Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Chatling answers from pages you already have, automatically, with nobody watching a queue. LiveChat puts a window on your site and routes each conversation to a person who is on shift, priced per seat rather than per conversation. Chatling starts at $40 a month with a free plan first; LiveChat has no free tier and starts at $25 a month per person, or $19 billed annually. The choice is not which answers faster, it is whether a person or a document should be doing the answering.
A support bot trained on pages you point it at
Live chat with the price printed both ways
Chatling | LiveChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $40 | 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) | None | 14 days |
A support bot trained on pages you point it at
Chatling builds a chatbot from a site, a sitemap or a set of documents, and keeps it in step by re-reading those sources on a schedule. Setting one up is closer to filling in a form than to drawing a flow, which is the whole appeal for somebody who wants questions answered rather than a project. Conversations are the meter, and the free plan gives enough of them to see whether the answers hold up.
Our note
The auto-sync is the feature worth paying for, because the usual failure of a document-trained bot is that it answers from last year's page. Check the add-on prices before comparing headline rates, since a second chatbot and a second seat move the real number.
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.
Pick Chatling if the questions are repeatable and you would rather not staff a chat window. It retrains itself from your own pages on a schedule and answers around the clock with no person online, for $40 a month after a free plan with a capped number of conversations. It has no live agent behind it at any price, so anything outside what the source pages cover goes unanswered.
Pick LiveChat if the question before a sale is the sale itself, and a real person closing it is worth the seat. Starter is $25 a month paid monthly or $19 paid annually, per person, which keeps a solo operator's bill to one seat rather than a volume tier built for a team. The chatbot half of the same company is a separate $52-a-month subscription and is not included, so budget for both if live agents and automated answers are both on the list.
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.
| API | Yes | Yes |
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| Data export | Some of it | Not stated |
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| Their cut | None | None |
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| Runs on (they differ) | Web | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
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| Covers | DM & Comment Automation | DM & Comment Automation |
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| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
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| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
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| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
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| Live deals | None right now | 1 |
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Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Our note
Price the chatbot in from the start if deflecting questions was the reason you came, because the live chat subscription does not include it and the combined figure is a different decision. For a one-person operation the entry tier is genuinely usable rather than a stripped demonstration.