Crisp Chat Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Crisp.chat is a live chat and chatbot platform for multiple channels, such as websites, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Twitter. But should you use Crisp to create your chatbots?

Explore whether you should use it with my Crisp.chat review! I will cover the features, pros and cons, pricing and more!

Let’s dive in!

What is Crisp Chat?

Crisp can be used to create chatbots and have a live chat on multiple channels, but it is much more than that.

With Crisp you can also:

• Create your own help desk
• Make complete email campaigns
• Have video calls with chat users
• Monitor the online status of your website

With that many features, it must be said that Crisp is mainly focused on live chat and customer service. But, by using Plugins you can add extra functionality to that. For example, if you want to add a chatbot to Crisp, you can add the “Bot” plugin. And if you want to automatically reply to questions, you can add the “Auto-Responder” plugin:

In this tutorial, I will mainly focus on the chat side of Crisp.

How to use Crisp Chat to create chatbots

When you log in at Crisp, you immediately see the latest chats of your live chat. On the left, you see a menu with:

• Inbox – This is the live chat
• Visitors – All visitors that are currently on your website
• Contacts – All contacts that chatted with your chatbot
• Campaigns – Send email campaigns
• Helpdesk – Create your own helpdesk in Crisp
• Plugins – To add extra functionality
• Settings

To get started with creatings chatbot flows in Crisp, you actually need to add it as a plugin to your Crisp account:

Once you have installed the plugin, you can get started with creating your chatbot flows, called “Scenarios”.

If you are going to build your scenarios, Crisp provides a flow builder:

Each scenario starts with an Event (which starts the flow) and the contents of the automation (what happens if you triggered after the flow).

In your chatbot flows you can choose from several categories of elements:

• Actions – These elements do something, such as sending a message, updating user information or searching the Helpdesk
• Conditions – These performs “if-then” checks in your chatbot flows, so you can personalize the conversations
• Exits – These elements forward or end the conversation. For example, you can start another chatbot flow or you can end the conversation

You can just drag and drop these elements in the flow builder. And when you want to edit one of the elements in your chatbot flow, a left-side panel opens up where you can change the content of the element:

Also, you can test out your chatbot before you deploy the changes:

In general, the interface of Crisp is really easy to use. But I didn’t think it was really easy to create your own chatbot, because it takes some time to fully understand the interface of Crisp.

First of all, the “Bot” feature was a little bit hidden in the interface and it took me some time to find out it was a plugin. Secondly, some simple things take a lot of elements in Crisp. For example, if you want to ask someone’s day of birth in Crisp, you need 3 elements to do that:

1. Ask the user for their day of birth
2. Save that value in a temporary field (called “Bot Memory” in Crisp Chat)
3. Save the value to a custom field (where it is permanent)

You have to figure these things out yourself basically, but once you understand it, you will quickly get the hang of it!

Chatbot elements

Crisp provides enough chatbot elements to create your chatbot flows.

Among these elements, I think there are a few good to point out:

Update User Information: With this element, you can collect user information and store the information in Crisp.

Condition: With this element, you can perform “if-then” checks in your chatbot flows, and personalize the conversation. This is great for improving the customer experience.

Run scenario: This elements allows you to start another chatbot flow, which is great for scalability. Instead of manually copy-and-pasting duplicate content, you can easily refer them to the correct chatbot flow.

They also do lack some elements, but these are definitely no deal-breakers.

Contacts

In Crisp, you can see an overview of all the contacts that talked with your chatbot:

And you can also see all the specific information per contact:”

Also, you can ask a question to the user and store the answer in a custom field. The same is true for tags, you can just apply tags to certain users (which are called “Segments” in Crisp).

Unfortunately, it is not possible to create user segments in Crisp.

Crisp Chat AI & NLP

In Crisp, you can understand the intent of the user and automatically suggest FAQ articles when someone asks a question.

Understand intents

With the “Auto-Responder” plugin of Crisp, you can understand the intent of the user and automatically reply to it with your chatbot:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to use Entities.

But Crisp solves this by providing a Dialogflow integration. There is only one drawback of that integration, you cannot understand the intent of the user with Dialogflow and respond with a Crisp chatbot flow. If you use Dialogflow to understand the intent of the user, you must also send a Dialogflow reply.

