LiveHelpNow vs LiveAgent (2026)

TL;DR

• LiveAgent publishes clean per-agent rates on annual billing: $15 Small Business, $29 Medium, $49 Large, $69 Enterprise. Both AI features are included at the $15 tier.
• LiveHelpNow publishes tiers from $39 Essential, $59 Professional, $79 Premium — every one prefixed "from", with the real number scaling on agents and usage. Its AI layer is a separate purchase: Knowledge AI from $99/month, Conversational AI from $499, Conversational AI Plus from $799.
• LiveAgent covers phone and social; LiveHelpNow does not have a built-in call center. LiveHelpNow's multi-brand support is stronger.
• If you need to compare vendors on a spreadsheet, only one of these lets you.

Pricing you can model versus pricing you have to ask about

This is the sharpest practical difference. LiveAgent gives you a per-agent number, and headcount times rate gets you close to your invoice. LiveHelpNow's rate card is a floor: a five-agent desk and a fifteen-agent desk both start "from $59" on Professional and are invoiced very differently. There is no way to run a like-for-like comparison against Freshdesk, Help Scout, or LiveAgent without a sales conversation.

That's not automatically bad — usage-based pricing can be fairer for small teams with heavy volume, or the reverse. It just means budget planning requires a written quote for your actual agent count first.

LiveAgent's transparency has a caveat too. The vendor discounts hard and often, and comparison sites republish promotional rates as list; a 33% new-user code was live at the time of writing, putting Small Business at $10 an agent. Budget against $15/$29/$49/$69, because that's what renewal looks like.

The AI split is the biggest structural difference

LiveAgent includes its AI Answer Assistant and AI Chatbot in Small Business at $15 an agent. That's unusually generous placement — most competitors put AI behind a higher tier or meter it.

LiveHelpNow separates AI into a rate card that operates on a completely different scale from the help desk beneath it:

Conversational AI costs roughly eight times the $59 Professional plan it attaches to. At the entry allowance that's about $0.50 per conversation, which is comfortable if each deflection saves several minutes of agent time and poor if your volume is a few hundred a month.

The free AI Agent Assist is smart packaging and a genuine productivity feature, but it never talks to a customer, so it deflects nothing.

There's a risk difference embedded here too. LiveHelpNow's AI meters on conversation volume, which tracks customer demand rather than your headcount. A campaign, an outage, or a seasonal spike drives the bill upward for reasons outside your control. Model it against your busiest month, not your average one.

Channel coverage runs LiveAgent's way

LiveAgent consolidates email, live chat, phone, and social — WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, X, Viber — in one agent workspace, with a built-in call center including IVR and routing from the $29 Medium tier. That call center is the standout: most competitors treat voice as a separate product with its own per-agent fee. Telephony itself is not included, so you bring a VoIP number and pay your carrier for minutes.

Social channels sit on Large Business at $49 or attach to a lower tier as a flat $39/month add-on. Because the add-on is flat and tier upgrades are per agent, the add-on stays cheaper at every realistic team size — 10 agents on Medium plus social is $329 against $490 for Large. Buy Large for SSO, custom roles, and audit logs, not for WhatsApp.

LiveHelpNow's channel story is narrower: live chat, ticketing, knowledge base, support portal, surveys, secure forms, and social channel support, with call logging and Zoom phone integration from Professional. Integration with a phone system is not the same as a call center.

Where LiveHelpNow does pull ahead is multi-brand: it handles support across multiple brands or properties from one account, and Hue AI routes conversations by topic and availability. LiveAgent charges $19 a month per additional knowledge base — cheap for one extra brand, $114 a month at six.

Two tier traps to know

On LiveHelpNow, ticketing starts at Professional. Essential at $39 is a chat-and-knowledge-base product with no email queue, and almost every support team handles both. The realistic entry point is $59, which also brings the dashboards and data export that make a desk measurable. Branding removal on the widget requires Premium at $79.

On LiveAgent, SLAs and the call center both start at Medium, so if you take phone calls or owe response times your entry price is $29, not $15. Branding removal is free only on Enterprise at $69, which means a consumer brand that wants a clean chat widget jumps to the top tier regardless of what else it needs.

Who should pick what

• Small teams needing phone, chat and email in one workspace → LiveAgent Medium. A built-in call center at $29 an agent is hard to beat.
• Multi-brand or multi-property support operations → LiveHelpNow, where the multi-brand handling is native rather than an add-on stack.
• Anyone running a vendor bake-off on a spreadsheet → LiveAgent, simply because the numbers are usable.
• Chat-led desks with high enough volume to justify conversational automation → LiveHelpNow, but start with Knowledge AI at $99 rather than jumping to $499.
• Budget-constrained teams that want AI at all → LiveAgent Small Business at $15, where both AI features are included.
• Consumer brands that need an unbranded chat widget → price LiveHelpNow Premium at $79 against LiveAgent Enterprise at $69 per agent; the flat-versus-per-seat difference decides it by headcount.

Bottom line

LiveAgent is the more predictable purchase and the broader product, with voice as its clearest advantage and a genuinely full entry tier. LiveHelpNow is worth the sales conversation if you run multiple brands or if conversational deflection is a real business case with the volume behind it — but understand that its AI is the product being sold and the help desk is the thing it attaches to.

Get a written quote from LiveHelpNow for your exact agent count before comparing anything, and check liveagent.com/pricing for current list rather than promo rates.