LiveChat alternatives in 2026: what Text plans cost, and seven alternatives plus Talvo on the same team

Open LiveChat's pricing page today and the title reads "Text Live Chat Pricing." New trials are now sold as Text plans, and the per-user price jumps from $19 to $79 the moment you want the tier with 200 AI resolutions included. If you're shopping for LiveChat alternatives, either because of the rename or because the bill stopped making sense, this guide covers what changed, what LiveChat costs a team of 3, 5 or 10, and how seven other tools, plus Talvo, price out for the same teams.

Prices come from each vendor's own pricing page, checked October 21, 2026, in US dollars before tax. We make Talvo, and it's one of the tools priced here. It's in here with its gaps, and we say where LiveChat is the better pick.

What changed at LiveChat in 2026: new trials are Text plans

The company behind LiveChat is Text, Inc., a subsidiary of Text S.A., which trades on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (ticker TXT). Its site footer lists a family of products: LiveChat, ChatBot, HelpDesk, KnowledgeBase, OpenWidget and Text. The LiveChat pricing page now says that pricing for new trials lives there as Text plans. The same plans and prices appear on livechat.com/pricing and text.com/pricing.

For anyone already paying, the page is explicit: nothing changes unless you want it to. LiveChat's move-to-Text page says "Moving to Text doesn't change your subscription price," that most accounts get 200 AI resolutions a month at their current price, and that Text's newer features come with Text plans, not with LiveChat plans, including legacy subscriptions.

There is a press report that complicates this. Bankier.pl wrote on April 7, 2026, citing PAP Biznes coverage of Text S.A.'s head of investor relations, that price grandfathering for existing LiveChat customers ended at the start of April 2026, with an average increase of about 20% that varied by plan. According to the same report, customers already on Text, and those on annual contracts running past 2026, were not affected, and the company expects 2027 to be a migration year to Text. A Quartr AI summary of the July 22, 2026 investor presentation points the same way. Text's own pricing pages don't mention it, so treat it as reported, not confirmed, and check your invoice. Details are in LiveChat pricing.

Prices have been confusing for a reason. Other guides quote three lineups ($16/$33/$50, $20/$41/$59 and $19/$49/$79 per user). Only the last is real: it is the legacy LiveChat price list for existing customers (Starter, Team and Business, annual billing; $25, $59 and $89 monthly), still published at livechat.com/pricing-legacy. The other two match neither that list nor the Text plans. A price-tracking site also logged a July 2026 change. Only trust a table with a date on it, including this one.

What LiveChat (Text) costs a small team

In short: Text charges per user and has no free plan, only a 14-day trial with no card. Essential is $19 a month on annual billing ($25 monthly) and Growth is $79 ($99 monthly). Each plan includes AI resolutions per account, not per seat: 10 a month on Essential and 200 on Growth. Extra resolutions come in packs of 50 for $49.50, about $0.99 each. Essential keeps 60 days of history and one team; Growth adds unlimited history, routing, working hours and supervision. WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and email land in the same inbox on every plan, per the pricing page, though Instagram appears only as an integration. Text says it is SOC 2 Type 2 audited. The full grid, the legacy plans and the pack arithmetic are in LiveChat pricing.

To compare fairly, we used three teams. Team A is 3 people with 300 chats a month that the AI handles. Team B is 5 people with 1,000. Team C is 10 people with 3,000. We assumed the AI fully resolves 60% of them, so 180, 600 and 1,800 billable resolutions. That 60% is our assumption, not a LiveChat figure. We rounded packs up to whole packs of 50 and left out API packages and tax. The LiveChat rows in the tables below follow from that: for example, Team B on Essential with annual billing is 5 × $19 + 12 packs ($594) = $689.

The per-user jump matters most if your AI is quiet. A 5-person team using 10 AI resolutions pays $95 a month on Essential with annual billing, $125 monthly. Move the same five to Growth and the seats alone cost $395 annual or $495 monthly. We covered why per-seat pricing behaves like this in per seat vs flat pricing.

Quick picks by need

Seven LiveChat alternatives and Talvo, priced on the same teams

Same three teams, same 60% assumption. Vendors that bill per resolution (Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout, Talvo) charge for 180, 600 and 1,800. Vendors that meter usage (Crisp, Tidio) or sessions (Freshchat) charge for every conversation the AI touches, 300, 1,000 and 3,000, assuming one session each. Tidio also bills by conversations your humans handle, which we assumed at 600, 1,000 and 2,000. Each tool uses the lowest-cost plan that fits the team and has chat. For Talvo that means the lowest total among plans with enough teammate seats. A bigger plan can be cheaper because it includes more AI resolutions: Team B would pay $294 a month on Starter, against $198 on Growth, and Team C $786 on Growth against $299 on Scale.