Crisp Help Desk: Automatically suggesting FAQ articles

In addition to understanding intents, you can also automatically suggest helpdesk articles when someone asks a question.

In Crisp Chat, you can simply add helpdesk articles to your account:

And then automatically suggest these articles using in your chatbot flows with the Search Helpdesk (AI) block:

I think this is great if you want to get started with AI quickly. But I think there are also two drawbacks compared to other platforms:

1. It can only suggest articles, not automatically answer the user’s question
2. You need to create the helpdesk articles manually in Crisp, and cannot train the chatbot on your website or PDFs

Live Chat

Crisp has a built-in live chat, which allows you to hand-over the conversation to a support agent when your chatbot doesn’t know the answer to a question:

They also have an iOS app and Android app, which allows you to respond to customer questions on the go. Moreover, they provide an integration with Slack, so you can reply to customer questions from your Slack channel.

Channels

With Crisp you can put a chatbot on 6 channels:

• Your website
• WhatsApp (using Twilio)
• Telegram
• Instagram
• Facebook Messenger
• SMS (using Twilio)
• Line

Furthermore, you can send email campaigns from Crisp.

This is really good, because you can create an omnichannel chatbot experience for your users with Crisp.

Marketing

Regarding marketing features, Crisp is mostly focused on websites.

They provide a pretty advanced native website widget that you can fully customize to the colors and branding of your website:

Moreover, you can also set up triggers on specific pages of your website (using the “Triggers” plugin of Crisp). With these triggers, you can initiate conversations with website visitors:

Regarding other channels, such as Facebook Messenger, there are no marketing possibilities. It’s also not possible to send broadcasts or sequences.

Crisp Integrations

Crisp has integrations with CRMs (e.g. Pipedrive and Hubspot), eCommerce platforms (e.g. Shopify and Woo Commerce), and many others.

They also provide a Zapier integration and Make (formerly Integromat) integration so you can connect with almost every software application on earth.

If that’s not enough, you can also send webhook events when something happens in your chatbot flows. You can use this to trigger custom integrations.

Crisp Pricing

Crisp provides a free plan and paid plans starting already at $28/month. But if you want to create a chatbot on their platform, you need to go with the Unlimited plan ($106/month).

The free plan that comes with 2 live chat agents and limited features (live chat, team inbox, mobile app and notifications).

If you want more features or live chat agents, you need to upgrade to the Pro plan, which is $28/month. This plan comes with 5,000 contacts and 4 live chat agents and more features, such as more channels (FB Messenger, Twitter, Email and Telegram), Triggers and widget customization (still no chatbot feature).

Lastly, Crisp provides the Unlimited plan, which is $106 per month and the plan you need if you want to create a chatbot with Crisp. This plan comes with unlimited live chat agents, 50,000 contacts and all the features of the platform:

Also, Crisp provides a 14-day free trial on each plan.

Analytics

Crisp provides analytics on several levels: Messaging, Contacts, Rating, Campaigns, Helpdesk and Status. They also offer both agent analytics and custom event tracking capabilities. In this section, I will only focus on Messaging analytics.

In Crisp, you have a dashboard that shows the number of conversations, the mean response time and the number of website visitors. It also shows the conversation activity and responsiveness of support over time:

 

Unfortunately, Crisp doesn’t provide a user input dashboard that shows the questions the chatbot didn’t understand, which makes it hard to improve the answers of your chatbot.

Crisp Templates

Crisp provides 4 templates that you can use to get started right away.

You cannot create these templates yourself, but it is possible to export scenarios from Crisp and install these on other Crisp accounts.

Support

Crisp provides extensive documentation with many (video) tutorials on how you can use their platform.

Moreover, they provide support via live chat and email.

Conclusion

So, should you buy Crisp to create your chatbots?

Yes, you should do that.

Crisp.chat is great for small to medium businesses who want to create an omnichannel customer support chatbot.

Crisp provides an easy-to-use visual flow builder, you can save user data in custom fields, has built-in AI,  can easily translate your chatbot to multiple languages, put your chatbot on 6 channels, provides built-in live chat + mobile apps, Zapier integration and an advanced native website widget.

Go to Crisp

And if you are considering Crisp as your chatbot platform, there are also a few drawbacks to keep in mind:

• It takes some time to fully understand the interface
• You cannot send broadcasts and sequences
• Limited marketing possibities on other channels than Website