31 Best Live Chat Software For Websites In 2024

Intercom is a conversational relationship platform that excels in personalized customer messaging across various touchpoints. It allows businesses to send customized, automated messages based on user behavior, which aligns with its distinction as best for personalized customer messaging.

Why I Picked Intercom: Intercom was a definite choice for this list due to its ability to automate personalized messages based on individual behavior and preferences. Using customer data, such as behavior, demographics, or previous interactions, businesses can segment their audience and create tailored messages that resonate with specific customer segments. This targeted approach helps increase engagement and conversion rates by delivering personalized content to individual customers or defined groups.

Intercom also provides detailed analytics and reporting on message performance. Businesses can track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer engagement with the messages sent through the platform.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include behavioral targeting, customer segmentation, live chat and conversational support, in-app messaging and an automated messaging platform.

It integrates well with Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, and other tools, allowing smooth workflows and increased productivity.

Drift is a conversational marketing platform that empowers businesses to engage website visitors with real-time, personalized chat messages, creating an environment ripe for meaningful conversations.

Why I Picked Drift: What struck me about Drift is its dedication to making conversations an integral part of its marketing strategy. It's not just about basic email marketing and answering customer questions; it's about sparking meaningful chat conversations to lead customers down the sales funnel.

To this end, Drift includes targeted messaging campaigns based on visitor behavior, attributes, or specific actions taken on the website. This personalization helps deliver relevant messages and offers to visitors, increasing engagement and conversion rates. Messages can be tailored to specific segments or individual visitors to create a more personalized experience.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include lead qualification and routing functionalities, meeting scheduling, AI-driven chatbots and live chat capabilities, and analytics and reporting tools to track and measure the effectiveness of conversational marketing efforts.

Integrations include Salesforce, Salesloft, Databox, FullStory, Google Analytics, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Lokalise, Marketo, and Slack

Nextiva is a cloud-based communication system that offers voice and video calls as well as chat capabilities. Its specialty is delivering superior voice-driven customer service, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking to prioritize telephone interactions.

Why I Picked Nextiva: Nextiva's stellar voiceover internet protocol (VoIP) phone system strongly differentiates it from its competitors. This cloud-based phone system provides advanced features such as call routing, call forwarding, auto-attendants, voicemail-to-email, and call analytics to improve customer service and streamline communication, bringing over-the-phone customer service into the internet era.

Nextiva also enables businesses to obtain virtual phone numbers, which are phone numbers not tied to a specific geographical location. Virtual phone numbers can help businesses establish a local presence in different areas, improving accessibility for customers and enhancing their overall experience.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include team messaging, video conferencing capabilities, and analytics and reporting features that provide insights into call metrics, team performance, and customer interactions.

Integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Zoho, Oracle Sales Cloud, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Teams.

Sprinklr is a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform that helps brands manage their online presence across various social media channels. Its primary focus is enhancing customer engagement on social media, making it ideal for organizations keen on leveraging social channels for customer service.

Why I Picked Sprinklr: I chose Sprinklr for this list due to its comprehensive approach to social media customer engagement. Sprinklr can effectively centralize and help users to manage customer conversations across multiple chat apps, such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Telegram. Conversations can be assigned to specific team members, tagged for categorization, and tracked to ensure timely resolution.

Sprinklr's platform also includes workflow automation capabilities to streamline social media customer engagement processes. This allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as routing, tagging, and categorizing social media conversations based on predefined rules and triggers in order to improve efficiency and ensure consistency.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include social media monitoring, social media analytics, including sentiment analysis and engagement rates, crisis management, social media publishing features, social media listening capabilities, and customer journey mapping.

Integrations include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Adobe Analytics, Bitly, Coveo, Stripe, Tableau, Form Assembly, Freshdesk KB, and Medallia.

HubSpot Service Hub is a component of the HubSpot ecosystem that focuses on customer service. It's designed to connect and synchronize with HubSpot's CRM, providing a streamlined service experience and a unified view of the customer journey.

Why I Picked HubSpot Service Hub: I chose HubSpot Service Hub for its tight integration with HubSpot's comprehensive CRM system. It distinguishes itself by working as part of a holistic system, bringing together marketing, sales, and service operations with seamless data syncing and shared contacts and company records.

The integration also enables closed-loop reporting, allowing businesses to measure the impact of customer service efforts on sales and revenue. By connecting customer service data with CRM data, businesses can gain insights into how customer support activities contribute to customer satisfaction, retention, and upsell opportunities.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include a ticketing system, automation, help desk software, customer feedback tools, chatbot building features, and robust reporting capabilities.

Integrations include the entire suite of HubSpot tools, Pure Chat, Olark, PandaDoc, Outlook, Zoom, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Salesforce, and Slack.

Tidio is a robust tool tailor-made for small companies looking to supercharge their customer interactions. It combines live chat widgets, email, and messenger services under a single intuitive platform to provide seamless customer communication.