Monthly billing:

Annual billing, where the vendor publishes it:

These are not like-for-like feature sets. Crisp's Mini plan has no omnichannel inbox or knowledge base, and its AI rate beyond included credits isn't published, so its range is our estimate from Crisp's own $0.05 to $0.10 per conversation. Freshchat's total is the steady state after the one-time 500 free AI sessions are gone. Chatwoot's totals leave out AI because it doesn't say how many credits a conversation uses. Chatwoot's seat-only rows are lower than Talvo's, but they exclude AI, which can't be priced from Chatwoot's published numbers. Crisp's $55 to $70 for Team A is the Mini plan; with the knowledge base you'd need Essentials, which brings it to about $95 to $100, more than Talvo's $88.20. Crisp and Talvo are also the two cheapest rows without a SOC 2 report, so read the trade-offs below before you pick on price.

Crisp

Crisp is the closest in spirit and the cheapest on Teams A and B; on Team C its estimated range ($220 to $370) brackets Talvo's $299. It prices per workspace: Free for 2 seats, Mini $45 for 4 seats, Essentials $95 for 10, Plus $295 for 20-plus with extra seats at $10 each. The Hugo AI agent is included from Mini, paid out of monthly credits of $5, $25 and $75, and Crisp estimates $0.05 to $0.10 per conversation. It bills usage, not resolutions, so handed-off chats consume credits too, and the pay-as-you-go rate past your credits isn't published.

The channel list is the draw: Instagram, SMS, WhatsApp Business and phone arrive with Essentials. The cliffs are real, though. The fifth person moves you from $45 to $95, and the eleventh from $95 to $295. Our Talvo vs Crisp post has the detail, and Crisp vs Intercom covers the premium end.

The catches: Crisp says it has not had a SOC 2 audit and lists no SSO or HIPAA, the Hugo pay-as-you-go rate isn't published, and customer-profile caps (5,000 on Mini) push you up a tier. Skip it if procurement wants a SOC 2 report; choose it if you want the lowest estimated bill on the 3- and 5-person teams, with a free plan for 2 seats.

Freshchat

Freshchat has among the lowest per-agent prices of the per-seat tools, level with Chatwoot: Free for up to 10 agents, then Growth $19, Pro $49 and Enterprise $79 per agent a month on annual billing. Monthly prices are $23, $59 and $95 per agent. Growth adds the Freddy AI agent plus WhatsApp, SMS, LINE, Facebook, Instagram and Google Business Messages.

The AI is where the bill surprises people. Freddy costs $49 per 100 sessions after 500 free sessions, and the 500 is once per account, not monthly. A session is all interactions within 24 hours, counted per interaction window, not per resolution. SAML SSO is on every tier, and the trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and more. Our Freshdesk alternatives guide goes through the three overlapping Freshworks products in detail.

The four with their own guides

Tidio looks cheap until its AI turns on. Starter is $29, Growth runs from $59 to $349 based on how many conversations your humans handle, and Lyro, the AI, is a separate add-on from $39 for 50 conversations up to $700 for 1,000, with Flows as a third meter. Choose it for a Shopify or WordPress store, with 10 seats and Instagram and WhatsApp on every plan; skip it if you want a bill you can predict, since it stops human replies at the conversation limit. Full numbers are in our Tidio alternatives guide.

Help Scout makes sense when most of your support is email and chat is a side channel. Standard is $25 per user on annual billing or $30 monthly with its Beacon live chat, and the AI agent costs $0.75 per strictly counted resolution, with three free months for new accounts. Skip it if chat is your main channel: the 26th user forces Plus, and live chat isn't on the Free plan. Our Help Scout pricing explainer has every cap and catch.

Intercom (now Fin, acquired by Salesforce in September 2026) is the best-known AI agent in this group and one of the priciest rows on these teams. At list prices, Essential is $39 per seat monthly ($29 annual), though new customers may be shown promotional prices, and Fin costs $0.99 per outcome. An outcome includes a customer who simply stops replying and a workflow that ends in a hand-off. It has SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA on its Expert plan, and data hosting in the US, EU or Australia. Skip it if you want predictable forecasting, because product tours, surveys and outbound sit in a paid add-on. See Intercom pricing and cheaper Intercom alternatives.

