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Channeled vs tawk.to - Comparison 2025

Channeled vs. tawk.to

Last updated on

Reviewed by Paddy Stobbs

Stackfix Co-Founder & CEO

PS

Channeled and tawk.to serve distinctly different customer support needs. Channeled excels as a specialized solution for Slack-centric teams, offering superior integration capabilities and a modern, intuitive interface. It's ideal for businesses that primarily manage customer interactions through Slack and value streamlined workflows.

Meanwhile, tawk.to positions itself as a free, basic customer support solution with broader channel support including live chat, email, and help center functionality, but suffers from usability issues and limited scalability. While tawk.to might suit small operations handling low ticket volumes, Channeled is the better choice for teams deeply integrated with Slack seeking a polished, efficient support solution.

Channeled Product Logo

Advantages of Channeled

Channeled is significantly better at Slack integration
We found Channeled's Slack integration to be exceptional, with rich features like emoji-based shortcuts and broadcast capabilities. This is particularly valuable for teams that heavily use Slack for customer communications. In contrast, tawk.to lacks any Slack integration capabilities.
Channeled offers a much more intuitive user experience
Channeled provides a significantly more streamlined and user-friendly interface, with a shallow learning curve requiring less than 30 minutes to master. This contrasts sharply with tawk.to's cluttered interface and confusing naming conventions, which can impede daily operations.
Channeled has a more modern and responsive interface
The platform features a clean, minimalist design that's fast and responsive, making it more efficient for daily use. This stands in stark contrast to tawk.to's dated interface which suffers from slow loading times and server disconnection issues.
tawk.to Product Logo

Advantages of tawk.to

tawk.to is significantly more versatile in communication channels
While Channeled focuses solely on Slack-based support, tawk.to offers a broader range of communication channels including live chat, email, and forms. This versatility is crucial for businesses needing to support customers across multiple channels, particularly those requiring a website chat widget or email support.
tawk.to offers superior self-service capabilities
tawk.to provides a comprehensive help center functionality with multi-language support (27 languages) and customization options, while Channeled lacks any self-service features. This makes tawk.to better suited for organizations looking to reduce support volume through customer self-service.
tawk.to offers better value with free core features
tawk.to provides essential support features like live chat, help center, and basic AI capabilities for free, making it an excellent choice for small businesses or startups. Channeled's features are more limited and typically require paid tiers.
tawk.to provides better AI support capabilities
tawk.to includes AI chatbot functionality and AI-assisted reply features, even in its free tier. While basic compared to premium alternatives, it still offers more AI capabilities than Channeled, which lacks native AI features.

Channeled is best for

  • Businesses with low ticket volume (< 100 tickets per day)
  • Who primarily manage their customer relationships through Slack channels and threads

tawk.to is best for

  • Businesses with a very low ticket volume (<25 tickets per day)
  • Who need basic live chat and help center functionality without paying anything
  • And/or who want AI chatbot capabilities included in a free tool

Channeled is less good for

  • Businesses with a high ticket volume (>500 tickets per day)
  • Who are looking for a more complete, focused and traditional customer support tool
  • And businesses who don't manage their customer relationships through Slack

tawk.to is less good for

  • Businesses with a moderate ticket volume (100+ tickets per day) requiring sophisticated workflow management
  • Who need omnichannel support across social media, phone, and WhatsApp
  • And/or who need advanced automation capabilities like rule-based routing and time-based workflows

Gallery

Channeled logoChanneled
Channeled screenshot
tawk.to logotawk.to
tawk.to screenshot

Pricing, features & ratings

Channeled logo

Channeled

Starting at

$100

Billed monthly

Pricing calculatorVisit Website
tawk.to logo

tawk.to

Starting at

$0

Converted from GBP

Billed monthly

Pricing calculatorVisit Website
Stackfix Verdict
Functionality
2

Functionality

2/10

<p>Channeled's Slack-centricity means that it's overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Channeled is best suited to businesses who primarily manage their customer interactions via Slack and not via other channels such as SMS, live chat or email. That being said, when it comes to managing Slack threads, it provides a robust and complete feature set including shortcuts that can be triggered by emoji reactions within Slack, and analytics/sentiment analysis over Slack threads.</p>
6

Functionality

6/10

<p>While free, Tawk.to offers basic support features: live chat, chatbot, email, Help Center creation, and minimal automation. The AI chatbot is also free. However, it doesn’t support important channels like phone and social media, and lacks advanced automation and reporting, including ticket routing.</p>
Ease of Use
9

Ease of Use

9/10

<p>As a result of it's focus on Slack, Channeled has a shallow learning curve. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">An average SMB employee would require less than 30 minutes and no guidance to master the product. </span>It's onboarding process is simple, short and easy to understand and makes full use of Slacks native integrations. Additionally, it's web app is simple, intuitive and easy to navigate.</p>
4

Ease of Use

4/10

<p>We find Tawk.to's interface cluttered and confusing. Live chat visitors appear as long random numbers, and you can’t create custom views to prioritize relevant tickets. There’s no option for multiple inboxes to handle different support requests. They also use unfamiliar terms like “Whisper” for internal notes.</p>
Look and feel
8

Look and feel

8/10

<p>Channeled's web app is simple, modern and easy to navigate. Additionally, it's design aesthetic is minimalist making it easy to work with and fast to load.</p>
4

Look and feel

4/10

<p>Tawk.to's interface looks a bit dated, and pages can take a few seconds to load. The platform sometimes gets disconnected from the server easily, which can get quite annoying.</p>
Customisability
3

Customisability

3/10

<p>Channeled does provide some elements of customisability such as the ability to create custom tags which businesses can assign to conversation threads, or the ability to create custom shortcuts which can be triggered by emoji reactions directly from Slack. However, there are limited routes for further customisability such as the inability to manipulate analytics dashboards or save custom views.</p>
5

Customisability

5/10

<p>Tawk.to offers basic customisability options. Users can create custom fields for customers and have good customization options over live chat (widget layout, message options, availability).</p><p>However, it lacks more advanced customization features like custom views (saved filters), custom objects, or custom reports.&nbsp;</p>
Ease of Setup
8

Ease of Setup

8/10

<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Channeled offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking &lt;5 mins. Setting up your first channels are particularly easy too - given Channeled's focus on Slack. It takes only a few clicks to connect and configure.</span></p>
6

Ease of Setup

6/10

<p>Tawk.to offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be relatively simple, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. However, setting up live chat is a fairly straight forward process (pasting a script into your website).</p>
Customer Support
3

Customer Support

3/10

<p>Channeled customer support options for most of it's pricing tiers remains minimal. Channeled provides a contact email address for support requirements as well as a documentation website which offers explanations and walkthroughs of its core features; however, the latter is still largely unfinished at the time of writing.</p>
8

Customer Support

8/10

<p>The in-app live chat with the support team connects you almost instantly. The agents are patient and helpful, providing a positive support experience.</p>
Integratability
7

Integratability

7/10

<p>Channeled provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), helpdesks (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk), project management tools (Linear, Asana etc.) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly, though this is a relatively new feature that Channeled is continuing to build upon.</p>
4

Integratability

4/10

<p>Tawk.to only has a handful of pre-built integrations with the most common tools like Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Slack, MailChimp and some web-builders. However, it does offer an API for custom integrations.</p>
Ease of Migration
7

Ease of Migration

7/10

<p>Businsses can export data themselves via the web app as well as through Channeled's dedicated API.</p>
8

Ease of Migration

8/10

<p>Tawk.to allows users to export key data (e.g. ticket and agent volume) via self-serve. Export of most other data are also available via API.</p>
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