The 12 Best Live Chat Widgets to Replace the Sunsetted Facebook Chat Plugin on Your Website

If you’re one of those website owners or businesses that employ a Facebook live chat widget on their website, this post is more than critical for you. Facebook is very soon (May 9, 2024) about to terminate the operation of its live chat—the embedded widget that allows you to use it as your website chat plugin.

Currently, countless users employ Facebook live chat on their websites. All these people must find alternatives to their current plugin once Facebook stops offering its live chat. The good news is, there are wonderful alternatives. So, don’t fret!

This big news regarding Facebook’s decision ignited the idea behind this post in our minds. We decided to craft a list of a dozen comprehensive live chat widgets that can replace Facebook’s tool. Read on to learn more about them.

What is a live chat and how does it work?

A live chat widget is an online answering machine on a website, appearing as a chat box on the page. It allows users and visitors to ask questions during their purchasing process. Being a real-time interactive tool, live chat enables seeking assistance for customers, without using emails or phone calls.

When a user begins chatting with the tool, their message is transmitted to the monitoring agent. They can reply promptly with predefined responses, engaging in a conversation with the user. These widgets usually include file attachments, typing indicators, and other features, providing efficient communication.

Behind the scenes, live chat widgets often operate through specific software that tracks conversation histories, controls incoming messages, and leads them to available agents. Furthermore, agents may handle several chats at once, but particular tools are included to help with this matter. These tools facilitate responding by prioritizing inquiries based on urgency.

Why you need a live chat on your website

Live chat widgets are today known as inseparable components of any website. They come with diverse benefits that make website owners choose no other way than to employ one of them. Here are some integral reasons why you need them:

• Real-time customer support: Waiting for replies or constantly checking your email inbox might get annoying. However, live chat enables you to get support directly within a second, anytime anywhere.
• Increased customer satisfaction: These widgets maximize the customers’ pleasant moments by providing immediate and personalized answers.
• Convenience for users: Customers mostly use this kind of communication which benefits them without having a phone call or leaving the website.
• Reduced support costs: Live chat allows agents to answer a vast variety of questions all at once. They no longer need to hire countless staff for the matter.
• Improved conversion rates: These tools also help evaluate customers’ interests and issues. Consequently, it leads to upraised sales and conversation rates.
• Valuable customer insights: Using a live chat leads to a better knowledge of customers’ preferences and suitable answers to frequent questions. It provides valuable insights and improves website usability.
• Competitive advantage: Providing a live chat system benefits you in the market compared to the competitors that use only emails, phone calls, or SMS for support.
• 24/7 availability: Live chat can help you answer those who seek service during non-standard hours as well as business hours, no matter which time zone they are in.
• Proactive engagement: These tools initiate conversations based on your website visitor’s interests and browsing patterns. They let you encourage and help users through their purchasing process. Plus, they help you support users with any obstacles they may go through.

What happens with Facebook Chat Plugin?

Facebook has announced that it will put an end to the operation of its chat plugin on May 9th, 2024. This is huge news for website owners and businesses that use Facebook’s tool for their customer support and communication.

The plugin is supposed not to work for users in guest mode. In other words, users will have to log into Messenger or Facebook to access the chat plugin. This change highlights how critical it is for companies to shift to new alternatives without interrupting customer support.

The risky dependence on a third-party live chat widget should have been an alarming concern for any website owner even before the new announcement from Facebook. Still, this isn’t the end of the world as there are many wonderful alternatives to replace your Facebook live chat widget.

Top Facebook Live Chat Plugin Alternatives

Now that we’re aware of the new change in Facebook live chat and understand the benefits of employing live chat widgets on our websites, it’s time to learn more about the best Facebook tool alternatives.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is a professional live chat widget. It enables you to communicate with customers and answer their questions even before asking. The platform provides various premium plans starting at $19 per user per month, with the option to try out the free trial. Also, if you run a startup, you can get Zendesk free for six months.

The tool helps you accompany your customers during their purchasing process. It is time-saving and allows you to handle users from different time zones simultaneously. Moreover, it supports over 25 languages. So, in any language your website visitor speaks, Zendesk responds.

Being user-friendly, Zendesk enables customers to seek assistance inside the website. Furthermore, you can initiate a conversation with them from the comfort of your mobile phone. Additionally, it furnishes modern AI-based chatbots that make it easier to engage with users and support them.

Some other remarkable features of Zendesk are:

• Personalized conversations
• Availability on other social channels
• Centralized workspace
• Proactive messaging
• Group messaging
• Third-party integration

2. Tawk.to

Tawk.to is a powerful live chat widget. It enables you to furnish phenomenal customer support and absorb countless visitors to your website. The platform comes with myriad premium features, and interestingly, offers a free plan. You won’t need to purchase even a trial. The free plan provides you with unlimited access to all features in a flash.

