LiveAgent Review: Is It Right for Your Business?
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
Jill is a writer at Fit Small Business specializing on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
LiveAgent is a multichannel customer service tool that offers ticketing, live chat, and in-app phone. It streamlines customer support activities by providing users with tools to manage tickets, distribute cases among their team, gain visibility on their overall support activities, and evaluate their agents’ performance. LiveAgent is best for businesses that need extensive ticketing functionalities and access to various support channels to process customer queries.
Who LiveAgent Is Best For
- Teams needing multichannel communication tools: LiveAgent offers users three fundamental customer support channels: email ticketing, live chat, and in-app phone. Access to these channels makes it easy for their customers to reach out to them in the channel they deem most convenient. For other options, check out our guide on the best customer service software.
- Teams needing a free customer service tool: Apart from providing users with access to its three fundamental support channels, it also offers free access to crucial customer service tools such as customer satisfaction surveys, analytics reports, and performance overviews. This is why we included it in our top picks of the best free customer service software.
Who LiveAgent Is Not a Good Fit For
- Businesses using social media to communicate with customers: While integration with social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Viber is available, it comes with an additional cost for the two lowest-priced plans. Users who have a limited budget but want access to this feature should consider Freshdesk or UVdesk.
- Users needing chatbots: LiveAgent offers live chat, but does not have chatbots. This is a limitation for users who want to maximize their agents’ time for more complex issues and have bots handle repetitive and common questions. If you want to use chatbots, we recommend subscribing to HubSpot Service Hub or Zoho Desk.
LiveAgent Overview
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Free plan gives users access to all of its three main customer support channels: email tickets, live chat, and phone | Social media messaging integration comes at an extra cost and is only included in the most expensive plan |
| Offers advanced reporting tools such as agent performance reports, channel reports, and ticket history | No AI tools or chatbots |
| Extensive native third-party integrations | No option for the two lowest-priced plans to add an in-app phone feature; while it is available in the free plan, the functionalities are limited |
LiveAgent Pricing
LiveAgent pricing has a free plan and three paid subscription options ranging from $15 to $49 per month. Plans are billed on a month-to-month basis, and annual contracts are not offered. All of its plans include essential features, such as a customer portal, ticketing, analytics, and performance reports.
Plans | Free | Ticket | Ticket + Chat | All Inclusive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Small teams that typically don’t receive a large volume of customer queries | Small businesses that need a solid ticketing software to manage a steady volume of customer inquiries | Small businesses that want live chat functionality to manage customer queries | Enterprises that want multichannel customer support with advanced reporting and analytics tools |
Monthly Pricing ($/Month) | ✕ | $15 per agent, per month | $29 per agent, per month | $49 per agent, per month |
Ticket History | 7 days | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Universal Inbox | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Live Chat | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
Calling | ✓ (limited to one phone number) | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ (unlimited phone numbers) |
Social Media Integration (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) | ✕ | Add $39 per month | Add $39 per month | ✓ |
Satisfaction Surveys | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
For more information on LiveAgent pricing and plan subscriptions, select a plan from the drop-down options below:
LiveAgent’s free plan offers one email address for email ticketing, one live chat room, and an in-app caller function with one assigned phone number. The free plan’s ticketing tools are quite extensive and have functionalities to merge multiple tickets with the same issue, split tickets with multiple requests, and send ticket satisfaction surveys to customers. Users can also download analytics reports and agent performance reports.
The Ticket plan is LiveAgent’s lowest-priced plan. Since it focuses on ticketing, it doesn’t include some features in the free plan such as an in-app caller and live chat. However, it does offer a range of essential features such as unlimited email ticketing email addresses (for multiple agents), unlimited ticketing history, and canned responses. It also has integrations with Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, Google Analytics, and Salesforce.
LiveAgent’s mid-range plan, Ticket + Chat, offers everything under the Ticket plan and more. Some of its notable additions are proactive chat invitations to website visitors, feedback requests, chat transcripts, real-time visitor monitoring, file sharing over chat, and chat widgets customization. It also has more direct integrations with ecommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and social media management software.
All Inclusive is LiveAgent’s most advanced plan. Apart from the features offered in the Ticket + Chat plan, it includes additional advanced features such as messaging integration with social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Its voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) feature allows users to connect it with multiple devices and make video calls through the desktop or mobile app. It also has call queueing, unlimited call recordings, and call routing and transfers.
