. I’d get a notification on my phone that someone had sent a message, but the mobile app was unreliable — sometimes the notification just wouldn’t fire. By the time I opened my laptop, the visitor had already left. This happened enough times that it became the core problem I wanted to solve when I started building Receiveo.
The cloud-hosted free tier is a different story. You get 2 agents, 500 conversations per month, live chat only (no email, no WhatsApp), and 30-day data retention. That means your conversation history disappears after a month. No AI on the free tier either.
If you’re technical and willing to manage your own server, database, and Redis instance, the self-hosted community edition is genuinely generous. If you’re not, the cloud free tier is tight.
Best for: Technical teams who can self-host and want full control. The cloud free tier is too limited for most.
Crisp — clean product, restrictive free tier
I haven’t used Crisp. This is based on their pricing page and docs.
Crisp’s free tier gives you 2 seats, 100 contacts, and a basic chat widget. No AI, no knowledge base, no email channel. Their approach makes sense to me — they have a nice balance between brand exposure and monetization. The free tier lets you try the product, and if you need more, the paid plans are reasonably structured.
The thing that stands out: the knowledge base doesn’t unlock until the Essentials plan at $95/month. I think that’s fair — premium features on premium plans — but if a knowledge base is important to you on day one, Crisp’s free tier won’t get you there.
They price per workspace rather than per seat, and they don’t charge per conversation. The paid tiers are $45/month (4 seats, $5 in AI credits), $95/month (10 seats, knowledge base, $25 in AI credits), and $295/month (20+ seats, white-label, $75 in AI credits).
Best for: Small teams who value design and are OK with 2 seats to start. Crisp’s interface is well-regarded, but the free tier is more of a taste than a tool you can run a business on.
Tidio — I tried it, it was too much
I signed up for Tidio when I was evaluating tools. I didn’t last long. There are too many separate concepts — Flows, Lyro, billable conversations, live chat messages — and figuring out what counted toward what limit felt like homework. I dropped it and moved on.
Looking at their current pricing page, the free tier includes live chat, ticketing, 50 one-off Lyro AI conversations, and Flows capped at 100 visitors per month. Seat limits on the free plan aren’t clearly stated. Paid plans start at $24/month, and the enterprise tier is $749/month.
The chatbot builder (Flows) is their differentiator. If you want to set up automated conversation paths without writing code, Tidio does that well. But for someone who just wanted a chat widget that worked, it was overkill.
Best for: Teams that want to build chatbot automations. If that’s not you, there are simpler options.
Receiveo — the one I built
Full transparency: this is my product. I’ll try to be as honest about the limitations as I’ve been about everyone else’s.
I built Receiveo because I was tired of losing customers while I was away from my desk. On Gleap, on Chatwoot — the same problem kept repeating. Someone would message me, I’d be sleeping or in the shower or exercising, and by the time I got to my laptop, they were gone. The core idea behind Receiveo was simple: AI should handle the conversation when I can’t, and hand off to me when it needs to.
That’s why AI came first for me. Every other tool on this list was built before the AI era and bolted on AI later. Receiveo was AI-first — human chat came after.
What’s free: 10 seats, unlimited conversations, a chat widget, shared inbox, contact management, knowledge base, WhatsApp, and AI that can handle up to 10 monthly active contacts per month. A monthly active contact is a person who interacts with the AI during a billing month — one person can have multiple conversations and still counts as one MAC.
What’s not free: More than 10 AI MACs, Confluence integration, advanced analytics. Paid plans start at $49/month.
The honest limitations: 10 AI MACs per month is a taste, not a production workload. If you’re getting serious traffic, you’ll burn through that quickly. The product is also newer than everything else on this list, which means a smaller integration catalog. I’m building fast, but it’s a small team.
The 10-seat decision was deliberate. I wanted teams to bring everyone in on day one, not get fished for money the moment they need seat #3. Most competitors give you 2 seats on free. I think that’s a trap.
So which one should you pick?
There’s no universal answer, but here’s how I’d think about it:
- You just want free chat, nothing fancy: tawk.to. It’s free, it works, and it’s been around long enough that it’s not going anywhere.
- You’re technical and want to own everything: Self-hosted Chatwoot. Unlimited agents, your data on your servers. Just be honest about whether you have the bandwidth to maintain it.
- You value polish and are a team of two: Crisp’s free tier. Clean product, limited free plan, but enough to see if it fits.
- You want to build chatbot automations: Tidio. The Flows builder is their strength. Everything else is secondary.
- You want AI handling conversations when you’re not at your desk: That’s why I built Receiveo. The free tier is the most generous on seats and the only one with AI included, but it’s a younger product. If you’re OK being an early adopter, it’s built for exactly this problem.
Pick the tool that solves the problem you actually have. Not the one with the longest feature list.