The platform is indeed user-friendly. A single line of JavaScript would enable you to effortlessly set it up. Immediately afterward, it empowers you to communicate instantly with any visitor. You’ll be able to monitor your traffic in real-time and even better, engage with visitors from the comfort of your mobile phone.

Tawk.to comes with support for over 45 languages. It helps you talk to visitors in any language with no sweat. Plus, the platform supplies modern AI-based chatbots that make it a breeze to automatically support users and engage with them instantly.

Some other notable features of Tawk.to include:

• Group messaging
• Video and voice capabilities
• Desktop notifications
• Extensive customization options
• Detailed reporting
• Sentiment tracking
• In-chat payments

3. Intercom

Intercom is the next live chat widget on our list. It furnishes a thorough combination of features such as an AI chatbot, help desk, and proactive support. The platform enables you to optimize your costs and make sure your customers are always thrilled with your support.

Over 50 languages are supported on Intercom, including the likes of Arabic, Bengali, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and more. The platform offers its breakthrough AI chatbot called Fin. It resolves 50% of customer inquiries in the blink of an eye, delivers meticulous responses, and diminishes the number of tickets.

The starting price of Intercom’s plans is $39 per seat per month. It opens many features such as:

• Shared inbox
• Ticketing system
• Public help center
• Basic automation
• Fin AI chatbot

Intercom helps you enjoy dependable interactions as it benefits from built-in safeguards, seamless human handoffs, and powerful automation. You’ll be able to employ outbound messages and message sequences to effortlessly interact with customers and minimize support volume.

4. LiveChat

LiveChat is an adaptable live chat widget for your website. It’s armed with integral features such as engaging visitors, supplying distinguished service, and impacting shopping determinations.

The platform’s AI-driven chatbot helps you get rid of repetitive tasks and offers instant support with true-to-life AI-generated answers. LiveChat’s AI Assist delivers exact responses in a flash. It offers data security and empowers you to manage all your AI data sources and control bot responses with ease.

A plethora of languages are supported on LiveChat. You can create chatbots in any language you desire. The platform allows you to test its free trial for 14 days before you can purchase its Starter plan at $52 per month and enjoy features such as:

• 1 active chatbot
• 1,000 valid chats per month
• Basic reporting features
• Data security

5. Olark

Olark is a collection of simple chat and messaging tools for all users. It supports countless languages and complies with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, which makes it fruitful specifically for users with disabilities. The platform enables hands-on help from humans with its set of features such as chat customization, automation, and real-time analytics.

CoPilot—Olark’s AI-powered assistant—helps you automate lead generation, convert traffic into pipeline, and shorten support response time. It can integrate flawlessly with CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot to let you prioritize chats, capture leads, and automate administrative tasks in a breeze.

You can use Olark to personalize chatbox forms and collect priceless information. Your customers will be immersed in real-time conversations. The platform presents a 14-day free trial. After that, you can initiate your service with a minimum of $29 per month to enjoy the full features of live chat with AI-powered chatbots.

6. Kayako

Kayako presents a mighty live chat software for customer service and help desk support. It lets you support customers, engage visitors, and convert prospects into leads in real-time and in no time.

The messaging experience on Kayako is as smooth as possible cause it comes with characteristics such as personalized customer service, mobile compatibility, and automatic follow-up messages. You can blend the platform with your website and iOS/Android apps.

Kayako’s AI-powered live chat helps you send automatic, friendly messages. Also, the software allows you to customize its appearance so it can match your website/app and boost user experience.

The platform’s pricing plans aren’t visible on Kayako’s website. You can request a demo to ask their sales team for specific pricing. Still, the live chat helps you please your customers with behavior-driven answers, thorough customer journey visualization, and real-time activity tracking.

7. Tidio

Tidio is a comprehensive live chat widget. It’s a wonderful tool for e-commerce and small businesses. Fortunately, Tidio offers a free plan that comes with real-time customer conversations and basic automation flows. Still, its premium plans start at $29/month and unlock advanced features such as intricate automation flows and sweetened chat limits.

From a single dashboard in Tidio, you can manage multiple channels at once, including:

• Email
• Live chats
• Messenger
• WhatsApp
• Instagram DMs

The platform allows you to minimize your response time thanks to features such as canned responses and pre-chat surveys. Also, it comes with support for multi-language usage, which is available in premium plans only.

Tidio’s chatbot, Lyro, can handle up to 70% of customer questions with conversations analogous to human responses. The widget loads asynchronously to make sure it won’t affect website loading speed or performance.