LiveAgent Features
LiveAgent offers essential customer support features that include multichannel communications, conversation and ticket management, reporting and analytics, and third-party integrations. Below, we take a closer look at some of its key features.
LiveAgent’s ticketing tool shows the channel where the inquiry was made, the contact details of the customer, as well as the status.
(Source: LiveAgent)
General Features
- Email ticketing
- Ticket splitting
- Ticket merging
- Ticket history
- Live chat
- Live chat history
- In-app caller
- Video call
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Agent ratings
- Agent performance reports
- Ticketing analytics
Click the tabs below to see a breakdown of the key customer service software features LiveAgent offers:
LiveAgent has a universal inbox where users can access and answer their messages from different channels, including emails, live chat messages, email tickets, and social media messages. All messages are organized based on importance, urgency, and date received. Multiple agents can also access the inbox and take action on active tickets using their unique login credentials.
The universal inbox shows all messages from various channels, including importance, longevity of case, and status.
(Source: LiveAgent)
Every message or ticket that comes into the universal inbox is automatically assigned to the right agent (if it falls under a certain topic), the agent with the least tickets, or a readily available agent. This helps improve efficiency and avoid confusion as each team member can easily view tickets and cases assigned to them.
LiveAgent allows users to choose the routing condition for their cases and list the names of agents based on prioritization.
(Source: LiveAgent)
The live chat widget has the ability to give the agent a preview of the message the customer is typing even before they hit send. This gives agents extra lead time to find the information the customer is looking for and provide answers swiftly—making them more efficient—which gives a good impression to customers.
Agents can see what customers are typing before they even get sent—enabling them to pull up needed information and answer the customer’s question quickly.
(Source: LiveAgent)
The analytics dashboard provides an overall view of customer support activities, including the sum of all resolved and active tickets in a given month, and the number of cases each agent worked on. The dashboard analyzes the nature of queries and the associated products and services, as well as the usage statistics per channel. It also shows agents’ performance based on satisfaction surveys answered by customers.
The analytics dashboard shows the summary of tickets received at specific periods of time.
(Source: LiveAgent)
LiveAgent can be integrated with many third-party applications to help users sync customer data from other software into the platform. It integrates with social media, ecommerce, analytics tools, CRMs, and project management tools.
Some of the most popular LiveAgent integrations include:
- Slack
- WordPress
- Pipedrive
- Mailchimp
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Salesforce
- ActiveCampaign
- Highrise
- Salesflare
- GoDaddy
Customer Service
LiveAgent offers 24/7 customer support for all of its plans—including the free plan—via live chat, email, phone, social media, and through its customer portal in the user dashboard.
Ease of Use
LiveAgent is simple to set up and use. It works out of the box and can be used immediately after sign-up. According to user reviews, it has a sleek interface that’s both clean to look at and easy to navigate.
LiveAgent Alternatives
LiveAgent offers excellent customer support tools, but it may not be the best fit for your business needs. For example, you may be looking for a provider that offers chatbots or affordable social media messaging integrations. If so, here are the best LiveAgent alternatives to consider:
 |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Best all-in-one customer service management solutions including a help desk, live chat, email, and ticketing | Best customer service software with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities | Best for teams who need a robust ticketing system |
Starting Price | Free version and paid plans start at $15 per user, per month | Free version and paid plans start at $14 per user, per month | Starts at $29 per user, per month |
What Users Say in LiveAgent Reviews
According to LiveAgent reviews, users like the convenience of being able to manage customer queries from various channels in a single platform. They like its integration with Slack as it helps them collaborate with their teammates easier, as well as get notifications on active cases. Many users also cited simple, uncomplicated setup, as well as helpful customer support.
At the time of this publication, LiveAgent reviews had garnered the following average ratings on popular user review sites:
- G2: 4.5 out of 5 based on 1,365 reviews
- Capterra: 4.7 out of 5 based on 1,058 reviews
- GetApp: 4.7 out of 5 based on 1,061 reviews
On the other hand, users who left negative LiveAgent reviews said the social media messaging tools and mobile app can be improved. Some users also noted the lack of artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities in the system.
Bottom Line
LiveAgent is a simple help desk and customer support tool that enables users to process tickets and queries via multiple channels. For small businesses looking for a free, feature-rich tool to manage their service needs, the free plan is ideal. However, growing businesses can choose from its range of subscription plans if they need more advanced features based on their priority channel—whether that is ticketing, live chat, in-app phone, or a combination of the three.
