Tawk.to
A free live-chat widget for a website, with paid add-ons for removing the branding, an AI chatbot, and human agents you can hire by the hour.
What you'd use it for
Putting a free live-chat widget on a website so visitors can message you directly, with the option to let an AI answer routine questions when nobody's watching.
- Chat with website visitors in real time from a free, unlimited-agent dashboard
- Let AI Assist answer routine questions automatically once it's connected to a knowledge base, FAQs, and site content
- Track contacts and their conversation history across chat and email tickets in one dashboard
- Publish a searchable knowledge base that AI Assist cites when it answers a chat
- Hire tawk.to's own trained human agents by the hour to staff the widget when nobody on the team is online
The verdict
Tawk.to earns its place here by giving away the whole job for free — unlimited agents, no message cap, no trial clock running out. What it charges for is polish rather than capability, namely removing its own branding or layering an AI agent on top of chat you already have for nothing. The AI Assist pricing follows the same free-then-paid shape as the core product — a real allowance of 100 messages a month before the $29 tier begins, not a wall hit on day one. It suits a solo operator or small team that wants live chat now and can grow into the AI layer later, and stops making sense once chat needs to sit inside a larger support stack rather than stand alone on the site.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | Any small business that wants live chat on its site with no budget line for it. | Full live chat software, unlimited agents, team collaboration, chat history, carries "Powered by tawk.to" branding. |
| Remove Branding | $29/month | A business that wants the widget to look like its own product. | Removes the "Powered by tawk.to" mark from the widget. |
| AI Assist | Free for 100 messages/month, from $29/month for 1,000 | Teams that want the widget to answer routine questions without a human online. | A free Hobby tier with 100 AI message credits a month and one chat agent, then paid tiers from $29/month (1,000 credits) up to $399/month (20,000 credits) as volume grows. |
| Hired Chat Agents | $1/hour | A business that wants a human answering chats without hiring one. | Tawk.to's own trained live agents staffing your widget on your behalf. |
Read from Tawk.to's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- A work email address to create an account, no credit card needed
- A website to paste the JavaScript widget code into
- Existing FAQs, documents, or site content to feed AI Assist's knowledge base if using that add-on
Signup takes under two minutes with no credit card, and the chat widget is live within minutes of pasting the code. A working AI Assist agent is a similarly short wizard, under three minutes by tawk.to's own account, though tuning it against a real knowledge base takes longer.
Your first run Paste the JavaScript widget code before the closing body tag on the site and the chat widget appears within minutes, before anything else is configured. Setting up an AI Assist agent is its own short wizard that tawk.to's own materials describe as under three minutes for a first working agent.
Where it breaks
The free tier is not a trial — it is the permanent product, and most small sites never need to pay anything beyond it. The paid pieces are all add-ons layered on top, not a tier structure in the usual sense, so there is no single 'the paid plan' to compare against a competitor's.
Browser dashboard plus a JavaScript widget you paste into your site. Mobile apps exist for answering chats on the go.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for a business that needs live chat wired tightly into a larger support platform — tawk.to stands alone on the site rather than plugging into one. Also not for anyone who wants to look independently branded from day one — the free tier still carries tawk.to's own mark, and removing it costs $29 a month.
Tawk.to’s whole pitch is unusual for this list: the core product costs nothing, forever, with no seat limit and no message cap. It is the reason it ended up on millions of small-business sites — a genuinely free live-chat widget, not a freemium teaser for a plan you are meant to outgrow.
What you pay for is everything adjacent to the free core. Removing the tawk.to branding is $29 a month on its own. The AI Assist add-on has its own free Hobby tier — 100 AI message credits a month — before paid tiers start at $29 a month for 1,000 credits, which is what turns the widget into something that can answer a question without a person watching the dashboard; it works off your existing knowledge base and FAQs rather than needing a separate setup. And if you would rather not staff chat at all, tawk.to sells its own human agents by the hour, at $1, to sit in your widget and answer on your behalf.
What this actually replaces
- Against a paid live-chat tool like Drift, the free core alone is the whole case: you are not buying chat, you are buying the branding removal and the AI layer on top of chat you already have for free.
- The AI Assist tier is the meaningful upgrade for a small team — it is the move from a human watching a chat window to something that answers on its own from what you have already written down.
- Hired agents are a genuinely different purchase — not software, a staffing service billed by the hour, worth knowing about if the actual gap is “nobody is watching the widget at 2am” rather than “the AI can’t answer this.”
For a solo operator or a very small team, the free tier plus AI Assist covers most of what live chat is for. The point at which to look elsewhere is when you need chat tightly integrated into a larger support stack rather than standing alone on the site.
Alternatives
Support & inboxAgentsCrisp
A live chat widget, shared inbox and knowledge base with an AI agent that answers from your docs, priced flat per workspace rather than per agent seat.
Support & inboxAgentsChatwoot
An open-source shared inbox and live chat you can run on your own servers, with AI reply assistance built in.
LiveChat
A live chat widget with AI reply suggestions and conversation summaries, that routes a conversation to a human agent when it needs one.
Support & inboxAgentsHelp Scout
A shared support inbox that looks and feels like email, with AI drafting replies and summarising long threads, built for small teams who dislike ticket software.
Get Tawk.to
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.