Why I Picked Tidio: I chose Tidio because it provides quality service without overwhelming small businesses. Its simplistic design and easy-to-use interface are perfect for a small team that needs to focus on customer engagement instead of on learning complex software.

Small businesses can also use Tidio to set up automated chatbot responses. AI chatbots can handle common inquiries, gather visitor information, or provide instant answers to frequently asked questions, freeing up time for customer support reps to focus on more complex issues.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include an integrated mailbox for managing customer inquiries, visitor monitoring, engagement, and analytics, live typing previews, and customization and branding features.

Integrations include Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Magento, BigCommerce, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Zendesk, and WordPress.

Gladly is a modern customer service platform that brings a unique approach to customer communication. It primarily stands out for its ability to consolidate customer interactions across different communication channels into a single conversation.

Why I Picked Gladly: While searching for the best live chat software, Gladly's single conversation feature stood out as being particularly unique. With Gladly's single conversation feature, all customer interactions are threaded together into a single conversation, regardless of the channel used or the number of interactions. This means that regardless of whether a customer reaches out via email, follows up with a phone call, and later sends a message through live chat, all those interactions are linked together in one continuous conversation thread.

By consolidating all interactions into a single conversation, customer service agents have access to the entire chat history, allowing them to have a better understanding of the customer's context and previous interactions. This helps agents provide more personalized and efficient real-time support and helps enhance customer satisfaction.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include a collaborative team inbox, comprehensive customer timelines, personalized communication, built-in voice and SMS capabilities, and robust analytics capabilities.

Integrations include Shopify, Medallia, Big Commerce, MaestroQA, Netomi, Qualtrics, Formstack, Loop, Siena, and Magento.

Qualified is a conversational marketing platform that goes beyond standard live chat services by providing real-time website visitor identification. It specializes in adeptly identifying and engaging with potential customers as they browse your site.

Why I Picked Qualified: Qualified's unique capability to identify visitors in real-time caught my attention. This feature allows businesses to identify and gather valuable information about their website visitors as they navigate through their site, including data on page visits, time spent on each page, click patterns, and other interactions on the website. This real-time tracking provides businesses with visibility into visitor behavior and helps identify their interests and intent.

By using firmographic data and reverse IP lookup, Qualified can also match website visitors to specific companies, enabling personalized and targeted engagement with key accounts.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include real-time visitor profiles, sales alert notifications, account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities, live chat functionalities, and conversational marketing features like AI chatbots and automated messaging.

Integrations include Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Google Analytics, Salesloft, Demandbase, HubSpot, Marketo, Metadata, Mailchimp, and Slack.

Zoho Desk is a customer service software that allows your business to engage effectively with customers and address their needs. Its standout ability is its seamless integration with other Zoho products, offering companies that already use Zoho a streamlined, unified platform for their customer service needs.

Why I Picked Zoho Desk: Zoho Desk's distinct value lies in its ability to mesh perfectly with the Zoho ecosystem, which includes CRM, marketing, and project management. For example, businesses can create automated workflows that trigger actions in other Zoho applications based on specific support scenarios. This integration allows for synchronized data updates, automated notifications, and seamless handoffs between teams, enhancing productivity and collaboration.

Zoho Desk also integrates with Zoho SalesIQ, a live chat and website visitor tracking tool. This integration enables businesses to capture chat conversations and visitor information from Zoho SalesIQ directly into Zoho Desk. Support tickets can be created from chat interactions, ensuring a seamless transition from chat to ticket-based support.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include multi-channel support, support ticket management, knowledge base and self-service creation features, automation and workflow capabilities, reporting and analytics tools, and a customer happiness rating feature.

Integrations include Zoho tools, including Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, and Zoho Analytics, as well as Google Workspace, Jira, Salesforce, Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams, and Pipedrive.

Zendesk Support Suite is a robust customer service platform that centralizes your business's customer support channels into one accessible location. This enables your team to handle customer inquiries and interactions across different channels, making it ideal for multi-channel customer support.

Why I Picked Zendesk Support Suite: I selected Zendesk Support Suite due to its its ability to manage customer communications across email, chat, phone (Android/iOS), and social media all in one place, allowing agents to respond to inquiries from different channels in a centralized manner. This multichannel support capability helps businesses provide consistent and seamless customer experiences.

Zendesk's multi-channel customer support features also allow tickets to be created through various channels, centralizing them in a unified dashboard. Agents can then assign tickets, set priorities, add tags, and track ticket status to ensure timely and effective resolution.

Standout features & integrations:

Features include automated workflows, knowledge base and self service features, and reporting and analytics features that can provide insights into key metrics like ticket volume, response times, agent performance, and customer satisfaction.

Integrations include Slack, Salesforce, ProductBoard, Mailchimp, Dialpad, Watchman Monitoring, Zignatures, Textline, Trello, and Intercom.