LiveAgent AI vs Chatbase vs Helply: Features and Pricing Compared

Looking for an AI support agent that does more than deflect questions? You have options, but choosing wrong means frustrated customers and wasted budget.

LiveAgent is an omnichannel help desk that combines ticketing, live chat, and call center features in one platform.

Chatbase offers a quick way to build chatbots trained on your data.

Helply delivers AI agents that actually resolve support tickets, not just route them.

This comparison breaks down features, pricing, real user feedback, and which tool fits your team. No fluff, just the information you need to decide.

Quick Comparison: LiveAgent AI vs Chatbase vs Helply

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a cloud-based customer support platform that combines help desk ticketing, live chat, a built-in call center, and social media helpdesk into one system.

It is designed to centralize all customer communication channels in a single inbox.

LiveAgent Features

Omnichannel Ticketing

All customer conversations from email, chat, phone, and social media funnel into a unified inbox.

The system includes ticket history, conversation management, and automation rules to route and prioritize tickets.

Live Chat

Chat buttons can be added to your website, and higher tiers include proactive chat invitations that trigger based on visitor behavior. This lets agents engage visitors before they reach out.

Call Center and IVR

The Medium tier and above include built-in call center functionality with IVR (interactive voice response).

This means you can handle phone support without a separate telephony system.

Knowledge Base and Customer Portal

You can create self-service documentation and a customer portal where users submit and track their own tickets through contact forms.

Social Media Channels

The Large plan includes Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X integration, letting you manage social support from the same inbox as email and chat.

AI Features

LiveAgent offers an AI Answer Assistant and AI Chatbot as part of its platform. These help agents draft responses and can handle some customer interactions automatically.

Enterprise Features

Higher tiers add SSO, custom roles, audit logs, time tracking, SLA management, and advanced reporting for teams that need more control and compliance features.

LiveAgent Pricing

LiveAgent Pros

• The dashboard and collaboration features help teams coordinate efficiently.
• Reduced lost chats and tickets
• Improved prioritization
• Ease of use
• Workflow customization options

LiveAgent Cons

• Bugginess around call notifications
• Missed pop-ups, forced declines
• Unexpected logouts
• Frustrating experiences with billing and renewals, particularly around how credits and refunds are handled.

Who LiveAgent Is For

Small to mid-sized support teams that want one platform for tickets, chat, voice, and social channels.

Teams that value ease of use, workflow customization, and built-in reporting to manage support performance.

Who LiveAgent Is Not For

Teams where voice and call handling must be flawlessly reliable, since some users report notification bugs and unexpected logouts.

Organizations that need flexible billing adjustments without friction may also find the renewal process frustrating.

Chatbase

Chatbase lets you build AI chatbots trained on your own data.

Upload documents, connect data sources, and deploy a chatbot that answers questions based on your content.

Chatbase Features

Custom Training on Your Data

Chatbase's core feature is training AI on your business content. Upload documents, PDFs, and text files to create a chatbot that answers questions based on your specific information.

The platform uses the OpenAI API under the hood and claims that user data is not used for model training.

This approach lets businesses deploy chatbots that reflect their unique knowledge base rather than generic responses.

Real-Time Data Sync

Beyond static documents, Chatbase connects to live data sources.

Integrations with CRMs and order management systems let the chatbot access current information like:

• Order details
• Subscription status
• Customer records

This means the bot can answer questions about specific accounts rather than just general FAQs.

Action Execution

Chatbase offers task execution capabilities through integrations.

The platform can connect to tools like Zendesk, Slack, Stripe, Salesforce, Calendly, WhatsApp, and Zapier.

Through these connections, the chatbot can perform actions like updating subscriptions or changing customer addresses.

However, the depth of these actions depends on the specific integration.

Smart Escalation

Chatbase includes rules for when conversations should route to human agents.

Teams can define escalation triggers based on conversation content, customer sentiment, or specific request types.

This prevents the chatbot from attempting to handle issues beyond its capabilities.

Analytics and Reporting

The platform provides reporting on chatbot performance, including conversation metrics and optimization insights.

Teams can identify common questions, track resolution rates, and find areas where the chatbot struggles.

Chatbase Pricing

Chatbase Pros

• Users who stick with the platform long-term report becoming impressed with the core functionality over time.
• The free tier allows testing before commitment. Quick setup for basic chatbot deployment.

Chatbase Cons

Chatbase holds a 2.3 "Poor" rating on Trustpilot with a large share of 1-star reviews. Common complaints include:

• Billing issues with charges continuing after cancellation
• Difficulty obtaining refunds under their non-refundable policy
• Slow or unhelpful customer support, with some waiting days for replies
• Breaks, errors, timeouts, API failures, and integration issues.
• Data and training quality problems surface in reviews, with users reporting training disappearing and the bot failing to properly read PDFs and knowledge base content.

Who Chatbase Is For

• Teams wanting to prototype a chatbot quickly without upfront investment.
• Developers comfortable troubleshooting issues independently.
• Organizations willing to accept some friction during setup in exchange for a lower starting price.

