Tawk.to is free, and it really is free. That is why it sits on more websites than any other chat widget. The bill shows up later, when you want your own name on the widget, or a second site covered, or an answer waiting for a customer at 11pm.
Below are seven honest tawk.to alternatives for a small business, what each one is good at, and what each costs as of September 2026. We make one of them. We have flagged that clearly and kept the rest straight.
Why small teams start looking for tawk.to alternatives
The free plan is generous and we should say so. Unlimited agents, unlimited chats, tickets and a knowledge base, with no seat arithmetic at all. Tawk.to carries roughly a fifth of all tracked live chat installs according to market share data, and most of those sites pay nothing.
What sends owners looking for a tawk.to alternative is usually not the chat. It is one of these four things.
- The badge. Every free widget carries a "Powered by tawk.to" line, and it follows you onto transcripts, ticket emails and the knowledge base. Your customer sees another company's name inside your support.
- Add-ons are sold per property. A property is one website. Buy an add-on for your shop and your booking site stays uncovered until you buy it again.
- Automated answers are metered. AI Assist has a free tier with a monthly message allowance, then paid tiers sized by how many messages it generates, with credit top-ups when a busy month runs the allowance out.
- It grows sideways rather than up. Chat is the centre of the product. Teams that end up living in email, or that want a help centre on their own domain, start stacking paid extras to get there.
What free actually costs once you add things on
These are the published add-on prices from tawk.to's own help centre, checked in September 2026. Vendors move numbers, so look at their site before you decide.
- Remove Branding: $39 a month, or $348 a year, which works out at $29 a month.
- Video, voice and screensharing: $49 a month, or $348 a year.
- AI Assist: a free Hobby tier, then paid tiers priced by the number of messages it writes.
- Hired agents: from $1 an hour. Ten hours a week runs $129 a month, and round-the-clock cover runs $728.
Put your brand on the widget and turn on calls and you are at $88 a month for one site, before a single question gets answered. Add a second website and the add-on clock starts again, because nothing carries across properties.
That is the whole decision in one line. Free stays free if you can live with the badge on one site. The moment you cannot, tawk.to stops being the cheap option, and a flat plan somewhere else is often less than the extras you were about to buy. Our plain pricing page is $15, $39 or $79 a month with every feature on every plan, which is the shape we picked precisely because of this problem.
Seven tawk.to alternatives worth your time
Entry prices as published in September 2026. Confirm on the vendor's page before you buy, because every one of them changes.
| Tool | Entry price | Free plan | Automated answers | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SupportifyGPT | $15 a month, flat | 14-day trial | Included, no per-answer fee | Everything on one bill |
| Chatwoot | Free self-hosted, or about $19 per agent | Yes, 2 agents | Credits, paid tiers only | Teams with a server |
| Crisp | About $45 a month per workspace | Yes, 2 seats | Billed in credits | Priced by workspace |
| Tidio | About $29 a month | Yes | From about $39 a month extra | Online shops |
| LiveAgent | $15 per agent a month | 30-day trial | Varies by tier | Teams with a phone line |
| Freshdesk | $19 per agent a month | 2 agents, 6 months | Add-on per agent | Room to grow into |
| Help Scout | $25 per user a month | Yes, 5 users | About $0.75 per resolution | Email-first teams |
Read the fourth column twice. It is where most of these tawk.to alternatives part company after month one. Nearly all of them bill the automated answers on the side, by credit, by conversation or by resolution, so the better your help articles get and the more questions get answered without you, the bigger the invoice. We priced ours the other way round on purpose, and the bot is on the $15 plan with nothing metered.
1. SupportifyGPT
Ours, so weigh it accordingly. $15 a month for one seat, $39 for up to three, $79 for up to ten, and every feature sits on every plan. Live chat, a shared inbox, ticketing, a self-building knowledge base, a public help centre on your own domain, bug tracking and the support bot. No fee to remove branding, because there is no branding to remove, and no charge per answer.
The bot works in two halves. Hand-written rules read the question and search your own articles, then a model writes the reply in plain sentences from what those articles say. If your articles do not cover it, it says so and passes the chat to you rather than inventing a policy you never wrote. When it drafts a new article for your knowledge base, that draft waits for you to approve it, so nothing it writes goes live unread. You can see SupportifyGPT next to tawk.to feature by feature.
