Bisa AI vs Tawk.to — when to upgrade from free live chat
Tawk.to is the free live chat that millions of small businesses use as their first step into website chat. It's genuinely free, it works, and the team gets a notification when a visitor messages. The catch is in the math: Tawk only works when someone on your team is online and watching. The 70% of visitors who land outside your working hours either get silence or a stale auto-message. Bisa AI is built to fix exactly that problem — an AI agent that answers from your website content 24/7, then hands the harder conversations to your team.
Tawk.to is free forever for live chat. Their AI Assist add-on costs $29/month per seat. Hiring chat agents costs $1/hour from their pool, or you staff it yourself.
One-time setup fee per agent, then pay-as-you-go credits. No monthly subscription. A quiet month costs nothing.
What Tawk.to does well
- Genuinely free for unlimited human-only live chat — hard to beat at $0.
- Mature mobile apps so your team gets push notifications.
- Long-established with a huge install base, so integrations exist for most platforms.
Where Bisa AI is genuinely different
- Answers visitors 24/7 from your actual website content — not just during working hours.
- No monthly seat fee for the AI — pay-as-you-go credits instead.
- Captures the lead even when your team is asleep, with the full context emailed for follow-up.
Side-by-side
| Feature | Tawk.to | Bisa AI |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free (chat) / $29/mo (AI Assist) | One-time setup + pay-as-you-go credits |
| Works when team is offline | No — only when staffed | Yes — 24/7 |
| AI answers grounded in your site | Yes (AI Assist add-on) | Yes (default) |
| Setup time | 30 mins (account + script) | 60 seconds |
| Mobile push to team | Yes | No — handover is email-based |
| Best fit | Teams who actually staff chat 9–5 | Teams who want chat working 24/7 without staffing it |
Stick with Tawk.to if you genuinely have someone on chat during all your business hours, your traffic mostly arrives 9–5, and you'd rather pay nothing than pay anything. It's a great free product if those things are true.
Switch to Bisa AI if you find yourself losing leads outside business hours, or if your team can't realistically watch chat during the day either. The AI handles the easy questions and hands you the qualified ones.
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