Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Messaging conversations persist. Live chat sessions end when the visitor leaves. That single difference decides which you want.
The difference
| Messaging | Live chat | |
|---|---|---|
| The visitor leaves | Conversation continues | Session ends |
| Nobody is online | Message waits, answered later | Chat unavailable |
| History | Visible to the customer | Gone when the window closes |
| Channels | Web, mobile, WhatsApp, social | Web only |
Why persistence changes everything
With live chat, an unanswered visitor is a lost one. With messaging, they send a message and get on with their day, and you answer within a reasonable time.
That removes the requirement to have somebody watching a widget at all times, which is what makes chat expensive to staff properly.
Which to choose
Messaging, for almost everyone starting now. It covers the live case and the asynchronous one, and it works on channels your customers already use.
Live chat still works where you genuinely have people watching during known hours and the conversations are short, but it is not a choice to make afresh: Zendesk Chat is in maintenance, is not sold to new customers and closes on 31 January 2028. If you are on it today, the question is when to move rather than whether.
One or the other, and the choice is per brand
A brand's widget does live chat or messaging, not both: they are separate configurations with separate settings, rather than parallel options.
The choice is made per brand, though. Turning messaging on lets you convert brands one at a time, and a brand still on the classic widget keeps it until you convert that one. So a staged migration is possible, and it is usually the right way: moving a brand across has consequences for your triggers and reporting, and doing one first and watching what breaks costs far less than doing all of them at once.
Messaging needs the Agent Workspace
A prerequisite worth checking before you plan anything: messaging requires the Agent Workspace to be enabled. An account still on the standard agent interface cannot run messaging at all, so that switch comes first.
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