8. Crisp

Crisp delivers a full-featured live chat widget that presents personalized conversational experiences to heighten users’ satisfaction. Users will enjoy employing GIFs, video previews, and user ratings within the chat.

The widget allows you to integrate knowledge bases, develop chatbot scenarios, and share files and audio. It simplifies multichannel communication and social commerce so you interact with customers across diverse platforms.

Crisp’s customization options let you personalize it as per your brand identity. It also collects all communications in one shared inbox—accessible across multiple messaging channels—to ease customer support.

The platform’s AI chatbot delivers immediate support even when your team is offline. It presents automated responses and scales one-to-one conversations, thereby integrating well into the Crisp platform.

Crisp comes with a free plan that paves the way for personal websites. In addition, the platform’s premium plans—starting at roughly $25 per month per workspace—are a fabulous investment for early-stage startups that tend to boost their customer relationships.

9. Drift

Drift is distinguished as an AI-powered buyer engagement platform. It comes with intuitive chatbots to sweeten customers’ interactions and present personalized, pleasing adventures. The huge help from AI allows Drift to listen/understand customer demands and offer exact solutions after learning from customers’ interactions.

The complete package of Drift’s features includes:

• Conversational Landing Pages (CLPs) for real-time conversations
• Machine Learning for understanding visitor behavior
• Bionic chatbots
• Video messaging

Drift doesn’t offer a free plan. Its premium plans start at a whopping price of $2,500/month for small businesses that aim to take their conversational capabilities to the next level. What’s more, Drift supports over 100 languages through AI-powered neural machine translation. It empowers you to communicate with customers from all over the world in any language you please.

10. LiveAgent

You can elevate how engaged your customers are with LiveAgent‘s wonderful live chat software. It allows you to instantly connect with users and present outstanding customer support and modern features. The platform’s state-of-the-art chat tool arms you with top features such as:

• Smart chat routing
• Proactive chat invitations
• Visitor tracking
• Multilingual support

LiveAgent presents dependable and instantaneous chat support with unlimited chat and ticket history. Also, you can benefit from comprehensive analytics and tracking features to heighten productivity. Proactive chat invitations enable you to turn visitors into customers in a flash. Additionally, a real-time typing view can help you prepare responses more snappily and enjoy unprecedented customer support.

The platform’s multilingual chat widget supports over 40 languages. If you doubt all the benefits, don’t forget to try out the 14-day trial period before the final investment. Otherwise, go ahead with the basic plan at $9 per agent per month to dive into a set of comprehensive features and superb customer service.

11. Smartsupp

With Smartsupp, it’s now time to use live chat to significantly push your online sales forward. The widget comprehensively presents both human and chatbot support to deliver a pleasing experience to your visitors on your website. It allows you to merge multichannel chats on a single dashboard, blending the likes of Facebook, email, and more.

Smartsupp allows you to customize the widget as per your brand personality. It helps you collect precious leads through the contact form to take your customer communication to its peak. Features such as visitor insights, conversation history, and video recordings empower you to sweeten the user experience and maximize conversion rates.

The platform’s chatbot merges with human support to automate sales and customer care procedures. It gives instant responses, engages visitors, and promotes products accurately. You can try out Smartsupp at no cost, or instead, purchase the basic plan at $19.5 per month if you have an early-stage business and tend to boost your online sales with no hassle.

12. Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat is the last but not least chat widget on our list. It presents secure chat experiences on your web/mobile app. The platform is backed by a scalable and fully managed backend. Its intuitive chat SDK and APIs help you personalize your chat options so they exactly match your appetite.

Beyond traditional text-based chat, Rocket.Chat takes the chatting experience to new horizons with its set of communication features such as video calls, voice messaging, and file sharing. It supports multiple languages to make sure it helps audiences from all around the world remain in touch.

Before making the purchase, don’t forget to pick the free trial to see if Rocket.Chat fits your needs. You can also take advantage of the platform’s free plan if your small team demands basic collaboration tools. Growing teams, on the other hand, can purchase the premium plan at a starting price of $4 per user per month to enjoy more control over the system.

Final Words

With all these incredible live chat widgets in the market, there’s no need to worry about Facebook terminating the support for its tool. Some of the live chat widgets we talked about today generously present their services for free. Others offer their comprehensive suite of features at various costs.

Before May 9, make sure you replace your Facebook widget with one of these tools to continue supporting your customers. This helps you avoid a stop in your sales and revenue generation.

About the Author

Robert Koch – experienced SaaS application designer and business optimization through automation consultant. An avid home brewer and cheesemaker in his spare time.