Last checked: October 2026. Crisp and every other vendor change prices, plans and features often. Figures marked "reported" come from third-party summaries, not from a page we verified on the day, and may be out of date. Please confirm on Crisp's own pricing page before you decide.
Crisp starts with the inbox
Crisp’s strength is the workspace: a shared inbox where teammates see conversations, reply and collaborate, with live chat at the centre. Its free plan is reported to include live chat for a small team, without the AI agent, which makes it a common first tool for a site that wants to talk to visitors. When the AI agent is added later, it works inside a place your team already knows.
If that sounds like your situation, a Crisp AI alternative may not be what you need; the AI add-on may simply be the sensible next step. Look at what it costs on the vendor’s pricing page, because the figures here are reported by third parties and may have changed.
Workspaces, seats and AI credits
In structural terms, Crisp prices the workspace and then meters AI usage in a dollar-denominated credit that the AI agent draws down. Reported figures put a Mini workspace at roughly $45 a month with four seats and a small AI credit included, and a larger Essentials tier at roughly $95 with a bigger credit. How many conversations a credit covers depends on the model and the length of the chat.
SiteTrellis separates the two parts. The plan covers the platform: 100 conversations on Free, 1,000 on Starter ($19 a month, 2 seats) and 5,000 on Pro. The AI cost is billed by your provider. Under 6 visitor messages per conversation, 1,500 tokens of prompt and knowledge sent every turn, and 180-token replies, our catalog estimates about $1.79 per 1,000 conversations on Claude Haiku 5.5 and about $35.88 on Claude Sonnet 5.5; the provider’s invoice is authoritative.
The trade is simple. With a credit, the vendor handles the AI account and you see one bill. With your own key you see the model prices directly, and you also run another account.
Crisp and SiteTrellis side by side
| Aspect | Crisp | SiteTrellis |
|---|---|---|
| Core idea | Team workspace with shared inbox and live chat; Hugo AI agent on top | AI chat agent on your own key; takeover inbox as a feature |
| Billing unit | Workspace plan with seats; AI drawn from dollar credits | Conversations; AI billed by your provider |
| Entry paid plan | Reported at roughly $45 a month, 4 seats, small AI credit included | $19 a month, 1,000 conversations, 2 seats |
| Free plan | Reported: live chat for a small team, without the AI agent | 100 conversations a month with the AI agent, no takeover |
| Bring your own key | Not offered, as far as our research found | Yes: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, DeepSeek |
| Shared team inbox | The core product | Takeover inbox for chats handed over, from Starter |
| Channels | Multi-channel inbox; check what your plan covers | Website widget only |
| Provider fallback | Not covered by our research; ask the vendor | Ordered fallback chain, built for resilience |
What a handoff looks like on SiteTrellis
Because the inbox is a feature rather than the product, handoff is deliberately small. The AI answers, an escalation rule fires, a teammate joins and later hands the chat back. The example below is fictional.
Can you make a gluten-free cake for Saturday?
We can make gluten-free cakes with 48 hours’ notice. Would you like me to ask the team to confirm Saturday?
Yes please, can I talk to someone?
Hi, Sam here. Saturday works. What size should I note?
Rules can fire on a request for a person, keywords, repeated unanswered questions or a simple negative-sentiment check, and outside business hours the same rule can switch to an email handoff. If you need routing between many agents, labels or several channels, a tool built around the shared inbox is the better fit. See Escalation and takeover.
Where SiteTrellis is behind
- No omnichannel inbox: no email inbox, social or messaging channels, and no voice.
- No automatic routing or round-robin between teammates; any permitted teammate can take a flagged chat.
- No native CRM or helpdesk connectors and no visual flow builder.
- Knowledge is pasted text and FAQ pairs; there is no website or PDF training.
- Live takeover starts on Starter, while some tools give human chat away on a free tier.
- A new product with no public reviews, and you must keep an AI provider account funded.
Choose Crisp if, choose SiteTrellis if
- Choose Crisp if a shared inbox for several teammates is the centre of your day and you want AI inside it, with one vendor to pay.
- Choose Crisp if you want free live chat first and may add AI later.
- Choose SiteTrellis if the AI answering your website visitors is the main job and humans step in occasionally.
- Choose SiteTrellis if you want to pick and swap models, keep a fallback provider and read the model bill yourself.
- Choose SiteTrellis if you manage several sites for clients and want separate workspaces and agents.
Questions to ask Crisp before you decide
- How many AI credits does a typical conversation of mine use on the model I want?
- Which channels does the AI agent work on, and on which plans?
- What happens to the chat when the AI credit runs out?
What you would do to move
Note what to keep
Note the answers your Hugo agent gives most often and any saved replies your team uses. Keep Crisp running for the shared inbox if you still need it.
Recreate the knowledge as pasted text
Write it as plain text and FAQ pairs in a new agent; the Build your agent page explains the fields.
Connect a key and a fallback
Follow the AI keys overview, add a spend limit and a second provider.
Test, then embed on one site or page
Use the playground, then paste the script tag on a single page and review the transcripts.
This comparison is written by SiteTrellis, so read it with that in mind. We aim to describe Crisp fairly and to say plainly where SiteTrellis is behind. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we will fix it. Last checked October 2026; pricing page: Crisp pricing.