The best free live chat widgets in 2026

"Free live chat widget" is one of the most searched phrases in this category, and the honest answer is that free always has a catch. The catch just changes shape depending on the tool: unlimited but basic (Tawk.to), a real free tier with caps that push you toward the paid plan (Tidio), or free only if you run the server yourself (Chatwoot Community Edition). None of that makes these tools bad. It means the word "free" is doing three different jobs across the market, and you should know which job it is doing before you install a script tag.

This post covers the tools with a genuine $0 tier, the tools that market themselves as free but are really a free trial, and where HelpYap fits, which is neither: a 7-day trial with no credit card, not a permanent free plan, because the product it gives you access to is a full AI agent, not a chat window with a bot bolted on.

Is there a live chat widget that is completely free forever?

Yes. Tawk.to is free with no seat limit, no chat limit, and no time limit: unlimited agents, unlimited conversations, a ticketing system, and a knowledge base at $0. It makes its money on optional add-ons, not on the widget itself.

The add-ons are where Tawk.to charges: removing its branding costs $39 per month, and its AI Assist bot starts from $29 per month for 1,000 message credits. It even sells outsourced human chat agents by the hour. The base product looks and functions like what it costs: the dashboard is dated, automation is thin, there are no SLAs, and support is community-driven rather than white-glove. For a side project, a solo founder, or a business with genuinely zero support budget, Tawk.to is the most defensible "free" claim in the category, because it is actually free, not a disguised trial.

Do free live chat widgets include AI chatbots?

Sometimes, with caps. Tidio's free plan includes 50 AI conversations a month from its Lyro bot before you hit a paywall. Tawk.to's AI is a paid add-on from the very first message. Chatwoot's AI only ships on the paid cloud plan, not the free self-hosted edition. Nobody gives away unlimited AI for free, because the AI is the part that costs the vendor real money per message.

Tidio is the clearest example of this pattern. Its free plan covers up to 10 agent seats and includes 50 AI conversations from Lyro at no cost, which is enough to test whether an AI bot actually helps your support volume before committing. Once you outgrow it, the paid base plan starts at $24.17 per month billed annually, and the Lyro AI add-on starts from $32.50 per month for 50 AI conversations beyond the free allotment. For an ecommerce store that wants to dip a toe into AI support without paying up front, that structure works. The complaint pattern in reviews is what happens after: stacking the base plan, the Lyro add-on, and Tidio's Flows automation tends to run two to three times the headline number, and we broke that math down in Tidio pricing explained. If you have already outgrown the free tier, see the best Tidio alternatives.

Is Chatwoot really free?

It depends which Chatwoot you mean. The self-hosted Community Edition is free forever, source-available, and yours to run on your own server with no seat cap. Chatwoot Cloud, the hosted version, is not free: it starts at $19 per agent per month billed annually and includes 300 Captain AI credits.

The free option is genuinely free in the dollars-out-of-pocket sense, but it moves the cost somewhere else: your time. Self-hosting means you own installation, upgrades, backups, uptime, and email deliverability, and the free Community Edition ships without Chatwoot's Captain AI agent or SSO, both of which are cloud-only. For a technical team with spare DevOps capacity and a preference for data ownership, that trade is worth making. For a small team that wants to install a script tag and move on, it usually is not, and the Crisp alternatives roundup covers Chatwoot alongside other options in more depth.

Does Crisp have a free plan?

Crisp's free-tier status changes often enough that it is worth checking crisp.chat directly before you commit. As of our last confirmed check on its published pricing, Crisp's plans started paid at Mini for $45 per month covering 4 seats, with no permanently free workspace tier at that time.

Whatever the current entry point is, Crisp prices by workspace rather than by seat, which is unusual in this category and genuinely useful if you hate doing seat math for a 4-to-10 person team. Each paid plan bundles a pool of AI credits rather than metering every resolution individually. The tradeoff is the opposite of a seat model: if your team grows past the seat count baked into your tier, you add seats at a per-seat rate on top of the workspace price rather than simply paying more per person from day one.

What about LiveChat, Smartsupp, and other tools that advertise "free"?

Several well-known chat tools use the word "free" in their marketing without offering a permanent free plan. We could not load LiveChat's, Smartsupp's, or JivoChat's current pricing pages during this research pass, so this section describes how each is structured rather than quoting numbers that might be stale. Confirm the current figures on each vendor's own pricing page before you budget around them.

