AI chatbot vs live chat: which suits your business?

A chatbot trained on your own business content, answering visitor questions automatically, with a fallback to your contact form if it doesn't know the answer. Nobody on your side needs to be watching it. It's good for the questions you get asked constantly: opening hours, what you offer, how pricing roughly works.

It doesn't store a message history and isn't meant to replace a real conversation. It's meant to catch the easy questions before they become an email.

A widget that lets a real person on your team reply to visitors as they browse. It's better for anything that needs judgement, a quote that depends on details, reassurance before a big purchase, but it only works if somebody is actually watching it. An unanswered live chat box looks worse than no chat box at all.

The AI chatbot is a £400 add-on, live chat is £175. Both are built into the Premium package and both can be added to any package. You'll need your own account with the live chat provider so you can see and reply to messages yourself. Because both are integrations that need looking after, sites with either need at least the Standard maintenance plan.

You can, but there's not much point stacking an AI auto-responder on top of live chat: if you want automated answers, that's what the chatbot add-on already is. Most businesses want one or the other, chosen by whether they have someone able to actually watch a chat window during the day.