Free versus free: what each one actually gives you
tawk.to's core product is free forever. You get unlimited agents and unlimited chats, and the widget shows "Powered by tawk.to" branding. For a support team that needs many people answering chats and has no budget, that is genuinely hard to beat, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. If your only requirement is a working chat box with lots of agents, tawk.to does that job at no cost, and it has done so for years. Paying for chat only makes sense if you need something that free chat does not give you.
Vedain is free in a different way. Every account starts with a 14-day trial of everything, with no card needed. After the trial, the chat widget stays on your site for free. The AI assistant keeps answering visitors for up to 100 conversations a month, every chat is saved as a lead in the CRM, and each new chat is emailed to your chat alert addresses (or to your admins). What needs a paid plan is replying live from the inbox, unlimited AI answers and the rest of the CRM. In short, tawk.to's free tier is built around people answering chats live, while Vedain's free widget is built around capturing the visitor and answering common questions automatically.
The real cost of free chat
A free tool costs nothing on the invoice, but most businesses end up paying for something around it. With tawk.to, the common extras are removing the branding, which is $29 a month per property (each website counts separately), and AI Assist, which starts from $29 a month. Neither is required, and many teams run happily without both. The less visible cost is time. tawk.to includes a free contacts CRM that keeps contacts from chats with a timeline. If your sales process runs in a separate CRM with deals and follow-up emails, someone has to move promising chats across, and that step is easy to forget on a busy day.
A worked example
Take a company with one website and three people handling chats, who want an unbranded widget and AI answers. On tawk.to at September 2026 list prices, that is $29 a month to remove branding plus AI Assist from $29 a month, so at least $58 a month, with the agents themselves free. On Vedain, people who only answer chats and support tickets take agent seats, and every workspace gets three of them free. So the same three chat agents cost nothing, and the workspace pays only for the admin who runs it on a full CRM seat: $10 a month in total, with the AI included and no per-conversation AI fees. A team of ten chat agents would pay $10 for the admin plus 7 agent seats at $5 each, or $45 a month. If those people also work leads and deals in the CRM, each needs a full seat at $10 a month instead, so ten of them would cost $100. tawk.to's add-on cost does not depend on the number of agents at all, so run the sums for your own team: the more agents you have, the stronger tawk.to's case becomes.
Support chat and sales chat are different jobs
A support chat is usually finished when the question is answered. A sales chat is often just the start: the visitor asks about pricing, leaves an email, and then needs a reply, a quote, a demo and a follow-up a week later. The tool you choose should match the job most of your chats are doing. To find out, look at your last month of chats. If most ended with "thanks, that fixed it", support tools fit. If many ended with "can someone send me a quote", you need the follow-up.
tawk.to is a strong support tool. It gives many agents a shared place to answer customers, and for a help desk that is most of what matters. Vedain is built for the second case. A lead is created as soon as the visitor gives an email, either on the pre-chat form or typed into the chat, and existing leads and contacts are matched by email so you do not get duplicates. The chat then sits on the lead's activity timeline alongside emails, deals and tasks.
AI answers compared
tawk.to offers AI Assist as a paid add-on starting from $29 a month. Its tiers change, so check tawk.to's own pricing page for what each level includes before comparing. In Vedain, by contrast, the AI assistant is part of the plan. It learns from your website (the "Generate from website" option reads your homepage and up to 8 key pages such as about, pricing, FAQ and policies), from uploaded documents in PDF, Word, .txt or .md format up to 7.5 MB, and from text typed into a knowledge box of up to 60,000 characters. It answers only from that knowledge, says when it is not sure, and does not invent prices or policies.
For sales teams, the useful part is what happens around the answer. The assistant can ask up to five qualification questions during the chat, such as company, team size, budget or timeline, and write the answers onto the lead. It hands off to a person when a visitor asks for a human, uses one of your own hand-off phrases, or when it cannot help. That means the AI filters routine questions while your team spends its time on the conversations most likely to turn into business.
- Questions your AI couldn't answer: a list, most-asked first, showing what to add to the knowledge.
