| Functionality | 6 <p>Hiver turns your email inbox into a lightweight Customer Support platform. It supports multiple channels, including email, live chat, phone calls, and WhatsApp. You can also set up a help center, create chatbots, and use basic AI and automation tools. However, it falls short of being a true omnichannel platform—each channel requires a separate inbox, which limits its efficiency.</p> | 6 <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 | 8 <p>Hiver is refreshingly simple because it operates directly from your inbox. The learning curve is minimal, and setup is one of the most intuitive we’ve seen. Most users will feel comfortable navigating the platform within an hour.</p><p>That said, the interface can feel cluttered. The support inbox is filled with too many tabs and action buttons, making it harder to quickly access tickets at a glance. A sidebar showing all tickets would be a welcome addition.</p> | 4 <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 | 4 <p>Since Hiver integrates with your inbox, its visual appeal really mainly depends on your email interface.</p><p>However, for the support inbox - while functional, the layout feels crowded with too many labels and tabs. Some design elements aren’t responsive, causing text to spill out when resizing the screen. On the plus side, page load times are acceptable at 2–3 seconds.</p> | 4 <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 | 5 <p>Hiver’s customizability is limited. You can make small adjustments to your help center layout and add custom fields or reports, but routing and automation are restricted to individual inboxes. There’s no option for advanced configuration or coding, which may disappoint users who want more flexibility.</p> | 5 <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. </p> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Hiver offers a self-serve free trial to its platform. Initial setup is fairly straightforward since the platform effectively operates out of your inbox and thus takes less than ten minutes if you're using either Gmail or Outlook. Additionally since, Hiver lacks many facets for customizability, it doesn't take long to fully configure the platform either.</p> | 6 <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 | 10 <p>Hiver offers delightful cusotmer support. Their 24/7 in-app assistance connects you to a human agent within seconds during every test we ran. Agents are knowledgeable, responsive, and willing to go the extra mile by providing personalized screenshots and videos. The help center also offers decent depth and quality.</p> | 8 <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 | 2 <p>Hiver includes only 9 pre-built integrations with popular tools like Aircall, Jira, Salesforce, and HubSpot. However, it lacks key integrations for industries like e-commerce (e.g., no Shopify support). While it does offer an API for custom integrations, this might not be sufficient for teams relying on niche tools.</p> | 4 <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 | 1 <p>Exporting data is a pain point. There’s no bulk export option for contacts or conversations—you’ll need to download them one by one. Reports also can’t be easily exported, which is a pain.</p> | 8 <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> |
.png/public){kind=small}
.png%2Fpublic&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
.png%2Fpublic&w=640&q=75)