What's the best live chat software for Indie Hackers?
I've recently decided to add a chat widget to Saas Pegasus but I got completely overwhelmed trying to pick one. It looks like there are about a million different options and a million different articles comparing a random selection of 10 of them (that all probably have their own agendas).
So... what makes the most sense for a small (in my case solo) developer project? Would love to hear directly from the people who are using these tools.
My main criteria:
- Nice UX for end users
- Not too bloated or complicated (I don't need a "Conversational Marketing Platform")
- Ideally free for 1-2 agents to use
Thanks!
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I used Intercom for my startup in the past but I got really stressed out by the idea of always needing to be available for customer support. I liked the idea of the bubble but not of chat. I couldn't find one, so I built it myself: https://www.contactbubble.com.
Nice, way to solve your own problem!
We use https://small.chat for markd.co (SaaS relationship manager) — love the Slack integration and so far it's been working very well for us.
p.s. it's not obvious from the site but it supports team so if you login with the right Slack account/domain, you can have multiple users managing the same account.
Also a https://small.chat user because I wanted something that sent messages to Slack. Works great.
Oh hey Yaw. Nice, yeah this is a pretty appealing option. Glad to hear it's been working well for you!
We ended up going with HelpScout. I think it sets users expectations well - when live chat is on they get an instant reply, otherwise they get clearly routed through the email route with a 24hr SLA. This allows us to confidently turn it on/off and set our users expectations on reply speed.
As a small team it's very important to be able to disable chat, it can be drowning some days
+1 for Helpscout. It's the best priced solution if you're a one man team. At OnVoard, I'm paying $20/mo for live chat + docs.
Crisp chat isn't exactly cheap and I don't think their UI is as good as Helpscout. If you want docs for crips chat, you have to get their unlimited plans at $95/mo
Try twak, 100% free
https://www.tawk.to/
I signed up and installed Tawk on two of my sites. I'm loving it so far. Been testing it out (so many features to customize if I want) the last 30 or so minutes. Looks to do all I want and then a whole lot more. And the add-ons are reasonably-priced, especially the white label option (only $12/month).
Thanks for the recommendation!
Indeed, i use it as well, really amazing feature set, plus a android app they have which is super helpful to provide support on that go.
I did the same thing but had a different experience. Is there an easy way to have tawk push an email or Slack message to you when you're not online (without switching to "offline" mode)? I found the UI to be quite confusing and couldn't figure out how to do this in my 15 minutes of playing with it.
I didn't try to get it integrated with Slack (I don't particularly use Slack often, usually only to chime in on a project with a bug or something). But I was able to get chat transcripts via email setup quickly. And I just downloaded the mobile app for Tawk and it works no problem.
I Googled for a Slack/Tawk integration, and someone has some documentation using Webhooks. Looks straight forward enough: https://wemanageyoursite.com/slack-and-tawk-to/
crisp.chat economical, easy to install & good. We installed it here last year - https://workapp.io
I've just done a quick PoC with three that looked decent and had free tiers:
Of the three chaport is definitely the closest to what I was looking for. The other two are much more complex and designed around workflows + bigger teams.
I don't know about one that I could recommend, but I just tried and then removed these two from my website for various reasons:
Both are free for a single website and 1 user.
I removed drift because it insisted on popping up the chat box when the page is first loaded. I just wanted mine to sit calmly in the corner until the visitor cared enough about it.
I removed crisp because it wanted all sorts of whitelistings in my content security policy settings, ones that I wasn't prepared to give it.
If you don't care about content security policy, then crisp did seem like a pretty good option.
Thanks for the info! Yeah drift seems a bit bloated and spammy to me. Thanks for the pointer to crisp - will look.
Try https://leadsbot.xyz and give me your feedback
Cool that you're entering this space!
If I'm being honest, I'd recommend getting a little bit of design help on the landing page. It looks very much like a generic bootstrap site which makes me think that it is not a very mature product. Guessing this is true, but also that you could do a small amount of work to make that not feel like it's true. :)
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.