The accessibility case is the strong one here

Olark has been selling live chat for a long time and says so plainly: founded 2009, more than twelve thousand businesses since 2009, backed by Y Combinator and certified as a B Corporation. The original product is human live chat, published at $29 an agent a month, and it is still sold that way for teams that only want people in the widget.

The AI product is priced unlike anything else in this comparison set. The Standard AI Website Agent was published at $400 a month billed annually, shown as $4,800 a year, with one human agent seat included in that figure and additional human agents at $29 an agent a month on top. Custom enterprise arrangements are handled through sales.

What the $400 buys is the absence of a meter. Their page states that the agent answers unlimited visitor questions, that there are no token costs ever, no token limits and no overages, and where it asks what the conversation cap is, it answers that there is not one. The agent is described as drawing on your live site and docs rather than on stale training data, and as being trainable on your business in about a minute.

Accessibility is a stated commercial position rather than a compliance footnote. Olark's own page says the classic chatbox is formally certified ADA compliant and exceeds WCAG 2.1 AA, names Allyant as the reviewing organisation, carries a Section 508 conformance claim, and offers a VPAT and a Letter of Conformance to download. Nobody else on this list of comparisons publishes anything comparable, including us. All figures above were published on the checked date and prices move, so read their pricing page and ours before deciding.

Written to be used rather than to be waved at. If any of these describe you, this is the wrong product and the rest of the page will not change that.

• You have to prove accessibility to somebody. This is the clearest reason on any of our comparison pages to buy the other product. Olark publishes an independent WCAG 2.1 AA rating, a Section 508 claim, a named third party auditor and downloadable conformance paperwork. We publish none of those. If a public sector tender, an education buyer or a legal review asks for a VPAT, this comparison is finished at that line.
• You want humans and AI in the same widget, from one vendor, with the routing between them designed rather than improvised. Olark's agent qualifies visitors, routes them and decides when a person is needed. Askably takes a name, an email and a message and sends an email, which is a much slower thing.
• Vendor longevity is part of the decision. Seventeen years of trading, a B Corp certification and a published customer count are things a small new product cannot offer, and if you are installing something on a site you will not touch again for three years, that should weigh heavily.
• You want live chat on its own without an AI purchase at all. $29 an agent a month for human only live chat is a clean, well understood product from a company that has been refining it since 2009. Nothing here answers a chat live, at any price.
• Finance wants one number a year and no variability. No token costs, no overages, no cap and one annual invoice is a genuinely restful way to buy this category, and restfulness has a price.

• The commitment is the difference before the price is. Olark's AI plan is published only as $400 a month billed annually, which is $4,800 agreed up front. Starter here is $29 a month, Growth is $99, Agency is $299, and you can stop at the end of any month.
• Answers arrive with numbered references to the passages they were built from, which turns a bad answer into a document you can go and fix rather than a behaviour you have to describe to support.
• You set the floor yourself. Below your chosen match threshold the request never reaches the model and the visitor gets the wording you wrote, so a question your material does not cover produces a refusal rather than an improvisation.
• More than one site is included rather than escalated. Starter carries three assistants across three sites each, and Agency carries ten assistants at ten sites each with a custom domain, which is the shape an agency running client sites actually needs.
• Taking our name off the widget costs nothing extra on any paid tier, and appearance is yours down to custom CSS, with the launcher in a closed shadow root and the panel in its own frame.

Read off their own site on that date, quoted narrowly. Prices and packaging in this category change often, so treat this as a snapshot and check both before you decide.

Listing this is more useful than filling it in. Every line here is something that was not clearly published, or was behind a sign-up.

• Whether the AI agent plan can be bought month to month was not shown. Only the annual figure appeared on the pricing page.
• The length of the free trial was not stated on the pricing page, only that no credit card is required.
• The certification wording specifically names the classic chatbox. Whether the AI agent conversation surface carries the same independent certification was not clear from the pages read.

Do you publish an accessibility audit or a VPAT?

No. We have no third party audit, no VPAT and no conformance letter. The widget is keyboard reachable and you control contrast through your own CSS, but that is a description of our intent, not evidence, and it is not a substitute for what Olark publishes.

Is $29 really comparable to $400?

Not directly, and the gap is not all margin. $400 buys uncapped conversations, a human seat and a certified accessible chatbox. $29 buys 1,000 replies a month on a widget with no audit behind it. Decide which of those you are actually shopping for.

Can a person take over the conversation?

No. There is no live handover of any kind. A visitor who wants a person leaves a name, an email and a message, and that arrives by email at an address you nominate. Olark exists because that is often not good enough.

What happens at high volume?

Growth covers 5,000 replies a month at $99 and Agency stops metering replies at $299. Above that the honest comparison is on the other things, not the count, because both products stop charging by the answer at the top of the list.