Not for you if you need a phone system or a native mobile app. We have neither, and we are newer than everything else on this list.
2. Chatwoot
Open source, and the closest thing here to free without a badge. Self-hosting the community edition costs nothing in licence fees, and costs you a server and the hour a month it takes to keep it patched. The hosted version has a free tier for 2 agents and 500 conversations, with paid plans from about $19 per agent a month on annual billing. Its Captain AI runs on credits and is not part of the free self-hosted edition, so "free plus automated answers" is the one combination you cannot have.
Best for a team with someone technical who would rather run software than rent it.
3. Crisp
Priced per workspace instead of per seat, which suits small teams where three people dip into support between other jobs. A free tier covers 2 seats, Mini runs about $45 a month for 4 seats and Essentials about $95 for 10. The AI is billed separately in credits.
Best for a small team that wants chat and a shared inbox without counting seats.
4. Tidio
The nearest thing to a like-for-like widget swap, with a free tier to start on. Starter is around $29 a month and Growth from about $59, then the ladder jumps to $749, which is a wall rather than a step. Lyro, the part that answers on its own, is billed separately from about $39 a month for a small bundle of conversations.
Best for an online shop that will comfortably stay on Growth.
5. LiveAgent
Entry is $15 per agent a month on annual billing, rising through $29, $49 and $69. Social channels cost extra on the smaller plans. It has a call centre built in, which almost nothing else at this price does.
Best for a team that answers the phone as much as the chat widget.
6. Freshdesk
Worth knowing that the old ten-agent free plan is gone. The free tier now covers up to 2 agents for six months, and paid starts at $19 per agent a month on annual billing. Freddy, its automation, is an add-on per agent, and the part that answers customers is billed per bot session once the included bundle runs out.
Best for a team that expects to grow into a larger suite and wants the room.
7. Help Scout
Calm, email-first, and the docs site it builds is genuinely good. Free for up to 5 users with one inbox and 100 contacts a month, then Standard at $25 per user a month on annual billing. Its AI Answers is charged around $0.75 per resolution, so deflecting more questions costs you more, which is the pricing model we deliberately avoided.
Best for an email-first team that wants a tidy inbox more than a chat bubble.
If the free end of this list is where you are headed, we went through the trade-offs in more detail in our guide to free help desk software, and you can compare the main help desk tools side by side if a name here is new to you.
When staying on tawk.to is the right answer
Plenty of businesses should keep it, and any list of tawk.to alternatives that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Stay put if:
- You run one website and the badge genuinely does not bother you.
- You want a dozen people in the chat queue at no cost. Nobody else gives you unlimited agents for nothing.
- Chat is the only channel you care about and email is fine in your normal inbox.
- You want trained agents covering your chat overnight. Hired agents from $1 an hour is a real service and no alternative on this list matches it.
A quick way to choose
Most of this decision comes down to one sentence about your own business.
- You want your brand on the widget without a monthly fee for the privilege: SupportifyGPT or Chatwoot.
- You have someone technical and a spare server: Chatwoot.
- You answer the phone too: LiveAgent.
- You sell online and want automated replies: Tidio.
- You live in email: Help Scout.
- You want one flat bill with nothing metered: ours, and you can start a free 14-day trial and find out in an afternoon.
One habit is worth more than any shortlist. Price the plan you would actually be on, with the add-ons you would actually tick, for the number of sites you actually run. Almost every unpleasant support bill starts with someone reading the headline price instead.
Switching without losing your history
Moving off tawk.to is smaller than people expect. A one-person shop can do it between lunch and closing.
- Export your chat transcripts and keep the ones that taught you something. Those repeated questions are your first knowledge base articles.
- Copy your best articles across by hand. If you have answered a question twenty times, it deserves a page.
- Paste the new widget snippet into your site and leave the tawk.to widget hidden but installed for a week.
- Point any links that went to your old help pages at the new ones.
- Cancel the add-ons first, then the account, once a full week has gone by with nothing missed.
Three things are worth watching in that first week. Check that email replies still reach you when a customer answers a notification, because that is the piece that quietly breaks in every migration. Check the widget on a phone, since most chats start on one. And write down every question you get asked, because by Friday you will have the list of articles worth writing.
The part worth planning is the articles, not the software. Whichever of these tawk.to alternatives you land on, the tool is only as good as the answers you have written down for it to find.
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