Short answer: live chat is a person answering your visitors in real time; a chatbot is software answering on its own. Live chat wins on trust and on anything personal — an order, an account, a complaint. A chatbot wins on speed and hours — it answers the same routine questions instantly, at 3 a.m., without anyone on shift. Most websites end up wanting both: a chatbot for the routine questions, and a person for everything else, with a handoff between them that the visitor barely notices.
What is live chat?
Live chat is the chat button in the corner of a website that connects a visitor with a real person on your team. The visitor types a question; someone on your team sees it in an inbox and answers within a minute or two. It feels like texting a shop assistant.
Live chat is at its best when the answer depends on the visitor: "where is my order", "can you check my account", "which plan fits my situation". A person can ask a follow-up question, look things up, make an exception and apologise properly when something went wrong.
Its weak spot is coverage. A person can only answer while they are there, and a small team can't be there all day. Outside your hours, live chat turns into a message form — which is fine if you reply by email, and frustrating if you don't.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot answers on its own. Older chatbots followed decision trees: buttons, menus and fixed scripts. Modern AI chatbots read the question in plain language and write an answer — ideally only from content you give them, such as your help articles, your website pages and your policies.
A chatbot is at its best with questions that have one right answer for everyone: opening hours, delivery times, how to reset a password, what a plan includes, where to find a setting. It answers instantly, in the visitor's language, at any hour.
Its weak spots are the opposite of live chat's. A chatbot shouldn't guess about a customer's own order or account, can't make exceptions, and can make an upset customer angrier if it keeps them away from a person.
Live chat vs chatbot, side by side
- Speed: a chatbot answers in seconds; live chat answers as fast as your team can.
- Hours: a chatbot works around the clock; live chat works when your team does.
- Personal questions: live chat can check orders and accounts; a chatbot should hand those over.
- Trust: people trust people, especially when money or a problem is involved.
- Cost: a chatbot costs a little per conversation; live chat costs your team's time.
- Setup: live chat works the moment you install it; a chatbot needs good content to answer from.
Which does your website need?
Start with live chat if you are small, your questions are varied, or most of them are about a customer's own situation — a service business, a hosting company's client area, a shop with a lot of order questions. Install the chat, set opening hours, and answer by email when you are away. Frosvo's free plan is built for exactly this.
Add a chatbot when the same questions keep coming back and your team spends its day answering them, or when visitors write outside your hours and wait until morning for a simple answer. The test is easy: if you could answer a question with a link to an article, a chatbot can answer it too.
You need both when you have enough traffic that routine questions crowd out the important ones. The chatbot handles the routine; your team handles the rest — and gets more time for it.
The part that matters most: the handoff
Combining the two only works if the chatbot knows when to step aside. A good setup hands the conversation to a person when the chatbot can't answer from your content, when the visitor asks for a person, and when the question is about the visitor's own account, money or orders. The person who picks it up should see the whole conversation and the reason for the handoff, so nobody has to repeat themselves. We wrote a full guide on getting the handoff right.
How Frosvo does it
Frosvo is live chat first, with an AI assistant on top. The assistant answers only from the knowledge you give it, shows the source of every answer, and hands the conversation to your team — with the reason written down — when it isn't sure, when the visitor asks for a person, or when your rules say so. Your team answers everything else from one shared inbox, together with email and messaging apps.
You can start with live chat alone on the free plan and switch the assistant on later, when the routine questions start to pile up. Start free.