- Agent ratings: your team can rate AI replies up or down.
- Resolved by AI: analytics show the share of conversations the AI handled with no hand-off.
- Action buttons and starter questions: up to five of each, for example a "Book a demo" button linked to your calendar.
Missed chats and notifications
A chat nobody answers is worse than no chat at all, because the visitor was ready to talk. Reviewers of tawk.to mention unreliable notifications and missed-chat emails that arrive late. Your experience may differ, but it is worth testing notifications carefully on any chat tool before you depend on it, whichever product you choose. Send a few test chats at different times of day and check how quickly each alert reaches the right person.
Vedain treats missed chats as a process with clear steps. When the AI hands a chat to a person, the assigned agent (or the round-robin pool, or the admins) is alerted straight away, along with your email alert addresses. If nobody replies within 5 minutes, admins and managers are alerted. If the chat is still unanswered after 30 minutes, it is marked missed, and the lead's timeline shows it. Out of hours, the AI keeps answering by default, never promises a live reply, and asks visitors who want a person for their email address. Your team then gets one follow-up alert per chat. One honest limit: Vedain has no native mobile app for agents yet, so the team works from a browser.
Lead capture and the CRM behind the chat
tawk.to's free contacts CRM stores the people who chat with you and shows a timeline for each one. It has also announced a deals pipeline product for 2026, but we could not confirm whether it has launched, so check tawk.to directly if that matters to you. Vedain's chat is one part of a complete CRM. The same account holds leads, contacts, accounts, deals and a pipeline, a shared email inbox that syncs with Gmail or Outlook, email campaigns, workflows and reports. A lead from the chat widget is tagged with the source "Chat Widget", so you can see how many leads and deals your website chat produces.
There are also practical links between chat and the rest of your work. A chat can be turned into a Support Desk ticket with the transcript attached, visitors can raise a ticket from the widget, and webhooks for chat started, resolved and missed (signed and retried) let you connect other tools, including Zapier. Developers can also open the widget or pass in a known visitor's name and email from their own code.
Setting up and moving from tawk.to
Moving is mostly a matter of replacing one script with another and teaching the AI about your business. There is no chat history to carry over for the AI to work, so the main tasks are your knowledge, your widget settings and your alerts. Test on a quiet page before you switch your whole site.
- Start the 14-day trial and add your team as users.
- Build the AI knowledge: use "Generate from website", upload your FAQ or policy documents, and fill gaps in the knowledge box.
- Style the widget: logo, colour, greeting, launcher text and position, plus a pre-chat form asking for name, email or phone.
- Set business hours, routing (manual or round-robin) and your chat alert email addresses.
- Replace the tawk.to script with Vedain's one-line async script, or use the WordPress plugin; guides cover Shopify, Wix, Webflow and more.
- Let the Setup Assistant confirm the widget is live, then send a test chat and check that the alert arrives.
- Bring across any contacts you need from tawk.to as a file import, and remove the old tawk.to code.
Most set-ups take an afternoon. Privacy settings are worth deciding before launch: you can link your own privacy policy on the chat form, use a cookie-consent mode that stores nothing in the browser until the visitor opens the chat, and delete closed chats automatically after 30, 90, 180 or 365 days.
Who should stay on tawk.to
Stay on tawk.to if you need many agents on a zero budget and your chat is mainly for support. It is free with unlimited agents, it is widely used, and it has been doing this for a long time. Vedain is newer and smaller, charges $10 a month for each full CRM user and $5 a month for each chat-only agent beyond the free ones (one per CRM seat, up to three), so it has no plan with unlimited free agents, no native mobile app for agents, no Instagram or Messenger inbox yet, no no-code chatbot flow builder for the widget, and no large app marketplace.
Choose Vedain if chat is how you find customers and you want each conversation to become a lead with follow-up in the same place, AI answers included in one price, and clear escalation when a chat is not answered. The quickest way to know is to run the free trial on a single page for two weeks and count how many chats turn into leads you actually follow up. If the answer is "very few", tawk.to is probably serving you well.