Who Chatbase Is Not For

• Anyone needing high reliability in production who cannot afford outages or broken integrations.
• Teams requiring fast, responsive customer support during onboarding or incidents.
• Buyers who expect clear refund and cancellation policies.

Helply

We built Helply because most AI chatbots just deflect questions. They answer easy stuff and route everything else to humans.

Helply is different.

We are an AI agent that actually resolves support tickets, not just a chatbot that passes problems along.

Helply Features

Multiple AI Agents

Each agent has its own knowledge base, persona, guidance, and actions.

For example, you can deploy a casual agent on your marketing site trained on sales content, and a professional agent in-app focused on support docs.

This way, your support bot won’t try to sell to existing customers.

Unlimited Training Documents

We do not track size or count of training documents. Sync your entire knowledge base without hitting caps.

Training Sources

Scrape websites up to three levels deep with page filtering. Sync from Groove, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Crisp, Front, and Notion. Upload text directly.

On signup, we scrape your KB URL immediately so you have articles loaded before finishing onboarding.

Native Escalation

When your AI agent cannot answer a question, it needs to hand off to a human. With Helply, you turn on escalation and it sends a form to your email by default.

Connect a help desk integration, and it creates tickets automatically. The entire process takes two or three clicks.

Our onboarding guides you through this, so within 10 to 15 minutes of signing up, you have a working chatbot that can answer questions and gracefully hand off to humans when needed.

AI Actions

Your agent can do more than answer questions.

The Calendly integration lets the agent collect a visitor's preferred meeting time and provide a booking link.

The Stripe integration is read-only, meaning the agent can check what plan someone is on, view their invoices, and provide links to the Stripe customer portal where they can manage billing.

For custom needs, you can configure API actions that hit any endpoint like;

• Pinging a Slack channel whenever someone mentions cancellation
• Querying a product database to return specific items
• Setting up automatic responses for topics like job inquiries.

Suggestions

When customers open your widget, they see clickable suggested topics. These can trigger different behaviors depending on how you configure them.

Some render a pre-written response without touching the AI at all, which means no message credits used.

Others trigger immediate escalation, letting customers skip AI entirely and go straight to your team. You can also create nested suggestions for simple decision trees.

Guidance

Guidance is custom instructions that persist across every conversation.

It’s different from training materials because guidance is always in context, not retrieved when relevant.

Use for edge cases, behavioral rules, or company context.

For example, one customer has "Tool A" and "Tool B" that users reference ambiguously. Guidance instructs the agent to always clarify which tool.

Identified Contacts

Pass logged-in user identity to Helply. Attach custom attributes like name, email, pricing tier.

AI uses this context without asking follow-up questions. It can also track conversation history per customer.

Help Desk Integrations

Helply integrates with Groove, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Crisp. It syncs KB articles as training material with automatic updates.

Helply also creates tickets on escalation. We also offer Notion integration for docs.

WhatsApp and Slack

Deploy your agent on both. WhatsApp provides links rather than creating tickets directly.

Knowledge Gap Finder

The Gap Finder scans your recent support tickets from your connected help desk and compares them against what your AI agent knows.

It identifies questions that your human agents are answering that the AI could handle if it had the right training material, helping you find and fill documentation gaps.

Analytics

We track total conversations, escalated tickets, and resolution rate (total conversations divided by escalations).

We give everyone the same metrics rather than splitting features across pricing tiers.

Widget Customization

You can customize colors, upload your logo, write custom welcome messages, set widget position, and choose from different icons.

Persona configuration lets you control the agent's tone and communication style.

Helply Pricing

Helply Pros

• We guarantee a 65% AI resolution rate in 90 days. If we do not hit that number, you do not pay.
• Native escalation in 2-3 clicks.
• Unlimited training documents.
• Specialized agents per use case.
• Working chatbot with escalation in 10-15 minutes.

Helply Cons

• No public API yet (planned for later this year).
• Support-focused only.
• No Shopify or retail integrations.

Who Helply Is For

• Support teams drowning in tickets who need AI that actually reduces workload, not just deflects it.
• Companies tired of chatbots that promise automation but still require humans for everything beyond basic FAQs.
• Teams who measure success by tickets resolved, not just conversations started.

Who Helply Is Not For

• E-commerce with Shopify integration needs.
• Sales and marketing teams focused on lead generation and pipeline.
• Organizations that only need a basic FAQ chatbot without deeper system integration.

The Verdict: Which AI Support Tool Should You Choose?

LiveAgent is a traditional help desk that has added AI features. Chatbase offers flexibility but requires technical know-how to get basic escalation working.

We built Helply to actually solve customer problems.

If your support team is overwhelmed and you need AI that reduces ticket volume, not just hides it, we should talk.

Ready to see what 65% resolution looks like?

Stop paying for chatbots that pass problems to your team. Start with an AI agent that actually resolves tickets.

Try Helply for FREE and see the difference between deflection and resolution!