Chatbot Reviews, Community & News

Olark Review - Summary

What is Olark?

Olark is a live chat platform built for startups with a tight budget and a lot of flexibility in their tech stack. Unfortunately, if that isn’t you, Olark isn’t the going to be the best live chat software solution for your business.

Olark has been around since 2009, which in live chat software years, is quite a few. In 2023, you can find better web chat applications that are just as well designed and with more features for free.

Although Olark is a fine choice at its price point, most companies looking for a live chat solution or to change their current live chat provider are now turning to Olark’s competition.

Channels: Live chat

Pricing - Olark:

Overall Rating - Olark:

Table of Contents
Olark Features
Integrations and API
Olark Pricing
Pros and Cons
Olark Review - Final Analysis
Olark Competitors and Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions

Olark Features

  • Live chat widget: Olark’s chat widget lacks many features associated with the top chatbot building platforms available. It’s a text-only chatbox, meaning you can’t use things like emojis or GIFs. You can, however, add an avatar for agents if you get the Non-Branded Chatbox PowerUp.
  • Chat tools: Olark’s chat tools are there for your live agents. They consist of file sharing, chat transfers, visitor details such as name and location, desktop notifications for new chat messages, and visitor page tracking to see the URL of visitors as they navigate your website.
Olark Review
  • Chat analytics: Includes tools to monitor chat volume by time and staff; the ability to add custom tags to your chats for transcript sorting and analysis; visitor history so you can review prior interactions with visitors from within the chat console; emailed reports that you can receive daily, weekly or monthly summaries of data; the ability to add chat events to your Google Analytics dashboard; and transcript archives so you can review, search, and filter complete transcripts of all your conversations.
  • Customization: Olark has some customization options. You can control the chatbox appearance and behavior through Olark's JavaScript API. Custom logos allow you to attach your company logo to your chatbox, or choose another custom image. Chat box themes let you customize your chatbox colors, shape, and more to match your brand. Unlimited domains make it possible to add your chatbox to multiple websites, or to subdomains. Language selection allows you to set your chatbox and chat console to your preferred language.
Olark Review
  • Automated messaging: Olark provides automation features such as chat routing, proactive chat, canned responses, visitor targeting, automatic greetings, and offline contact forms.
  • Team management tools: Olark has a handful of team management tools your live agents can use. Groups allow you to route chats by the department, specialty, and other filters. Activity monitoring and agent performance reports provide visibility into chat volume, agent activity, agent availability, response times, and ratings. Customer satisfaction surveys ask visitors to rate their service when a chat ends. And pre-chat surveys ask questions or request contact details before starting a chat.

 

Olark Review
  • Chat routing: There are two types of chat routing options: Round-robin, where each new chat gets assigned to the next available agent; and All Agents, where each chat remains open until an agent responds to it.
  • Targeted chat: Olark’s targeted chat feature helps automate decisions on how and when to interact with your visitors. It lets you proactively engage customers, hide the chat box on specific pages and block some visitors.
Olark Review
  • Olark ‘PowerUps’: PowerUps are Olark’s upsell features. There are four PowerUps you can enable for an additional monthly fee.

    Visitor Insights PowerUp is a user interests summary that includes gender and age bracket, company, industry, job title, and social profile links to Twitter and LinkedIn.

    Live Chat Translations PowerUp automatically detects your visitor’s language, translates agent and visitor chats in real-time, provides chat-by-chat control of language and translation settings, and supports translation to and from more than 100 languages.

    Visitor Cobrowsing PowerUp allows visitors to share their screens with live agents while chatting. This empowers live agents to provide high-touch guidance through purchase decisions, payment and shipping options, technical questions, etc.

    Non-Branded Chatbox removes the Olark branding and link from your chatbox and allows you to customize the colors to match your brand. You can also add your agents’ avatars to put a face to the conversation.
Olark Review

 

Olark Review

Olark Integrations

Olark has integrations for a limited number of CRMs and helpdesks, automation tools, email platforms, analytics providers, ecommerce plugins, and web publishing tools.

In the below image you’ll see all of the integrations that have been built for Olark. They do also have additional ecommerce plugins for Shopify, Wordpress, Magento, and BigCommerce.

Olark Review

If you can’t find the integrations Olark has out of the box that matches up with your tech stack, you can use their webhooks or Javascript API to build your own.

