LiveChat: What It Is, Pricing and How to Use It (2026 Guide)

What is LiveChat?

LiveChat is live chat and customer service software for websites, made by the Polish company formerly called LiveChat Software, which renamed itself Text in 2023. The company now sells new customers a single product called Text (“Text by LiveChat”), which combines the chat widget, an omnichannel inbox, ticketing and an AI Agent in one subscription. If you sign up on livechat.com today, Text is what you get. Existing LiveChat customers keep their plan, price and login and can run both side by side.

In this guide we use “LiveChat” because that is still the name most people search for and the name on the website, and “Text” when we mean the specific app or plans.

The problem it solves is the gap between a website visitor with a question and a sale or a resolved ticket. A chat widget lets visitors ask questions in real time; the AI Agent answers the routine ones from your own content; your team picks up the rest in a shared inbox; and anything that cannot be answered now becomes a ticket. LiveChat has always leaned toward sales as much as support, with proactive campaigns and reports that tie chats to revenue.

Who it is for

• Online stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, Webflow or a custom platform that want chat to recommend products, recover hesitant buyers and answer order questions.
• Support teams of a few to a few dozen agents moving customers from email and phone to chat and messaging channels.
• Sales-led websites (SaaS, services, B2B) that want to start conversations with high-intent visitors through targeted campaigns.
• Teams that want one inbox for website chat, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS.

It is less suited to very small businesses that want a free plan or to answer most questions with AI at a low fixed price: per-seat pricing plus metered AI resolutions can cost more than AI-first tools such as Tidio. Large enterprises with complex ticketing needs may prefer a full help desk.

Key features

• AI Agent. An AI assistant that answers customers in the chat widget. You set its name, avatar, tone (Professional, Concise, Polite, Friendly or Casual) and answer length, write custom instructions of up to 10,000 characters, and train it on websites, uploaded files (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, TXT, CSV, TSV and MD, up to 50 MB) and articles written in the app. It can read images customers send and recommend products from a Shopify or WooCommerce catalogue, an uploaded product list or, since late October 2026, an imported Google Shopping product feed.
• Skills and handoff. The AI Agent’s built-in skills include sending a welcome message, handling tickets, collecting customer details, transferring to a human and offering a discount code. Custom Skills can call webhooks in external systems such as a CRM.
• AI Copilot for agents. Reply suggestions and AI text edits for human agents, plus chat and ticket summaries on Growth.
• Omnichannel Inbox. Website widget, in-app chat, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS through Twilio in one inbox, with routing rules, VIP customers pinned to the top and cart value shown next to the conversation.
• Ticketing. Turn chats into tickets, add custom ticket fields, merge duplicates and see order details inside the ticket. Ticket skills (October 2026) apply several ticket updates in one click, and a ticket transfer view (November 2026) shows where tickets get passed between teams and teammates.
• Campaigns and Conversion Radar. Proactive messages targeted by behaviour and device. Conversion Radar flags visitors showing buying or lead signals and pairs them with campaigns, which are AI-personalised by default since October 2026.
• Playbook. The automation area (renamed from Automations in May 2026), where you can now describe a process in plain language and get an editable automation.
• Reports. Sales conversion reports comparing AI, human and no-chat sessions, leads conversion, visitor drop-off and chat revenue tracking. Sales reports can be grouped by team, teammate or agent type, and reports can switch time zones so distributed teams see the same numbers. Since 25 October 2026 an order counts as chat-influenced only if it is placed within 7 days of a chat, down from 30, so revenue figures from before and after that date are not directly comparable.

Pricing

Text plans are priced per user (seat) per month, and every person who answers chats or tickets needs a seat. There is no minimum team size. Prices below are from livechat.com/pricing at the time of writing (checked 5 November 2026), before tax.

	Essential	Growth	Enterprise
Annual billing	$19/user/month ($228/user/year)	$79/user/month ($948/user/year)	Custom
Monthly billing	$25/user/month	$99/user/month	Custom
AI Agents	1	10	Custom
AI resolutions per month	10	200	Custom
AI Copilot	5 reply suggestions + 5 AI text edits per user/month	50 reply suggestions + 100 AI text edits per user/month, plus summaries	Custom
Chat history	60 days	Unlimited	Unlimited
Live visitors tracked	50	400	Custom
Proactive campaigns	3 (1,000 impressions)	30 (10,000 impressions)	Custom
API calls per month	10,000	20,000	Custom

Growth also adds chat supervision and takeover, shared canned responses, team performance reports and chat topic insights. Enterprise adds a dedicated team, onboarding and training, SLAs, SSO with audit logs, a white-label widget and a legal and compliance review.

Add-ons on Essential and Growth: 50 extra AI resolutions for $49.50 (about $0.99 each, with optional auto-refill) and 100,000 extra API calls for $29.50. Both paid plans start with a 14-day free trial with no credit card, and you are not charged automatically at the end.

Worked examples from the vendor: three users on Essential cost $57 a month billed annually or $75 billed monthly; three users on Growth cost $237 a month annually or $297 monthly; five users on Growth cost $395 a month, or $4,740 a year. The vendor also prices 350 AI resolutions on Growth as the 200 included plus three 50-packs ($148.50). If you expect the AI Agent to resolve, say, 500 chats a month on Growth, add six resolution packs (300 resolutions) at about $297 a month on top of the seats.

Existing customers on legacy LiveChat plans (Starter, Team and Business) keep them; those plans are not the ones offered on the main pricing page.

