| Functionality | 8 <p>Atlas offers most of the support functionality that SMBs will need. It includes support for most channels, help centre creation, basic AI, automation and reporting functionality. It also uniquely offers "session recording" functionality, which allows you to view a video/ live session of a user using your web product. </p><p>However, it lacks more advanced features such as a chatbot builder, native phone and SMS support, advanced automation, and custom reporting. The product is still evolving, with features in beta. </p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent is a fairly well rounded product. It offers support for almost all channels you can think of including live chat, most social media platforms and even call centre support. Additionally, it provides the ability to create basic help centres. The area where it falls short is chatbots - both rule based and AI - where it currently offers no native solution.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>Atlas has a gentle learning curve, and really shines with its efficient keyboard shortcuts that power users love. One of its best features is the customer timeline, which gives you a clear, chronological view of every client interaction at a glance. While everything flows nicely for shortcut users, those who prefer mouse navigation might find it frustrating that they can't see all tickets in a sidebar.</p> | 3 <p>Given the breadth of functionality, LiveAgent can be unintuitive to use at times. Many core features were buried away deep in settings or hidden by poor UX. Additionally, many elements of the web app lacked tooltips and had truncated text components making it additionally difficult to figure our what button does what. It would take an average SMB employee over a day to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 6 <p>Atlas has a modern, clean interface that is pleasing to use. However, the UI lacks the polish of more established competitors, and loading times can be comparatively slow, taking 2-3 seconds for some pages.</p> | 2 <p>LiveAgent feels dated. Its live chat template customisation offerings feel like they're from two decades ago and its internal facing web app isn't well designed either. M<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">any elements of the web app lacked tooltips where one might expect them and had truncated text components making the app feel rough around the edges. </span></p> |
| Customisability | 6 <p>Atlas offers a standard level of customisability.</p><p>Users can create custom fields for customers, set up custom views, and track custom events. The live chat widget and chatbot builder have standard customization options.</p><p>However, it lacks more advanced customization features like custom objects, custom actions, and custom reports. Help Centre customization (style, layout) is particularly limited.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers a number of channels for customization. It's external facing components offer a deep range of options for branding, colour and styling. Meanwhile its internal facing features also offer a lot of room for tweaking. For example, it's very easy to configure custom filtered views for your inbox, or set up deeply flexible rules that can be triggered from almost anything.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 4 <p>Frustratingly, Atlas does not offer a self-serve free trial for its platform. Instead, you'll need to trudge through a sales demo before you can get access. However, the process is relatively short and smooth and once access was granted, we found the tool to be simple to set up and configure.</p> | 3 <p>LiveAgent offers a self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy connection option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly standard when compared to competitors with simple scripts to add live widgets to your website and relatively basic (albeit dated) appearance customisation options. </p> |
| Customer Support | 9 <p>Atlas's customer support is excellent. They offer 24/7 in-app live chat with Atlas's team (including the founder!), who are always happy to provide friendly and personal help.</p> | 6 <p>LiveAgent offers support via a live chat widget inside its web app. We found it quick and easy to contact a real agent (<3 mins), and when tested, we find them to be helpful and direct, often resolving technical questions in one response.</p><p>Though LiveAgent also provides a help centre, we found this very confusing to use and overwhelming at times. Thankfully, support agents rarely linked to articles and instead opted to answer questions directly.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>Atlas only has 15 pre-built integrations. While these integrations cover key areas like CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Close, Pipedrive) and calling (Aircall, Dialpad), it lacks integrations with popular tools in other categories such as project management, data enrichment, and surveys. It does offer an API for custom integrations.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offered a strong array of integrations. It covered all the basics from popular CRM systems (Salesforce, Hubspot) to project management platforms (Jira) to automation platforms (Zapier). We were also pleased to see that they offer an API too.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Atlas's data export capabilities are somewhat limited. While reporting data for selected reports can be exported directly from within Atlas, most data seem only available for export via API. For example, tickets can only be exported as PDFs.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers self-serve export functionality for both customer data and anlytics data within its web app. On top of this, they also offer an API - however, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity.</p> |