LiveChat is a longstanding player whose homepage invites you to "start for free," which historically has meant a time-boxed free trial rather than a permanent no-cost tier: once the trial ends, every plan is paid and billed per agent. Smartsupp has publicly marketed a genuine free tier in the past, aimed at a single operator handling a small number of conversations a month, with paid plans unlocking more seats, more channels, and AI reply assistance. JivoChat has also marketed free and low-cost entry plans for small teams. Treat all three as worth a look if the structure fits what you need, and treat any specific dollar figure you read about them, including in older articles, as something to reconfirm on their site the day you sign up, because live chat pricing in this category changes often.

HubSpot deserves a mention too: its free CRM has long bundled a basic live chat widget at no cost, which is a reasonable starting point if you are already using HubSpot for anything else. The moment you want AI resolutions or deeper automation, you move into paid Service Hub tiers, which price seats separately from the free chat tool. If HubSpot is already your CRM, that path is worth evaluating on its own; if it is not, adopting an entire CRM just to get a free chat widget is usually not the fastest route to what you actually want.

Why isn't any live chat widget with real AI actually free?

Because AI has a real, per-message cost to the vendor that a static chat window does not. A free chat widget just needs a server to hold a websocket connection open, which is cheap at scale. An AI agent calls a language model on every reply, and that inference cost scales directly with your conversation volume, so no vendor can give it away unmetered without losing money on your busiest month.

That is why every "free" AI live chat tool in this list handles the problem the same way: cap the free AI usage low enough to be a genuine trial (Tidio's 50 conversations), sell AI as a separate paid add-on from the first message (Tawk.to's AI Assist), or exclude AI from the free tier entirely (Chatwoot Community Edition). None of these are dishonest. They are just proof that a chat widget and an AI support agent are different products with different cost structures, even when they ship inside the same script tag.

Does HelpYap have a free plan?

No. HelpYap has a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, not a permanent free plan. It is built for teams that have already decided a basic chat window is not enough and want an AI agent that resolves conversations by actually reading your documentation, with source citations, not a scripted bot with a handful of canned replies.

The honest positioning: if a static chat window with a human on the other end covers your volume, a free tool like Tawk.to is the right call, and there is no reason to pay for more than you need. HelpYap starts making sense the moment you want the AI to actually work, and it is priced the way we think AI support should be priced: a flat seat fee with a pool of AI conversations included, never a per-answer meter that punishes you for the AI doing its job well. Starter is $19 per seat per month for up to 3 seats with 300 AI conversations per seat, Pro is $49 per seat for up to 10 seats with 1,000 conversations per seat plus Slack and webhook integrations, and Business is $89 per seat with unlimited seats, 2,500 conversations per seat, and an Opus model add-on. Every seat also comes with a real chat widget, not just the AI layer bolted onto someone else's inbox. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

Quick comparison: free and near-free live chat options

A snapshot of where each tool actually sits on the free-to-paid spectrum. Figures for LiveChat, Smartsupp, and JivoChat are omitted here because we could not verify them on the vendor's own page this run; check their current pricing pages directly.

How should you choose a free live chat widget?

• Zero budget, any team size: Tawk.to. It is the only tool here with an honestly unlimited free tier.
• Want to test AI before paying anything: Tidio's free plan, for the 50 included Lyro conversations.
• Technical team, want to self-host: Chatwoot Community Edition, if you have the DevOps capacity to run it.
• Already on HubSpot: its bundled free chat tool, evaluated against how much you actually use HubSpot elsewhere.
• You have decided a scripted bot is not enough: a paid AI-first tool like HelpYap, tested first on its no-card trial.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Free live chat widgets are real, but "free" means three different things depending on the vendor: unlimited but basic (Tawk.to), capped until you need more (Tidio), or free only if you run the infrastructure yourself (Chatwoot Community Edition). For a side project or a team with a genuinely small support volume, any of those is a fine place to start, and you should not pay for more than you need. HelpYap is not trying to win the free-forever comparison; it has a 7-day trial with no credit card, and it earns the $19-per-seat starting price by giving you an AI agent that actually reads your documentation and resolves conversations, not a chat window waiting for a human. If a static widget is genuinely enough for you today, take it. If you have already tried one and the bot could not answer a real question, that is the signal to try HelpYap's trial instead. For a broader look at paid options once you outgrow free tiers, see the best live chat software for startups in 2026.