What’s the most used live chat tool on the web?
- 11 months ago
- 3 min read
Live chat tools hold significant potential for enhancing customer support, sales, and marketing efforts. But its adoption remains relatively low. Businesses offering live chat tools are competing for the relatively small user base, so the competition is fierce. We take a look at our web data to see which is the most used live chat tool on the internet.
With the increasing prevalence of ecommerce, companies have to keep adapting to different channels and technologies to provide seamless customer experiences online. Live chatting is one solution to address the evolving expectations. Allowing companies to communicate with their customers in real time, it is a valuable tool for customer support, sales, and marketing. Connecting website visitors to a human support representative allows for faster issue resolution, often resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
Live chat software operates with a small snippet of JavaScript code that has to be added to the website. Our technology detection detects live chat software by rendering the pages of websites and checking for specific patterns in code. This means we can measure the adoption rates of live chat software tools by counting the number of unique websites that have live chat software embedded.
In our data, out of the websites utilizing live chat software, a staggering 59% have opted for Tawk.to.
Live chat tools usage is low
Despite its benefits, live chat software is not very common on the web. We only detect it on 0.5% of active websites, excluding parked domains and placeholders. For the current article, we looked at nearly 640,000 websites that are using live chat software. Among a plethora of live chat software options available, one name stands out above the rest – Tawk.to.
In our data, out of the websites utilizing live chat software, a staggering 59% have opted for Tawk.to. Tawk.to is a free live chat platform with key features including more than 45 languages, canned responses, website visitor tracking, customizable branding and file sharing. It was founded in Nevada, United States, in 2010 and remains privately owned.
We can also see that Live Chat Inc, Zopim and Zendesk (Update: Zendesk acquired Zopim in January 2024) have been competing for second place, while Tawk.to seems to have gotten entirely unreachable. However, when we narrow our sample down to only online stores, we see that Zopim increases its market share to 20.1%, followed by Zendesk (18.5%) and Live Chat Inc (10.3%). Yet, Tawk.to dominates with 61.8%.
Late to the game, but in the lead
Tawk.to is what can be considered a “late entry” to the market, yet they have managed to overtake a large chunk of the market. A plausible explanation for Tawk.to’s popularity could be its accessibility; it has a free version offering most of the features that users would otherwise have to pay a monthly fee for.
When we look at the geographical distribution, Tawk.to seems to be predominantly adopted in Asia and North America. As many as 31% of websites using Tawk.to are based in the United States, 8% in Indonesia and 8% in India.
Bigger players have also entered the market in the past years; Hubspot provides a free live chat tool as a part of their CRM, and Meta provides a live chat solution with a Facebook Chat Plugin. Furthermore, after OpenAI released its AI chatbot ChatGPT, multiple companies like Google, Meta and Alibaba have released AI-powered chatbots too. What remains to be seen is how chatbots and live chat will coexist; will chatbots continue to improve their capabilities and bridge the gap with human responses, or will live chat maintain its prominence in delivering personalized, high-quality interactions?
