7 live chat widgets compared: weight, cookies, price
A month of tests, one page. We put Spookat next to Tawk.to, Crisp, Intercom, Tidio, LiveChat and Chatwoot, measured what each one costs a page before anyone touches it, and read what each one gives your team. This post is the scoreboard: the five measurements and four product rows where Spookat leads or ties, each with its source. The same charts live at /vs, next to a one-on-one page per rival that also says where that rival is better.
how we measured
Everything below comes from our widget lab, measured on 2026-09-27: a plain test page, Google Chrome 153, a fresh profile and an empty cache for every run, medians over 5 to 7 runs. How we test has the whole setup, and every chart links to the raw JSON.
One thing to know before reading the charts. Crisp, Intercom, LiveChat and Chatwoot won’t run on a domain their owner didn’t allow, so on our test page they stop early. For those four we measured their widget on the vendor’s own site, counting only the widget’s own requests. They’re marked with a star. Spookat’s rows were measured again later the same day, after fixes we made that morning, and each research file says so.
what a page pays before anyone clicks
This is the one that matters most, because every visitor pays it, including the ones who never open the chat. Spookat’s launcher is one script, 2.0 kb over the wire. The lightest rival we saw running is Crisp at 121.1 kb, sixty times more. Intercom on its own site is 1,006 kb, five hundred times more. The details are in the weigh-in.
Requests tell the same story in a different unit. Spookat makes one. The others make 10 to 27, and all six also open a websocket before anyone says a word. Each request is a round trip, and on a phone with a weak signal round trips are what you feel.
Servers contacted: one for Spookat, our CDN. Two to nine for the others. Every new server can mean another DNS lookup and another TLS handshake, and it’s one more company that sees your visitor’s browser say hello.
what a page stores before anyone clicks
Spookat sets no cookie and writes nothing to storage before a click. After a click it still sets no cookie; one storage key appears only when a visitor sends a message, to keep their conversation across pages. Every rival leaves something behind on page load: Tidio one storage key, the others five to eight cookies and storage keys, some kept for up to 400 days. That’s the difference between a chat your cookie banner has to mention and one it doesn’t. The cookie test lists every name and lifetime.
what a page’s main thread pays
Lighthouse reports how long the browser’s main thread was busy. We ran each page with the widget and without it and took the difference. Spookat added 1 ms. The others added 190 to 865 ms, time in which a phone isn’t responding to taps or scrolling. Crisp isn’t on this chart: on its own site the difference with and without the widget was within run-to-run noise, so there’s no honest number to draw. The Lighthouse test has every score.
what your team gets
Measurements are half of it. The other half is what you pay for and how your team works. These four rows come from each vendor’s public pricing and help pages, checked on 2026-09-26, and each one-on-one page at /vs links the exact source.
| Spookat | Tawk.to | Crisp | Intercom | Tidio | LiveChat | Chatwoot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| your whole team, no seat price | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| answer chats in Slack threads | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | $ | $ | ✓ |
| answer chats in Discord | ✓ | ✗ | $ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| never stores visitor IPs | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
✓ on every paid plan, $ only on a pricier plan or as an add-on, ✗ no.
Seats. Spookat charges per site, and the whole team comes with it. Tawk.to is the only other one here with free agents. Crisp caps seats per plan, Tidio at 10, and Intercom, LiveChat and Chatwoot charge per person.
Slack and Discord. Spookat puts every chat in a Slack thread or in Discord (a card’s thread in a text channel, a post in a forum channel). One of them on every paid plan, both at once on agency, and your team answers right there. Crisp and Chatwoot answer from Slack too. Tidio needs its Plus plan, and LiveChat a third-party app per agent. For Discord, only Crisp comes close, from its $95 plan.
IP addresses. We never store a visitor’s IP address, not in the database and not in our logs. Every rival here collects, processes or can store it, per their own privacy pages.
what’s in the box
These aren’t compared, because we’d need a sourced fact for every rival to put them in a row. They’re what you get with Spookat:
- 8 styles and 17 self-hosted fonts, in your colour, in your corner, with your button text.
- 12 languages, with a greeting per language.
- Your AI agent can set it up: our MCP server has the tools for it, and in our own test a fresh agent set a site up with nothing but our docs.
- A new chat rings your team’s phones through web push, and owners get a simple mode made for the phone.
- Every extra site you pay for through Spookat 30% off, once one pays full price. A partner program for people who set it up for clients is coming soon: today you pay for their sites yourself.
what the scoreboard doesn’t show
Every rival here does things Spookat doesn’t. Several are full helpdesks, with ticketing, knowledge bases and email, WhatsApp or Instagram in the same inbox. Some come with an AI agent of their own. Tawk.to, Crisp, Tidio and Chatwoot have free plans. We don’t. If that’s what you need, one of them is the better pick, and each one-on-one page at /vs says so in a section of its own.
What Spookat is built for is narrower: a chat that costs a page almost nothing until someone wants to talk, and lands that conversation where your team already is. On that, the charts above are the whole argument.
check it yourself
The raw data for every chart is at /research, the lab’s scripts are at /research/widget-lab/, and each chart on /vs links its file. Or open DevTools on any site running one of these widgets, tick “Disable cache”, reload, and count.
Put the 2 kb one on your site. 14 days, no card.