For businesses that outgrew free live chat and need answers after hours
Tawk.to alternative and tawk.to alternatives with an AI chatbot in the plan
InChat is an AI chatbot for your website that learns your pages, help articles and PDFs, answers visitors around the clock and hands hard questions and ready buyers to your team in a shared inbox. You do not buy AI credits, a branding add-on and an inbox separately. Plans start at $24 a month billed yearly with 500 AI conversations and 3 team members.
- $24/mo
- Starter billed yearly, 500 AI conversations, 3 team members
- $0
- extra to remove our badge or to let the AI answer
- 10 minutes
- from pasting your site URL to a working preview
The short answer
Tawk.to is free live chat: the widget, inbox, ticketing and unlimited agents cost $0, and the company charges for add-ons. Removing the tawk.to badge is $39 a month ($29 billed yearly) per site, and AI Assist is $29, $99 or $399 a month for 1,000, 5,000 or 20,000 AI message credits, where one credit is one AI reply. A site that wants a clean widget and AI answers for about 500 chats a month pays roughly $83 a month on yearly billing. InChat is $24 a month billed yearly for 500 AI conversations with no badge fee, so it is the cheaper buy once AI does the answering. If people answer every chat and the badge does not bother you, tawk.to at $0 is still the better deal.
See it answer
A 10:40 pm question answered, a booking request waiting in the morning
This is the chat that sits unanswered on a free live chat widget when nobody is online. The agent read the service area page and the pricing page, answered from them, collected the visitor's details and left the request in the inbox for the morning shift.
- Answers come from the pages you already publish, with the source named
- After-hours chats turn into requests your team can act on
- The whole conversation counts once, however many replies it takes
Ask about our services
AI answers from this site, a person when you need one
Booking request, Plano, water heater, Thursday AM, handed to dispatch with phone number
Compare
What tawk.to and InChat cost for the same job
Tawk.to figures come from tawk.to/pricing and the tawk.to help center: Remove Branding $39 a month or $348 a year, AI Assist Growth $29 a month for 1,000 message credits, Business $99 for 5,000, and extra credits at $30 per 1,000. Chat counts assume about four AI replies per conversation. InChat is shown on yearly billing; monthly billing is $49 for Starter and $149 for Plus.
| What you need on one site | Tawk.to, yearly billing | InChat, yearly billing | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human live chat only, the tawk.to badge is fine | $0 | Starter, $24 a month | Tawk.to is cheaper. Stay on it if nobody needs AI answers |
| No badge, AI answers about 250 chats | $29 + $24.17 = $53.17 a month | Starter, $24 for 500 AI conversations | $29 a month less, with twice the room |
| No badge, AI answers about 500 chats | $29 + $24.17 + $30 credits = $83.17 a month | Starter, $24 for 500 AI conversations | About $59 a month less, about $710 a year |
| No badge, AI answers about 2,000 chats, 6 people in the inbox | Branding $29 + Business $82.50 + 3,000 credits $90 = $201.50 a month | Plus, $74 for 2,000 AI conversations and 10 team members | About $127 a month less, about $1,530 a year |
Tawk.to prices from tawk.to/pricing, checked in October 2026. Tawk.to add-ons are bought per property, so a second website pays for branding removal and AI Assist again. Hired tawk.to chat agents ($1 to $3 an hour, about $610 to $728 a month for nights and weekends or 24x7) are left out of every row. A conversation that needs more than four AI replies uses tawk.to credits faster; a one-question chat uses them more slowly.
Why teams switch
What changes when the chatbot is the product, not an add-on
Trained on your site in minutes
InChat crawls your website and help pages, reads the PDFs you upload and answers from them, naming the source. You do not write shortcuts or canned replies for every question.
Priced by conversation, not by AI reply
Tawk.to AI Assist spends one credit for every AI reply, plus AI Commands and Smart Reply suggestions. InChat counts a conversation once, whether it took one answer or eight.
No badge fee
Starter and every plan above it run without our branding. On tawk.to that is a separate $348 a year for each website.
Human handoff with the context attached
When a visitor needs a person, the agent collects their name, email or phone and routes the chat to the right teammate with the full transcript, during your hours or for the next morning.
Lead capture that sales can use
The agent asks your qualifying questions, records the answers and offers your calendar link when the visitor fits. Qualified leads arrive in the inbox and by email.