For the integrations already built for Olark, the installation of different tools consists of either pasting an embed code into your website or installing an extension into your ecommerce platform or CMS.

Olark API

Olark has a Javascript API that gives you flexibility and control over the behavior of the Olark chatbox. You can decide, how, when and where to display the chatbox on your site, as well as view and update visitor information.

Olark Pros and Cons

Pros - Olark

  • Easy to understand pricing: It doesn’t get much easier to understand when it comes to Olark’s pricing. It’s $19/month, per agent. If you need 5 seats/agents, that will cost you $95 per month. One thing that many of the best live chat software providers do not make easy to plan for, is pricing. Olark, on the other hand, is one of only a few that make it possible to always know what the service is going to cost your business, month after month.
  • Searchable live chat transcripts: The transcripts dashboard captures every conversation that goes on in your Olark chatbox. This helps agents share a conversation with a customer once it is complete. You are able to see an entire conversation along with the visitor’s name, email, location as well as the chat rating. This feature also allows you to filter for chats that matter using tags, keywords and data range.
Olark Review
  • Good for startups with flexible tech stack: If you’re on a tight budget and haven’t locked yourself in too deep into your tools you can use as part of your tech stack, Olark could be a great tool for you to consider.

Cons - Olark

  • Not a serious platform for the long-term: You get what you pay for with Olark. The platform is cheap, and you can get a lot for a little, but ultimately, Olark is very limited and isn’t scalable.
  • Integrations are limited and under-developed: Olark’s integrations are need to be more advanced. At the moment, the integrations are so basic that they almost all require additional development work with Olark’s API and/or webhooks.
  • Limited automation features: Most of the work done on Olark is manual. Although you can set welcome messages for website visitors and automate lead forms that pop-up on defined pages, that’s about all the automation Olark provides.
  • No AI/machine learning chatbot tools: Olark is not using any AI/machine learning or NLP (natural language processing). In 2023, finding great AI chatbots for a reasonable price is commonplace and even to be expected from live chat platforms.

Olark Pricing

How much does Olark cost?
Olark pricing is very straightforward. It’s $19 per agent, per month. This means you don’t need to worry about how many contacts or conversations you have each month, because it’s limitless.

Olark Review

You may not be done with your monthly spending, however, because Olark PowerUps come at an additional cost. Here are prices for each PowerUps option that Olark provides as an additional service.

Visitor Insights: $59-99 per month
Live Chat Translation: $29 per month
Visitor Cobrowsing: $99 per month
Non-Branded Chatbox: $59 per month

The only PowerUp that the large majority of companies are going to want is the Non-Branded Chatbox. If you did want to include all of Olark’s PowerUps, however, the maximum additional cost you would pay for the platform is $19/agent + $286 per month.

Olark Review - Final Analysis

For what Olark does, it does it well. The problem is that it doesn’t do enough to compel businesses that are evaluating different live chat software options away from choosing one of Olark’s competitors.

In our final analysis of Olark, we think it could make sense for a startup that’s testing out the waters with a new product, however, beyond that, there’s no real reason to choose Olark as the live chat software for your website.

Olark Competitors and Alternatives

At Chatbots.org, we’ve reviewed and ranked hundreds of chatbots and chat platforms. We also rank these chatbots by category.

Here’s how Olark stacks up against the competition (#1 being the best) in the “Best Chatbot” categories the platform qualified for:

 

Live Chat Software

Olark: #23 out of 23.

Read More >>

Real Estate Chatbots

Olark: #11 out of 11.

Read More >>

Olark Frequently Asked Questions

Olark is a live chat platform for early-stage companies that saves chat conversations and transcripts, which you can review, search, and sort at any time. The platform also provides detailed real-time reporting to help you identify your busiest chat times and most effective live agents.

Olark is a cloud-based live chat solution that enables businesses to interact with customers through their website. Some of Olark’s main features consist of automated messages, team management, real-time reporting, and searchable chat transcripts.

No, Olark does not have a mobile app that replicates the functionality of its desktop application. However, Olark does have a live chat Slack app that can be used to talk to customers directly in Slack.

The best live chat software platforms can be found in Chatbots.org 2023 rankings of “The 23 Best Live Chat Software Platforms for Seamless Customer Communication.” Ranking #1 on the list is MobileMonkey.

Sign up for the industry trends reports and actionable tips fueling business growth.

Featured In