Chatling vs tawk.to Comparison 2026
Chatling is a bot that reads your pages and answers questions from them, for $40 a month after a capped free tier. tawk.to gives away its live chat widget completely, with no seat limit and no expiry, and sells three things around it: removing its badge, an AI bot of its own called AI Assist, and human agents you can hire by the hour. The AI Assist product is the direct rival to Chatling and starts lower, at $29 a month, with a free tier of its own for small volumes.
A support bot trained on pages you point it at
Live chat that is free, with paid extras
At a glance
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Chatling | tawk.to | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $40 | Free |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free plan, paid tiers | Free |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | None | Not stated |
| API | Yes |
Chatling
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.
tawk.to
Live chat that is free, with paid extras
tawk.to gives away the live chat widget itself, with unlimited agents and no seat count, and earns from three things around it: taking the branding off, an AI bot answering from your knowledge base, and hired human agents who answer chats for you by the hour. That last one is unusual enough to be the reason to look. The free product is not a trial and does not expire.
Why people weigh these two
- tawk.to instead of Chatling
- tawk.to puts free live chat with real people on the site instead of a trained bot, with paid extras on top.
- Chatling instead of tawk.to
- Chatling trains a bot on the pages you point it at rather than routing to a live person, from $40, the pick when the goal is answering without staffing a chat.
Which one should you pick
Pick Chatling if training a bot from a sitemap or a folder of documents, with scheduled re-syncing so the answers do not go stale, is the whole job. It costs $40 a month once the free tier's conversation cap runs out, and every plan includes API access to put the same answers somewhere other than the widget.
Pick tawk.to if the live widget itself should cost nothing, permanently, badge and all. Its own AI bot, AI Assist, starts at $29 a month, cheaper than Chatling's $40, and also has a free tier for low chat volumes. The detail worth reading twice is the $1-an-hour hired human agent service, priced unlike anything else in this category and the reason the free widget can stay free.
Common questions
- Which costs less, Chatling or tawk.to's AI bot?
- tawk.to's AI Assist starts at $29 a month and has its own free tier for low volume. Chatling's first paid tier is $40 a month after a free plan with a capped number of conversations. The live chat widget underneath tawk.to costs nothing at any volume, forever.
- Is tawk.to really free?
- The chat widget is, with no seat limit and no expiry, as long as you keep its badge visible. Removing the badge is $29 a month. Chatling has no free equivalent to the widget itself, since it is a document-trained bot rather than a live chat product.
- Can either one put a person behind the chat instead of a bot?
- tawk.to sells hired human agents at $1 an hour who answer on your behalf. Chatling's listing does not mention any human agent option; it only answers from the pages or documents it was trained on.
- Which one keeps a bot's answers current automatically?
- Chatling re-reads its source pages weekly or monthly on a schedule, so the bot does not quietly go stale. tawk.to's AI Assist answers from your knowledge base too, but the listing does not state a re-sync schedule for it.
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.