Tawk.to is free and does what it says: it lets your team chat with website visitors. The question isn’t whether it’s good, it’s whether anyone is free to answer it. Use the checklist below to decide, and if you switch, the steps to do it cleanly.
Keep Tawk.to if someone can watch the chat in the hours it’s on and most chats need a person. Look for an alternative if chats arrive when nobody is free, visitors ask the same questions daily, or after-hours messages go cold. An AI chat agent is the usual alternative: it answers at any hour from your business’s own information and hands over to you. Ours costs $299 setup, then from $29.99 a month ex GST.
Two or more ticks on the right and the free tool is costing you enquiries.
Lena runs a small cleaning company in Parramatta. Tawk.to was on her site for two years, answered from her phone when she remembered. Checking a month of history showed most chats came in at night asking the same three things: price for a two-bedroom bond clean, which suburbs, and whether they bring their own products. Those are exactly the chats an AI answers well.
Illustrative composite based on common patterns, not a single client.
Also comparing other tools? See the Tidio alternative guide and every free live chat option compared. Unsure whether a person or an AI should answer? Take the live chat vs chatbot quiz, or go straight to our AI chat agent and its plans.
Its core live chat is free: you and your team answer chats in its dashboard and apps. Tawk.to makes money from paid add-ons, such as removing its branding, its AI features and hiring chat agents by the hour. Check its pricing page for the current list.
Because the cost isn't the software, it's the person answering. If chats come in when nobody can reply, a free tool still loses those enquiries. An AI chat agent answers them at any hour.
Running two chat widgets on one page confuses visitors and slows the site. Pick one: either Tawk.to with its own AI add-on, or a different chat that is AI-first and hands over to you.
Your history stays in your Tawk.to account. Export what you need before you remove the widget or close the account; Tawk.to's help centre explains how.
Removing the Tawk.to snippet takes minutes. Building an AI chat that knows your business takes longer, because its answers come from your prices, services and policies. With us, nothing changes on your site until you've tested the new chat and approved it.
Many Australian businesses use it. Whatever chat you use, your privacy policy should say you collect personal information through website chat and that it may be stored overseas, under the Privacy Act and APP 8.
We build and run a custom AI chatbot for your website: $299 one-off setup, then from $29.99 a month (AUD, ex GST), month-to-month. See our AI chatbot plans and pricing.