How to use LiveChat: step-by-step

These steps follow the Text app that new customers get, based on the vendor’s help center. If you are on a legacy LiveChat account, menu names differ: the widget code sits under Settings > Channels > Website.

1. Sign up. Click “Start free trial” on livechat.com, fill in the short form and you are logged in. No card is needed for the 14-day trial.
2. Install the chat widget on your website (see below).
3. Set up the AI Agent with your content and handoff rules.
4. Test in the preview widget, then switch the agent on.
5. Invite teammates. Each person who answers chats needs a seat. Set chat acceptance schedules and decide what happens when nobody is online: keep chats open or show a form.
6. Monitor and improve from Reports and the Inbox.

Install the widget

Go to Settings > Website widgets, enter your website URL and click Continue. Choose Embed code, click Continue, open the HTML tab and click Copy code. Paste the code just before the closing </body> tag of your site, ideally in a shared footer or layout file so the widget appears on every page.

If you use a website platform, follow its route instead: install from the Shopify App Store, use the Webflow app, or follow the WordPress, WooCommerce or Google Tag Manager guides. Developers on React, Vue or Angular have their own instructions. When you reload your site and see the widget, Settings > Website widgets should show the site as Connected.

Set up the AI Agent

Owners and Admins can configure the AI Agent from Team > AI agent profile:

1. Set the agent’s name, avatar, tone and answer length. Pick the tone your brand uses in email; “Friendly” with “Standard” length is a safe default for most stores.
2. Write custom instructions. Describe your business, what the agent should and should not discuss, and how to handle refunds, discounts and complaints. You have up to 10,000 characters.
3. Choose languages: all, one or several.
4. Add knowledge sources. Add your website (the whole site, nested pages or a single page, with an Auto-update interval so it re-scans), upload files such as your returns policy or product sheets, or write articles in the app.
5. Turn skills on or off, for example Collect customer details for lead capture or Discount code for sales.
6. Configure handoff: transfer automatically or to a specific team, and tick Create a ticket so the customer is not left waiting if no teammate answers within 30 seconds.

Test the agent in the Preview widget with the questions customers actually ask. Ticket and transfer skills are only simulated in preview. When the answers are right, switch the agent to accept chats.

Monitor and hand off

Use Reports > Performance (AI agent) to track resolutions, resolution rate, CSAT and transfers, and open Inbox > AI agent to watch live AI conversations and take over when needed. Read transferred chats weekly: each one is either a gap in your knowledge sources or a question that genuinely needs a human.

Tips to get better results

• Feed the AI Agent your real policies. Upload shipping, returns and warranty documents rather than relying on marketing pages, which are vague by design.
• Write instructions as rules. “Never promise delivery dates; link to the tracking page instead” works better than “be helpful”. Our guide on how to write better prompts applies directly.
• Watch your resolution meter. On Essential, 10 resolutions a month runs out fast. Turn on the email alert at 90% usage, and decide whether auto-refill is worth it before it happens.
• Use campaigns sparingly. Target a few high-intent pages (pricing, cart, checkout) rather than greeting every visitor; Essential caps you at 3 campaigns and 1,000 impressions.
• Always pair handoff with tickets. Ticking Create a ticket means out-of-hours questions turn into follow-ups instead of lost leads.
• Re-scan your site after changes. Set an Auto-update interval on website sources so the agent does not quote old prices.
• Compare AI against humans in reports. The sales conversion report splits AI, human and no-chat sessions, and sales reports can be grouped by agent type; use them to decide where the AI should answer and where it should hand off. Remember the 7-day attribution window when comparing with older reports.

Limitations and common problems

• Costs grow with seats and AI usage. A ten-person team on Growth costs $790 a month on annual billing before extra resolutions. Model your volume before choosing a plan.
• Essential is a taster for AI. Ten AI resolutions, 60-day history and no supervision or team reports make Essential suitable mainly for very small teams.
• Two products, one help center. Search results and help articles mix the legacy LiveChat app and the new Text app, with different menu names. Check which app an article describes before following it.
• AI answers are only as good as your content. If the agent gives wrong answers, the fix is usually clearer instructions or better source documents, not a different tone setting.
• Data and privacy questions. Text runs on Google Cloud in the US and the EU and states SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and GDPR support. Which region a new Text account uses, and which AI models power the agent, are not stated on the pages we checked; ask sales if it matters for your compliance. HIPAA compliance is listed as “Coming soon” on the pricing page, so do not use it for protected health information yet.

Alternatives

• Tidio - live chat with the Lyro AI Agent and a free plan; cheaper for small stores, but with several usage meters; our Tidio vs LiveChat comparison prices both at the same team size.
• Gorgias - an ecommerce help desk built around Shopify, better if tickets and order actions matter more than chat.
• Wati - WhatsApp-first messaging for teams whose customers live on WhatsApp.
• Manychat - Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp automation for marketing-led conversations.

See all options in our support and messaging tools directory, and our guide to the best AI customer support tools, which compares per-agent and per-resolution costs across these vendors.

Verdict

Sign up for the LiveChat (Text) trial if you run an online store or a sales-led website, have a few people answering chats, and want chat to sell as well as support. Growth is the plan most teams will need, because it adds 200 AI resolutions, unlimited history, supervision and team reports. The product is mature, the apps are good, and the sales reporting is a genuine strength.

Skip it if you need a free plan, have a large team where per-seat pricing becomes expensive, or want an AI agent to handle thousands of chats a month at a low fixed price. In those cases Tidio or an ecommerce help desk such as Gorgias is likely to be better value.