Alternatives
A Tawk.to alternative when free volume is not the whole job.
Tawk.to is hard to beat on a free widget and an in-product inbox. CanWeChat is for teams that will pay $19/month per site to answer from Slack, Discord, or Telegram — with a documented widget API and signed outbound webhooks.
Cost vs workflow
Tawk’s free tier wins if agents live in Tawk. CanWeChat charges for a workflow: visitor bubble → the chat surface your team already watches. No per-seat fees; invite teammates to the same workspace inbox when you are not in Slack.
API and webhooks that fit a SaaS stack
Open, send, identify, page, events, destroy on the widget. HMAC-SHA256 webhooks with retries and delivery history for your backend. That is the difference between “chat on the site” and “chat that hooks into billing, CRM, or alert pipelines.”
When to stay on Tawk
Stay for free high-volume chat inside Tawk’s inbox. Move when Slack (or Discord/Telegram) is where answers actually happen — see CanWeChat vs Tawk.to and the compare table.