Kept current without re-pasting content
InChat re-crawls your site every week, so a new price, service or policy page reaches the agent without anyone updating a knowledge base by hand.
How it works
Move from tawk.to to InChat in an afternoon
-
1
Paste your website URL
InChat reads your public pages. Add your tawk.to knowledge base articles as URLs or upload them as PDFs so nothing your visitors already rely on is lost.
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2
Test it on your real chats
Open your tawk.to monitoring history, take 20 questions visitors actually asked and put them to the agent. Fix a weak answer by improving the source page or adding a short instruction.
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3
Set handoff, hours and lead questions
Invite your team, set who gets which topics and when you are online, and write the two or three questions that qualify a buyer.
-
4
Swap the embed code
Remove the tawk.to script from your site template and paste the InChat script tag in its place. The change takes effect on the next page load.
What is the best alternative to tawk.to?
The best alternative to tawk.to depends on who answers your chats. If you want an AI chatbot that answers visitors from your own website at any hour and hands the rest to your team, InChat is the direct choice: it trains on your site in minutes and costs $24 a month billed yearly for 500 AI conversations with no badge fee. If you only need human live chat, the closer swaps are Crisp, Tidio and LiveChat.
The buyers who switch from tawk.to to InChat usually have 1 to 20 people, a service business, an online store, a SaaS product or a client portfolio, and one job for the widget: stop losing visitors whose questions arrive when nobody is online. They were already paying for branding removal, looking at AI Assist credits, or both. For those teams the comparison is not $0 against $24. It is $53 to $200 a month of tawk.to add-ons against one plan.
If you are weighing a few tools, our Tidio alternative page totals Tidio's Lyro, Flows and branding add-ons, and the Crisp alternative page works through Crisp's per-workspace plans.
Is tawk.to really free?
Yes, tawk.to's live chat is really free. The widget, the agent dashboard, ticketing, the knowledge base and the mobile apps cost nothing, with no limit on agents or chats. Tawk.to makes its money from add-ons: removing its badge, AI Assist credits, video and screen sharing, and hired chat agents billed by the hour.
Free stops being the whole picture in two situations. The first is branding. The tawk.to badge shows on the widget, emails and knowledge base pages until you pay $39 a month or $348 a year, and that is per property, so three websites pay three times. The second is coverage. A free widget only helps while a person is online; outside those hours visitors leave an offline message or leave. Covering those hours means AI Assist credits or hired agents at $1 to $3 an hour. Our full tawk.to pricing breakdown shows each add-on and four real monthly totals.
Does tawk.to have an AI chatbot?
Yes. Tawk.to's AI chatbot is called AI Assist, and it is a paid add-on on top of the free chat. The Hobby tier gives 100 message credits a month at $0, Growth is $29 a month for 1,000 credits, Business $99 for 5,000 and Enterprise $399 for 20,000. Extra credits are $30 per 1,000 on paid tiers.
The unit is what catches buyers out. A credit is one AI-generated message, not one conversation, and AI Commands and Smart Reply suggestions used by your agents draw from the same balance. A typical support chat takes about four AI replies, so 1,000 credits cover roughly 250 conversations. When the balance runs out, AI Assist finishes the chats it is in and stops joining new ones until you buy more or the month resets. InChat counts conversations, so 500 on Starter means 500 visitors helped, however long each chat runs.
How much does tawk.to cost per month with AI?
Tawk.to with AI and no badge costs about $53 to $202 a month on yearly billing for a single website, depending on chat volume. Branding removal is $29 a month billed yearly, AI Assist Growth is $24.17 a month billed yearly for 1,000 credits, and Business is $82.50 billed yearly for 5,000. On monthly billing the same setups run $68 to $138 before extra credits.
Those totals cover one property. An agency running AI chat on five client sites buys branding removal and AI Assist five times, which is over $3,000 a year at the Growth tier before any extra credits. A business that also wants people covering nights adds tawk.to hired agents at roughly $610 a month for evenings and weekends. If your real goal is answering after-hours questions, compare those lines with a plan where the AI is already included, such as InChat's flat plans from $24 a month.
Who are tawk.to competitors?
