Updated August 2026 · 5 min read
Tawk.to has the best free live chat in the business and it knows it. Unlimited chats, no credit card, free forever. Most of the "alternatives to Tawk.to" articles you'll find are written by people who missed the point, because free chat was never the problem. The question isn't whether you can get a free chat widget. It's what happens after your customers start messaging at midnight.
Three places. AI Assist, the knowledge base chatbot that answers while you sleep, starts at $29 a month. White-label, which is a polite way of saying "remove the Powered by tawk.to branding", is another $29 a month. And if you want trained human agents to answer on your behalf, that's $1 an hour per agent, which is a bargain until you notice the invoice adding up.
So a store that wants an AI chatbot that looks like their brand is looking at roughly $58 a month before they've answered a single question themselves. That's not an unreasonable price, but it's a different conversation from "free chat software".
ChatNest goes the other way: the AI comes included. The free plan gives you 100 AI messages a day and they refill daily, which is a usable free tier rather than a teaser. Paid plans are flat, £15 to £149 a month, and the price doesn't move when conversations grow. The bot trains on your pages, docs and FAQs, answers only from that content, and hands over to a human through the live inbox when it's out of its depth. WordPress and WooCommerce plugins are built in, which matters if your site is on either. Full disclosure: we built it, and the comparison table at chatnest.uk/compare has the side-by-side numbers if you want to check the bias against the facts.
Tidio bundles AI into its platform plans, but the free tier's 50 Lyro conversations are a lifetime allowance that never refills, and real AI starts at $39 a month. Good widget, awkward meter.
Chatwoot is the open source route. The free Hacker plan covers 2 agents and 500 conversations with no AI, self-hosting the Community Edition is free in licence but not in server time, and paid plans start at $19 per agent a month with Captain AI credits on top.
Crisp is flat per workspace: free for 2 agents, $45 a month for Mini with roughly 90 automated AI conversations included. Predictable and clean.
If you only need humans answering during office hours, keep Tawk.to. Switching would be a waste of effort. Switch when the after-hours questions pile up and you want the AI to handle them, or when the branding fee starts to sting. The rule of thumb: if you'd be paying for AI Assist and white-label anyway, that's $58 a month, and there are cheaper ways to get both in one product.