Last updated on
Reviewed by Paddy Stobbs
Stackfix Co-Founder & CEO
Thena and LiveAgent serve distinctly different customer support needs. Thena excels as a modern, Slack-first solution ideal for B2B companies with strong Slack usage, offering superior AI capabilities and a clean, intuitive interface.
LiveAgent, while offering broader channel support including phone and social media, feels dated and less intuitive, better suited for traditional businesses needing wide channel coverage but less concerned with modern features or user experience.
Advantages of LiveAgent
Advantages of Thena
LiveAgent
Thena
 LiveAgent Starting at $19user / month Billed monthly |
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| Stackfix Verdict | ||
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| Functionality | 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> | 7 <p>Thena is one of a handful of up and coming support platforms tailored to B2B focused customers. It's focus is on Slack-centric teams (where it excels), however, it also provides support for email, a basic live chat widget, MS teams and forms. Additionally, we were pleased to see that you can configure an AI agent to respond to messages for you as well as the ability to set up a basic help centre.</p><p>However, it lacks support for many channels that non B2B focused businesses might want such as all social platforms or phone calls.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 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> | 6 <p>Thena's web app is well presented, however, given the sheer breadth of features, it can feel overwhelming at times. Instead of a traditional email style inbox, it places a focus on a kanban-style tickets view which may be unintuitive for agents who aren't used to project management platforms. Despite this, the UI was designed well to present information and buttons are intuitively placed such that the learning curve is not too steep. It would take an average SMB employee an hour to master the tool.</p> |
| Look and feel | 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> | 7 <p>Thena's web app is well designed, fast to load and easy to use. It has a modern feel to it and looks great in both dark mode or light mode. We especially appreciated the addition of keyboard shortcuts across the inbox that help agents zip through the platform when tackling a large backlog of tickets.</p> |
| Customisability | 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> | 6 <p>Thena offers a number of facets for customization. It's internal facing interfaces offer the most scope - with things like inbox views, AI agent context and workflows, all fully configurable.</p><p>However, its external facing interfaces are limited in their customizability. For example, both its live chat widget and help centres only offer basic aesthetic options such as colours and logos.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 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> | 4 <p>Unfortunately, Thena does not offer a self-serve free trial for its platform. Instead you'll need to hop on a sales demo to get access. However, the sales call is often with the founder and was helpful and swift. One we got access, initial setup was limited and the platform can feel slightly overwhelming given the sheer breadth of features and facets you can customize. However, given its Slack centricity, getting connected to it is very simple thanks to a native integration which only takes a few clicks.</p> |
| Customer Support | 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> | 8 <p>Thena primarly provides support via a 1:1 slack channel with their team. When tested, agents responded in <15 minutes and were well versed and very helpful, even for complex setup style questions. Additionally, Thena provide a well written and rich help centre that can answer most queries.</p> |
| Integratability | 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> | 5 <p>Thena offers integrations with popular task management platforms (Jira, Linear), CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) and incident management platforms (Rootly, Incident.io). We would like to have seen a Zapier integration like many of its peers offer though. That being said, Thena does offer an API through which technical teams can interact with the platform directly.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 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> | 7 <p>Thena offers self-serve export functionality to CSV/JSON for tickets and their details within their web app. Additionally, Thena offers an API through which you can interact with tickets directly.</p> |
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