Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Live chat still exists and still works. Whether you should choose it now is a different question, and it turns on who is actually watching.
What live chat is
A real-time conversation with a visitor on your website. It exists while they are on the page, and it ends when they leave. Agents see who is browsing and can start a conversation.
What it does well
- Immediacy, when somebody is genuinely watching.
- Seeing visitors on the site, which messaging does differently.
- Short, transactional questions answered in a minute.
What it does badly
- Anyone who leaves. The conversation and the answer are gone.
- Out of hours. Chat is either unavailable or a form.
- Anything longer than a few minutes, because both sides are held in place.
- Any channel but the web.
Should you use it
For a new setup, messaging is the better default: it covers the live case and everything else. Live chat remains reasonable where you have people genuinely watching during known hours and the questions are short.
Where teams get into trouble is choosing chat for the immediacy and then not staffing it, which produces a widget that promises a person and delivers a form.
If you already have it
It keeps working, and there is no urgency. Moving to messaging is a project rather than a switch, so plan it rather than doing it on a quiet afternoon.
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