Tawk.to's main competitors are Tidio, Crisp, LiveChat, Zoho SalesIQ, Freshchat and Olark for live chat, and AI-first website chatbots such as InChat and Chatbase for automated answers. Tidio and Crisp are the closest on price for small teams, LiveChat and Zoho SalesIQ charge per seat or per operator, and Freshchat pairs per-agent pricing with paid Freddy AI sessions.
The useful split is not free against paid. It is whether the tool was built for people answering chats, with AI added later as a meter, or built around an AI agent that answers from your content with people as the escalation. Tawk.to, Olark and LiveChat sit in the first group. If you are comparing seat-based tools too, the LiveChat alternative and Zoho SalesIQ alternative pages total their costs for the same team sizes.
When is tawk.to the better choice?
Tawk.to is the better choice when your own staff answer every chat, the badge does not matter to you and AI answers are not part of the plan. At $0 for unlimited agents, nothing paid beats it for pure human live chat, and its hired-agent service is fair value if you want real people on the queue overnight.
It also makes sense for very low volume. A site with a dozen chats a month can live inside the free 100 AI credits. InChat is the better buy once you want AI to carry most of the conversations, need a clean branded widget, or want leads qualified and handed to sales with the transcript, because at that point you would be buying three tawk.to add-ons to get one InChat plan.
Free chat works until the chats arrive when nobody is there
Most people looking for a tawk.to alternative are not unhappy with the price. They run a small business, an agency or a store, they installed tawk.to because it was free, and it did its job while someone was watching the dashboard. Then the evening and weekend chats started piling up as offline messages, and the visitors who asked them had already bought somewhere else by Monday. What they need is not another free inbox. It is something that answers the forty questions customers keep asking, correctly and at 11 pm, and brings a person in for the rest.
Who it is for
Teams that switch from tawk.to to InChat
Home services and local businesses
Service area, prices, availability and emergency questions come in at night and on weekends. The agent answers from your service pages and turns booking requests into tickets your dispatcher picks up first thing.
Online stores
Shipping times, returns, sizing and stock questions make up most chats. The agent answers from your policies and product pages, and order problems go to a person with the order number already collected.
Agencies and SaaS teams
Pricing, integrations, onboarding and fit questions repeat every day. Answers come from your docs and pricing page, and qualified prospects get a calendar link while support issues reach the right person.
FAQ
Tawk.to alternatives, common questions
For AI answers on your website, InChat is better than tawk.to because the AI chatbot, human handoff and an unbranded widget are in one plan from $24 a month billed yearly. For human-only live chat, nothing beats tawk.to's $0 price, so Crisp, Tidio or LiveChat only make sense there if you need a feature tawk.to lacks.
People switch from tawk.to for three reasons. Chats that arrive while nobody is online go unanswered, the tawk.to badge costs $348 a year per site to remove, and AI Assist charges per AI message, so the bill grows with the length of every conversation as well as the number of chats.
Yes. InChat includes the AI chatbot in every plan: 500 AI conversations on Starter at $24 a month billed yearly, 2,000 on Plus at $74 and unlimited on Pro at $249. There are no message credits to top up and no separate branding fee.
Yes. Add your tawk.to knowledge base article URLs as training sources, or export the articles and upload them as PDFs. InChat reads them alongside your website and answers from both, naming the page it used.
Most teams switch in an afternoon. Training on your site takes about 10 minutes, testing with 20 real questions takes an hour or two, and replacing the tawk.to script tag with the InChat script tag is a single edit in your site template or tag manager.
Yes. Create an account and you get 50 AI conversations to test InChat on your own website, with no card needed. The trial does not renew. Every paid plan also has a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Keep comparing
Tawk.to pricing, worked out
Branding, AI Assist credits and hired agents totaled.
Tidio alternative
Lyro, Flows and branding add-ons against one plan.
Crisp alternative
Per-workspace plans and AI limits compared.
LiveChat alternative
Per-seat pricing against a flat team plan.
Olark alternative
Another human-first chat tool with AI on top.
AI chatbot pricing
Every InChat plan, what it includes and the yearly price.
Answer the chats that come in after hours, starting tonight.
Paste your website URL, test the agent on your own pages and replace the tawk.to widget with one script tag. Plans from $24 a month billed yearly with 500 AI conversations, 3 team members and human handoff included.