Zendesk belongs on this list only if chat is becoming one piece of a larger support operation. Live chat needs Suite Team, at $55 per agent on annual billing or $69 monthly, with only 5 AI resolutions included per agent each month and $1.50 to $2.00 for each additional one. It's powerful and add-on heavy, which is why it's the most expensive row in both tables, and it's overkill for a team that mostly wants chat. See Zendesk pricing and Zendesk alternatives.

Two outliers: Chatwoot and HubSpot

Chatwoot is the open-source option, and the only one on this list you can run yourself. Cloud plans are priced per agent monthly: Startups $19, Business $39, Enterprise $99, with a free Hacker plan for 2 agents and chat only. Its Captain AI uses credits (300, 500 or 800 a month by plan, extra at $20 per 1,000), but Chatwoot doesn't say how many credits a conversation consumes, so we can't price the AI. It announced SOC 2 Type II, probably for the cloud service rather than self-hosted installs. Self-hosting needs real DevOps work.

HubSpot appears here only for its free tier: up to 2 users with live chat and limited bots, plus HubSpot branding on chat and email. We haven't priced its paid Service Hub on these teams, so treat it as a place to start if you already live in HubSpot's CRM, not as a priced alternative.

How the AI meters compare

The headline rates look close until you read what each vendor counts.

LiveChat's rule is close to Talvo's: the AI solves it, you pay once per conversation. The difference is the rate and the allowance. On Essential, that allowance is 10 a month. AI resolution pricing compared covers the definitions in depth.

Free alternatives, and what each one limits

Free tiers hide their limits in the details.

Where LiveChat is still the better pick

Stay if you sell on Shopify and want the selling features inside the chat. Stay if you need WhatsApp, Messenger or SMS (through Twilio) in the same inbox as email and chat on every plan, a SOC 2 Type 2 report to hand procurement, or Growth's chat supervision and takeover. LiveChat is also a mature product with a long review history. Capterra lists it at about 4.6 out of 5 from roughly 1,700 reviews, and many of those reviews are years old. The recurring complaints are price, add-ons on the bill, and a few stories about billing after cancellation.

If your team is happy and your AI volume is low, a $25 Essential seat is fine. The case for leaving is the Growth jump, the AI packs, or the rename making you wonder what's next. For a straight two-product comparison, see Talvo vs LiveChat.

Where Talvo fits, and where it doesn't

Talvo is a customer messaging and support platform: live chat widget, AI agent, shared inbox, two-way email, a knowledge base with a hosted help center, and automation, priced per workspace instead of per seat. Starter is $49 a month ($39 annual) for 5 teammates and 100 AI resolutions. Growth is $149 ($119) for 15 teammates and 500. Scale is $299 ($249) for 25 and 2,000. Extra resolutions are $0.49, and adding a teammate up to the plan limit never changes the bill.

The AI answers only from your published articles, cites the one it used, and hands off to a person with the conversation intact when it isn't confident. A hand-off is never billed. That means a quiet month costs the same as a busy one until the AI itself crosses the allowance, and the bill follows the AI, not the headcount.

Now the honest part. Talvo launched in 2026, is in beta, and has no reviews on G2 or Capterra. It doesn't have WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram or Messenger (all are on the roadmap), no phone channel, no Zapier, and no native Shopify integration. It has no SOC 2 report, no SAML SSO and no HIPAA. Integrations today are the REST API, webhooks and Slack. If your shop sells through Shopify chat or your customers text you, LiveChat or Crisp is the better buy today. If your support is website chat and email, you want a help center included, and the per-seat math is what's bothering you, Talvo is worth a trial.

How to switch from LiveChat without losing your help content

Switching is mostly a content job. Past conversations aren't imported, so your chat history stays in LiveChat. The parts that do move are your help articles and your contacts.

1. 1Install the widgetAdd Talvo's one script tag before </body> and leave LiveChat in place for now (guide).
2. 2Import your help centerPaste the public address of your help center and Talvo reads the articles. Each arrives as a draft for you to review (guide).
3. 3Bring your contactsExport your contact list as a CSV and upload it. People are matched by email, so nothing duplicates.
4. 4Forward your support emailPoint your support mailbox at the forwarding address in Settings, and replies thread back into the same conversation.
5. 5Test the AIAsk it three of your real customer questions in Setup, then publish the articles it should be using.
6. 6Remove LiveChatOnce the Talvo widget and email are live, take out the old snippet and decide what to do with the subscription.

Before you cancel anything, run through this list.

If you're only after the category overview, our best live chat software for small business guide ranks the field, and how to add live chat to your website covers the snippet side. Re-check every price before you decide; this is a category where they changed twice this year.