A chat tool, or chat inside a CRM?
Zoho SalesIQ and Vedain both put a chat window on your website, but they start from different places. SalesIQ is a live chat and visitor engagement product. It does its job well, and it is designed to work alongside Zoho CRM, which you buy as a separate subscription. If you want deals, a sales pipeline, email and follow-up tasks next to your chats, the full picture in the Zoho world is SalesIQ plus Zoho CRM. So the first question is simple: do you already have a CRM you are happy with, or are you choosing one now?
Vedain starts from the CRM. Live chat and the AI assistant are part of the same product as your leads, contacts, accounts, deals, email inbox sync, campaigns, workflows and reports. A chat is not synced across to another system later; it lands on a lead record the moment the visitor shares an email address, and it shows up on that lead's Activity timeline. For a small sales team, that decides how many tools you pay for, how many logins your people juggle, and how often a warm enquiry is lost between systems.
What it costs in rupees: worked examples
Zoho SalesIQ is priced per operator a month, plus GST. The published plans are Basic at ₹500, Professional at ₹1,000 and Enterprise at ₹1,500 per operator a month on monthly billing, or ₹350, ₹750 and ₹1,200 per operator a month on annual billing. These figures cover the chat product only. A full CRM with a pipeline is Zoho CRM, a separate subscription with its own price. Vedain is ₹500 per user a month, billed in rupees through Razorpay, with GST on Indian billing, and that one price includes live chat, AI answers and the full CRM. People who only answer chats and support tickets do not need that full seat: each CRM seat comes with one free agent seat (up to three per workspace), and each further agent costs ₹200 a month. A chat-only operator therefore costs less on Vedain than on SalesIQ Basic, on monthly or annual billing.
The table shows monthly totals before GST for teams of two and five, using list prices checked in September 2026.
| Team size | Vedain (chat, AI and CRM) | SalesIQ Basic (chat only) | SalesIQ Professional (chat only) | SalesIQ Enterprise (chat only) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 people, monthly billing | ₹1,000 | ₹1,000 | ₹2,000 | ₹3,000 |
| 2 people, annual billing (per month) | ₹1,000 | ₹700 | ₹1,500 | ₹2,400 |
| 5 people, monthly billing | ₹2,500 | ₹2,500 | ₹5,000 | ₹7,500 |
| 5 people, annual billing (per month) | ₹2,500 | ₹1,750 | ₹3,750 | ₹6,000 |
Read the table carefully. On annual billing, SalesIQ Basic costs less than Vedain for the chat alone. The comparison changes once you add a CRM subscription for the same people, and once you account for AI: on Basic and Professional you connect your own AI provider key and pay that provider separately. Vedain's figure already includes the AI and the CRM, with no per-conversation AI fees. Check both vendors' current price pages before you decide, because list prices change.
AI answers: your own key, Zia, or built in
SalesIQ offers AI answers in two ways. On Basic and Professional you bring your own AI key; on Enterprise, SalesIQ uses Zia, Zoho's own AI. Bring-your-own-key sounds like a small technical step, but it has practical consequences. Someone has to open an account with an AI provider, add a payment method, create an API key and paste it into the chat settings. From then on you get a second bill from that provider, usually in dollars and based on usage, so your cost rises and falls with chat traffic.
Providers also set usage limits on new accounts, and if a card expires or a limit is reached, the AI can stop answering until someone notices. Keys need to be stored safely and replaced when staff leave. For a company with a technical person who already manages AI accounts, this is routine. For a five-person sales team, it is one more thing to own. Vedain takes a third route: the AI assistant is built in on every plan, it is included in the per-user price, and there is nothing to connect.
You train Vedain's assistant by clicking "Generate from website", which reads your homepage and up to eight key pages such as about, pricing, FAQ and policies. You can add PDF, Word, text and Markdown files up to 7.5 MB each, and up to 60,000 characters of typed knowledge. The assistant answers only from that knowledge, says when it is not sure and does not make up prices or policies. A list of questions it could not answer, most-asked first, shows you what to add next.
Free plans, compared exactly
Both products have a free option, but they are built for different uses, so compare them line by line rather than by the word "free". The SalesIQ free plan gives you three operators and 100 chat sessions a month. That suits a small team that mainly wants to answer chats live and can stay within the session limit. It is a sensible starting point if your people are at their desks during business hours and chat volume is low.
