Website chatbot tools compared: when an off-the-shelf one is enough.

The short answer

An off-the-shelf tool is enough when most questions have written answers, the tool already connects to where your work happens and someone on your team will spend time setting it up and reading conversations.

It stops being enough when requests must go straight into booking software or customer records the tool does not connect to, when your trade has strict rules about what the chatbot may say, or when the monthly bill grows faster than the work it saves.

• A Shopify store answering questions about sizes, delivery and orders: an off-the-shelf tool, such as Tidio, built for exactly that.
• A software company with a support team and a help centre: Intercom or Zendesk, where the AI agent sits inside the helpdesk the team already uses.
• A business already on HubSpot's Professional or Enterprise plans: HubSpot's own agent, which reads your HubSpot records.
• A dental clinic that wants booking requests in its practice software, with medical questions always passed to reception: a custom build, or a tool plus custom work on the connection.

What you are choosing between

The tools fall into three groups, and most comparisons mix them up:

• Free live chat with optional AI, such as tawk.to. A person answers, and an AI add-on can cover common questions. Cheap, and only as good as the person behind it.
• Chat and helpdesk tools with an AI agent built in, such as Tidio, Intercom, Crisp, Zendesk and HubSpot. You sign up, add your sources, set rules and put a code snippet on your site.
• A chatbot built for your business by a studio or a developer, with its jobs, limits and connections written for you, usually for a setup fee plus a monthly plan.

If you have not yet decided whether you need a chatbot at all, start with chatbot, live chat or contact form.

Tidio and Intercom, side by side

These two come up most often, and they are built for different businesses.

Tidio is aimed at small businesses and online stores. Its pricing page sells live chat, an AI agent called Lyro and rule-based automations called Flows, alone or together. Lyro is billed by conversation: a conversation with at least one AI reply counts once, however many replies it takes. The free plan includes a one-off allowance of Lyro conversations to try it with. It works with Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email as well as your website, and its higher plans add API access.

Intercom is a helpdesk for support teams. You pay per teammate seat, and its AI agent, Fin, is billed per outcome. Fin's pricing page counts an outcome when no further help is requested after its last answer, or when it completes a procedure you set up, such as qualifying a lead or handing over to a person in a set way. It charges one outcome per conversation, and a conversation simply passed to your team without an outcome is not charged. Fin can also run on other helpdesks, with a monthly minimum.

So the choice usually makes itself. A three-person shop where the owner answers chats between orders fits Tidio's model. A team of support agents working a shared inbox with a help centre fits Intercom's. Paying per seat for people who never answer a chat is an easy way to overpay.

Other tools worth a look

• Crisp charges a flat monthly fee per workspace, with a set number of seats in each plan, and its pricing page says conversations are not limited. AI use comes from credits included in each plan, and the free plan has none. It lists connections to Shopify, WordPress, HubSpot and Zapier.
• Zendesk charges per agent seat. Its AI agent is billed by automated resolution, with an allowance per agent each month, and its pricing page says requests escalated to a person do not count. It suits a business that already runs its support on Zendesk.
• HubSpot's customer agent needs a Professional or Enterprise subscription and runs on HubSpot Credits, charged per resolved conversation. It answers from your knowledge base, website and HubSpot records, so it fits a business whose customer data already lives there.
• tawk.to offers live chat free, with paid add-ons to remove its branding, hire chat agents or add AI Assist, which answers from your knowledge base and saved answers.

Some website platforms include a basic chat of their own, and some booking tools include messaging. Check what you already pay for before you add another widget.

How each one charges

The billing unit decides what makes your bill grow, so match it to how your business works:

• Per seat: Intercom and Zendesk. The bill grows with the number of people who answer chats.
• Per conversation: Tidio's Lyro. The bill grows with the number of conversations the AI takes part in, whether or not it settles them.
• Per outcome or resolution: Intercom's Fin, Zendesk and HubSpot. The bill grows with the conversations the AI closes, which also means a good month costs more.
• Flat per workspace with AI credits: Crisp. Predictable until you outgrow the credits.
• Free with paid extras: tawk.to. Cheap, and the time of whoever answers is the real cost.

Before you sign up, estimate how many chats you get in a month and how many a chatbot could close on its own. A clinic with two receptionists and a few hundred chats a month gets very different bills from these models. What an AI chatbot costs works through a year's total for each one.

