Chatbase vs LiveChat Comparison 2026
Chatbase trains an agent on pages you have already written and lets it answer, from $32 a month on message credits. LiveChat puts a person in the conversation, at $19 a seat billed annually, with its chatbot sold as a separate subscription from $52. One deflects the question. The other answers it, and sells while doing so.
A support agent trained on your own pages
Live chat with the price printed both ways
At a glance
- LiveChat starts cheaper, at $19.
- Only Chatbase has a free tier.
Side by side
Chatbase | LiveChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $32 | From $19 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free plan, paid tiers | Paid subscription |
| Free tier (they differ) | Yes | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial (they differ) | 7 days | 14 days |
Chatbase
A support agent trained on your own pages
Chatbase builds a chat agent from your site, your documents and your help centre, then puts it on the page as a widget. Answers come from what you fed it rather than from the open web, which is the whole reason to use one of these rather than a general assistant. It also hands off to a person when the agent is out of its depth.
Our note
This is the cheapest sensible way to put a support agent on a site whose answers already exist in writing. Manychat and Chatfuel are the better fit when the conversation happens in Instagram or Messenger rather than on your own page.
LiveChat
Live chat with the price printed both ways
LiveChat puts a chat window on a site and routes the conversations to whoever is answering, with canned replies, transcripts and a record of what somebody was looking at when they asked. It is priced per person rather than per conversation, so a solo operator pays for one seat. The chatbot is a separate product from the same company at its own price. For a creator selling a course or a service, this is the direct line.
Why people weigh these two
- LiveChat instead of Chatbase
- LiveChat covers the same site conversations with people rather than a trained bot, priced plainly from $19 with no free tier.
- Chatbase instead of LiveChat
- Chatbase builds an AI agent from your own pages instead of routing chats to a person, so nobody has to be watching the widget. It starts at $32 a month with a free tier.
Which one should you pick
Chatbase suits a site where the answers already exist in writing and the same handful of questions arrive over and over. The free tier is 50 credits a month and deletes idle agents after 14 days, so treat Hobby at $32 as the real entry point. Credits are consumed per message, which means a busy support page can outrun a plan quickly. Where questions need judgement rather than lookup, it will frustrate the people asking.
LiveChat is the better answer when the question before the purchase is the purchase. Per-seat pricing at $19 makes it affordable for one operator, which volume-priced chat tools rarely are, and the entry tier is genuinely usable rather than a stripped demonstration. Price the chatbot in from the start if deflection was your goal, because the combined figure is a different decision.
Common questions
- Which is cheaper for one person?
- LiveChat's Starter at $19 a seat billed annually undercuts Chatbase's $32 Hobby tier, but they are not doing the same job: one buys your own time answering, the other buys automated answers.
- What happens when a chatbot cannot answer?
- Chatbase hands over to a person, so it needs somebody available anyway. LiveChat starts with the person and sells automation as an extra subscription from $52 a month.
- How do Chatbase's message credits work?
- Each message spends a credit. Free covers 50 a month, Hobby 700 at $32, and Standard is $120. A busy page can run through an allowance well before the month ends, so watch the rate rather than the headline.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.