Vedain's free option starts after a 14-day trial of everything, with no card needed. When the trial ends, the chat widget stays on your site for free. The AI answers up to 100 conversations a month, every chat is saved as a lead, and each new chat is emailed to your chat alert addresses or to your admins. What it does not include is replying live from the inbox, unlimited AI, or the rest of the CRM; those need a paid plan. Vedain also has no free plan with unlimited agents: on a paid plan one chat-only agent per CRM seat is free, up to three, and each further one is ₹200 a month, while anyone who works in the CRM takes a ₹500 seat.
From chat to pipeline, and nobody left waiting
In Vedain, a lead is created as soon as a visitor gives an email address, in the pre-chat form or typed into the chat. If the email matches an existing lead or contact, the chat is attached to that record instead of creating a duplicate. The source is recorded as "Chat Widget". The AI can also qualify visitors: you choose up to five questions, such as company, team size, use case, timeline and budget, and it asks them naturally and writes the answers onto the lead. The lead then moves through the same deals, email and workflows as every other lead.
Hand-offs are where many chat set-ups fail, and reviewers of SalesIQ mention the widget sometimes showing offline while operators are online. In Vedain, when the AI hands a chat over, the assigned agent, the round-robin pool or the admins are alerted at once, along with your email alert addresses. If nobody replies within five minutes, admins and managers are alerted. After 30 minutes without an answer, the chat is marked as missed. After business hours, the AI keeps answering, never promises a live reply, and asks visitors who want a person for their email.
WhatsApp for Indian businesses
Many Indian customers would rather message on WhatsApp than use a website chat window. Vedain offers WhatsApp Business as a separate channel that lands on the same lead and contact records. It has a one-time registration fee of ₹1,500 and a platform fee of ₹1,000 a month for one admin and five users, with extra users at ₹250 a month. Published per-message rates are ₹0.98 for marketing, ₹0.14 for utility and ₹0.14 for authentication, and service replies are free. Credits are prepaid from ₹5,000, plus 18% GST on Indian billing.
Set-up and moving across from SalesIQ
Vedain's widget installs with one line of script that loads asynchronously. There is a WordPress plugin and step-by-step guides for Shopify, Wix, Webflow and other site builders, and the Setup Assistant confirms when the widget is live. You can set your logo, colour, greeting, launcher text and position, and the widget opens full screen on phones. Developers can open the chat from their own buttons, identify signed-in visitors and receive signed webhooks, usable with Zapier. A careful switch takes an afternoon, and you can do it during the trial:
- Export your contacts from Zoho as a CSV file and import them into Vedain as leads or contacts, so returning visitors are matched by email.
- Train the AI from your website, then upload price lists, policies and FAQs as documents.
- Choose qualification questions, up to five action buttons such as "Book a demo" linked to your calendar, and starter question chips.
- Set business hours, routing (manual or round-robin), chat alert addresses, your privacy-policy link and, if you need it, cookie-consent mode.
- Replace the SalesIQ script with Vedain's, confirm it in the Setup Assistant, and send a few test chats before you cancel your old plan.
Who should stay with Zoho SalesIQ
SalesIQ is a capable product, and for some businesses it is the right choice. If your company already runs on Zoho One or Zoho CRM, SalesIQ fits naturally with the tools your team uses every day, and moving chat to another product would split your data rather than bring it together. The same applies if you want Zia on the Enterprise plan as part of a wider Zoho set-up. In that case, the cost of SalesIQ is small next to the effort of changing systems, and your team keeps one familiar way of working.
It is also fair to be clear about what Vedain does not have yet. Agents work in the browser; there is no native mobile app for them. There is no Instagram or Messenger inbox, no no-code chatbot flow builder for the website widget, and no large app marketplace. Vedain is newer and smaller than Zoho, and has no public review-site ratings to point to. Vedain is the better fit if you are choosing a CRM and a chat tool together, want AI answers without managing a provider account, and prefer simple pricing in rupees: ₹500 a month for each CRM user, and ₹200 a month for each chat-only agent beyond the free ones (one per CRM seat, up to three).