Who writes the answers

Every one of these tools answers from sources you give it: your website pages, help articles, documents and short question-and-answer entries. None of them knows your parking, your cancellation policy or which dentist sees children until someone writes it down.

That work is the same whichever tool you choose:

• Collect thirty real questions from your inbox, forms and phone notes.
• Check that your pages answer them, and write short answers for the ones they do not.
• Remove old price lists and out-of-date pages from what the tool can read.
• Write the rules: what it must never answer, and when it hands over to a person.
• Read conversations every few days at first, and fix answers at their source.

Ask each tool whether it reads your live pages or a copy taken when you set it up. With a copy, someone has to refresh it every time a price changes. The full order of work is in how to add an AI chatbot to your website.

What it can connect to

This is where off-the-shelf tools differ most from each other and from a custom build.

Store platforms are well covered. Tools built for online shops can look up an order or a delivery in a platform such as Shopify, which saves the most time for an online store.

Messaging apps are common too: several tools answer Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email in the same inbox. Each app has its own rules and approval, so check each channel you need is on your plan. WhatsApp for business covers what WhatsApp charges and requires.

Booking software and trade systems are the weak spot. Most tools pass a booking request to an inbox or a person, and writing it into your booking software or practice system usually means building a custom action on that software's API, if it has one, often on a higher plan. Ask these before you buy:

• Does it write the request into my booking software, or only notify someone?
• Can it see my real free times, or does it only collect preferred times?
• What happens to a request when the connection fails?
• Can I export every conversation and contact if I leave?

When an off-the-shelf tool is enough

Most of these are true for a business that does well with a ready-made tool:

• Most questions are common ones with written answers: prices, delivery, opening hours, policies.
• The tool already connects to the place requests should land, such as your store platform or helpdesk.
• Someone on your team has time to set it up properly and read conversations every week.
• Handovers can go to one inbox or one team during opening hours.
• The billing unit matches your volume, and you have checked the bill at your busiest month.

If that describes you, set one up yourself. You do not need to pay anyone, and a careful setup in an off-the-shelf tool beats a careless custom one.

When it is not enough

A custom build earns its cost in fewer situations than vendors of custom work suggest, and in these it usually does:

• Requests must land in booking software, practice software or a CRM that the tool does not connect to, in the format your team works from.
• Your trade has strict limits: a clinic that must never comment on symptoms, a law firm that must never advise, with refusals and handovers tested before launch.
• Handovers depend on the topic and the time: urgent cases to one person, bookings to reception, complaints to the owner, a different route at night.
• You would rather pay once for the setup than a bill that rises with every conversation, seat or outcome.
• Nobody on the team has the time to write the answers, test them and read the conversations.

That is the work we do: a chatbot that answers only from information you approve, says so when it does not know, hands over with the conversation attached and sends requests to your inbox, booking tool or CRM where its API allows, with an alert when a connection fails. See AI chatbots for how we build and test one, and the prices page for where ours start.

Test it on your own questions before you pay

Most of these tools have a free plan or a trial, so use it as a test rather than a tour. Intercom's pricing page offers a trial with Fin included, and Tidio's free plan includes a first allowance of Lyro conversations.

• Run your thirty real questions through it, in your customers' words, typos included.
• Add the awkward ones: a complaint, an urgent case, a service you stopped offering, a discount someone was promised.
• Ask for a person, and check who gets the handover and how fast.
• Try it on a phone, and check that the chat button does not cover your booking button.
• Look at where conversations are stored and who can read them, and add a line about the chat to your privacy notice.
• Find the export: conversations, contacts and your answers, in a file you can keep.

If the tool guesses when it should say it does not know, change your sources or its rules. If it still guesses, change the tool. What it should pass to a person is covered in what a chatbot should hand over.

Mistakes when choosing a chatbot tool

• Choosing from the demo. The demo answers questions the seller picked.
• Paying per seat for staff who never answer chats.
• Turning on a pop-up that opens the chat by itself and covers the page on a phone.
• Two chat widgets on one site, such as an old live chat and a new AI agent.
• Pointing the tool at every page and PDF you have, including last year's prices.
• Leaving the free plan's branding and default greeting in place.
• Never checking the bill against the plan's limits until the busiest month arrives.