Why should you integrate chat within your website/blog?
- You can chat with your visitors. It can prove to be a source of instant feedback.
- For a site visitor in thirst of some information, there is nothing better than being able to chat with the site owner in real time. If you are an affiliate, you can consider embedding chat box on your landing page. It can make your conversion rate go higher.
- If you are a business – like webhosting – whose operations rely heavily on the internet you can have your dedicated support personnel’s chatting 24*7 from your site.
Which is the most popular online chat service among startups?
Zopim 
- Very easy to set up
- You can chat from any client. So your customer may be sitting on your website and you can chat straight from your Gmail account.
- Looks way beautiful than any of the chat clients out there.
- Have support for built in analytics.
- Can be integrated with your favorite CRM/help desk solution.
- Plans start from as low as $9.80/month
Are there any free and easy options available?
Yes, there are a number of options available to embed/integrate chat within your website. I will review some of the important ones which I have tried myself.
- Has a ‘Live Support’ options for small/medium businesses. If you are planning to open a company with a live-support service provided by your personnel, don’t look beyond Zoho. It’s surprising that the service is totally free of charge.
- Has ‘Live Chat’ for small site owners. Perfect for bloggers. Have all the functionality of ‘Live Support’ except that it support one person only.
- Very easy to integrate chat. It provides you with a small code inside iframe that you can put in your HTML.
- They have a widget called ‘Shout box’ through which site visitors can talk among themselves. This is something similar to Google Friend Connect.
- Layout, Background color, title text, title text color customization available.
- Can chat with multiple visitors at a time.
- Completely free of cost.
- Easy to integrate chat within your website/blog.
- Layout, color customizations, text customizations available.
- Option to read offline messages from the comfort of your mail box.
- No need for a separate chat client. It can be integrated with Google talk, MSN, Yahoo and other commonly available IM’s.
- Can chat with only one visitor at a time.
- Service is available in three plans. Basic plan is free.
- MeeboMe is from the creators of Meebo. [The first of its kind service that enabled you to chat across IM’s. Though there are many clones of it now.]
- What sets MeeboMe apart? It keeps track of all visitors and shows the visitors on your website, in real time.
- Allows you to chat with multiple visitors at a time.
- Again very easy to integrate chat within website.
- Layout, color and text customizations options available.
- Free of cost.
So, which one I chose?
If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed I don’t like installing too many client-apps on my desktop. Going by that habit, If I need to integrate a chat for my business website I will definitely go for Zopim [Review]. However if I need a similar service for a hobby website I may go for a chat solution like Plugoo.
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 
LiveAdmisn Live chat solution Integrate with the website. this company provide live chat service since 2002. I suggest you visit this site as well.
I also recommend Chatwee if you need some social approach. This chat widget is recommended for websites bringing together communities, where every engaged visitor really matters. You can use it as a free chat box placed in particular div element or convert to chat tab with fixed bottom position. Great for adding chat rooms, events, games and radio websites.
http://chatwee.com
I have used Chat4Support for 3 years and get impressed by its live chat support and website traffic and visitor monitoring.
Is Google Talk is available as a chat service which non google account holder can just click on the badge and chat to owner ?
Check out Barc.com – put an easy to use chat room on your site for free – it looks great too and has more features than any of the chats listed above.
Nice list, couple of serious players in the live chat space right now are ClickDesk – http://www.clickdesk.com/ and Olark – http://www.olark.com/
Check them out! Cheers!
Hi,
one more solution you might wanna add is tingl, because it also allows you to audio live chat and also video live chat. It also allows you to rerout your incoming webcalls to your phone or cell phone.
It has a free version available.
regards
i am wondering, if poeple go on the website, it would be nice if they could see whos also there, then it would be nice if they wouldnt need to register first. they should just start chatting
Still handy a year or so after posting. Zoho looks good. Ta.
nice information, but i want ask a question, If i integrate chat with my blog site , is it against adsense TOS
Hi
I want integrate online chat to my website like customer asking their queries with technical team.
i want to do this into my website how can i do it. if you know any links or source code please inform me.
Thanks & regards
Vijay
nice works
thanks.
Hey There,
Thanks a lot for the information, I have been looking such widgets for my blog for free
I think your post will definitely help me find one.
Nice to know that 🙂
Thanks u r information