Botsmith vs LiveChat and ChatBot.com

LiveChat and ChatBot.com come from the same company, Text, and people often shortlist them as a pair: LiveChat for your staff to chat with visitors, ChatBot.com for the automated side. Botsmith does one narrower job. It reads your website and your files, answers visitors from them, and emails you when someone wants a person. This page sets out what each one charges, what the money buys, and which kind of business each one fits.

Two products, one company

It helps to know what you are looking at before you compare prices.

• LiveChat is software for people. Your staff log in, see who is on your website and type replies in real time. Its plans are Starter, Team, Business and Enterprise.
• ChatBot.com is described on LiveChat's features page as the place to create your own bot and automate customer service with AI. When we checked, its pricing page was headed "Chatbot pricing and plans with Text's AI Agent" and listed three plans: Essential, Growth and Enterprise.
• Text is the parent brand. Both sites carry its name in the footer, and LiveChat's pricing page links its AI Agent row to Text.

One thing we could not confirm from the public pages is how a LiveChat subscription and a ChatBot.com plan are billed when you want both. LiveChat's pricing page says Text Essential costs $19 per user per month, billed annually, which is the same figure as the ChatBot.com Essential plan. Ask their sales team before you assume it is one bill or two.

What each one costs

Both Text products charge per user, meaning per member of your team with a login. Botsmith charges one flat price for the account. All LiveChat and ChatBot.com prices are in US dollars and were checked on 5 October 2026.

Three details change the sums for a small business.

Seats are charged whether or not they are used. LiveChat's pricing FAQ says it charges a fee for every user account created, regardless of whether the user is logged in. The Starter plan allows one user. Team and Business allow up to 400. So a part-timer who covers chat two afternoons a week still needs a paid seat on Team.

The AI allowance on ChatBot.com is small on the entry plan. Essential includes 10 AI resolutions a month. The page defines one resolution as the AI directly solving a customer question, and says several questions in the same chat still count as one. Growth includes 200 a month. Past that, extra resolutions are $0.99 each, or $49.50 for a pack of 50 that refills automatically. ChatBot.com calls this per-seat pricing with AI resolutions included, and it means you do not pay per message.

Botsmith counts messages, not resolutions or seats. Starter's 2,000 is the number of visitor messages the bot will answer in a month. Nobody on your side needs a login per person, because there is no queue of chats for staff to work through.

A rough way to compare: if your bot settles 60 questions in a month, ChatBot.com Essential covers the first 10 and the other 50 are one extra pack. On Botsmith those 60 conversations come out of the 2,000 messages. If your team mostly answers chats themselves and the AI is a helper, the comparison runs the other way, because Botsmith has nowhere for them to do that.

What the money buys

With LiveChat you buy a tool for a team. The pricing page lists routing that shares chats between available agents, chat takeover from a bot or a colleague, canned responses, visitor tracking and reports. The Business plan adds a work scheduler, staffing prediction and agent performance reports. You can put the widget on as many websites as you like at no extra cost, and translate it into any of 48 languages. Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS and Apple Messages for Business appear in its channel list, and its features page promises more than 200 integrations.

With ChatBot.com you buy an AI agent that sits inside that kind of workspace. Its pricing FAQ says the product also includes live chat, a help desk with ticketing, workflow automation and analytics in a single platform. You feed the AI from help articles, internal docs, URLs and PDFs. It detects the customer's language and replies in it, with 48 languages supported. A person can step in and take over from the AI at any time. The features page describes a no-code editor for building workflows from scratch, ready-made templates, and ticket rules that assign, prioritise or tag tickets automatically. Channels listed are website chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and mobile apps.

With Botsmith you buy a bot and little else. It crawls your public pages. It also answers from PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and CSV files you upload. It replies in whatever language the visitor writes in. When your content does not cover a question it says it is not sure, and does not invent a price or a policy. When a visitor leaves a name, phone or email, you get an email within seconds with the full transcript. You can add it to a site with one script tag, or hand out a chat link and QR code.

What Botsmith lacks is the whole human side. There is no shared inbox, no ticketing, no routing and no way for you to type into a live conversation. There is no visual flow builder either: you shape the bot with plain written rules and by answering the questions it could not. If those missing pieces are the reason you are shopping, stop here and pick the Text products.

Trying each one

All three let you start without paying. LiveChat and ChatBot.com each advertise a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. Botsmith's trial is 14 days too, with 200 messages and no credit card. ChatBot.com also states there are no long-term contracts on its monthly plans.

The difference is what you have to set up to get a fair test. For LiveChat you need people ready to answer, or the trial shows you an empty queue. For ChatBot.com you add knowledge and decide when the AI hands over to staff. For Botsmith you type in your website address, wait a few minutes, and ask it the ten questions customers ask you most.

When LiveChat and ChatBot.com are the better choice

• You have staff whose job is to talk to customers in real time, and you want them to see visitors, pick up chats and transfer them to each other.
• You need tickets, so that a question that cannot be settled in one chat has an owner, a status and a history.
• You want to design the conversation yourself, step by step, in a visual workflow editor, not leave it to an AI reading your pages.
• Customers message you on WhatsApp, Messenger or SMS as well as your website, and you want one place to answer all of it.
• You want a person to be able to take over from the bot in the middle of a chat.
• You manage a team and need reports on response times, workload and how each agent performs.

When Botsmith is the better choice

• You run a small business and nobody is free to sit in a chat window during the day.
• Most questions you get are already answered on your website, or in a price list or policy you can upload.
• You want a bill that stays the same when you add a helper, with a message allowance you can check at a glance.
• You expect the bot to handle more than a handful of questions a month and do not want to buy resolution packs.
• You are happy for the bot to take a visitor's details and email you, and you will call or write back yourself.

To be straight about the limit: Botsmith will not grow into a live chat desk. If you later hire a support team, you will be moving to a product like LiveChat, not upgrading a Botsmith plan.

Can you use them together

Avoid running two chat bubbles on the same page. Visitors will not know which one to use. If you already pay for LiveChat and your team answers during the day, try the Text AI Agent first, since it hands over to the people you already have. A Botsmith bot still earns its place on a separate site, a campaign page or a printed QR code, where a team inbox is more than the job needs.

If you are weighing other tools that mix live chat with AI, see how Botsmith compares with Tidio and Lyro and with Crisp. For seat-based help desks, we cover Zendesk AI agents, Freshdesk Freddy AI and HubSpot's chatbot. There is also a wider list of Chatbase alternatives sorted by how they charge. Botsmith's plans are on the pricing page, and setup steps for WordPress and Wix are in the install guides.

LiveChat and ChatBot.com figures and descriptions on this page come from the pricing and features pages on livechat.com and chatbot.com, checked on 5 October 2026. Prices are in US dollars and can change, so check the vendor's page before you buy. Botsmith figures come from our pricing page.