miniDesk vs tawk.to

The tawk.to alternative where AI is not a paid add-on

tawk.to provides the platform at no cost and charges for the AI agent and white-label as add-ons, each billed per property. miniDesk bundles AI replies on the free tier and strips the branding on every paid tier.

Start free, no cardSee pricing
  • Free plan, no card
  • AI on every plan
  • One flat price per workspace

TL;DR

tawk.to's platform truly is free: live chat, unlimited agents, knowledge base, no card, provided you retain their badge. The AI is largely not. A free Hobby tier offers 100 message completions that cannot escalate a conversation to a human, and then AI Assist begins at $29 a month for 1,000 message completions, where a completion is every response the AI produces in a live channel, including the Smart Reply suggestions your own agents glance at and discard. Removing the badge costs another $39 a month, and every add-on is billed per website. miniDesk bundles AI replies on the free tier and strips the badge on every paid tier. If your team is primarily humans responding, tawk.to is the lower bill and you should accept it.

For a room full of human agents, tawk.to prevails on price, and by a wide margin

They charge nothing per seat and we price seats by tier, so the math favors them. Fifty human agents on tawk.to with AI Assist Growth and white-label runs roughly $68 a month. The same fifty on miniDesk Scale is $349. That is the factual shape of it. The comparison only flips when the AI is doing the responding, because tawk.to meters the AI by completion, tallying every response it produces, while we count the conversation once regardless of how many times the AI speaks within it.

The full comparison

Arranged in four groups, following the sequence a buyer follows. Capabilities come before costs, because cheaper than what is the first question a pricing comparison must settle.

Channels

  • Live chat widget on your site

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Shared email inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Web form, separate from the chat widget

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Not available

AI

  • AI that answers customers on its own

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Answers drawn from your own documents

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Agent-assist copilot in the inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included, then billed by usebilled by use

Developer

  • REST API

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • MCP server, published and supported

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Not available

What the price covers

  • The AI costs nothing beyond the plan price

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included, then billed by usebilled by use

  • A free plan with the AI on it

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Unlimited free conversations

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Adding a teammate costs nothing

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

Checked against each vendor's own published documentation, September 2026.

What you actually pay at scale

Three actual teams, priced from each vendor's own published pages, with one caveat worth flagging: tawk.to's AI Assist tiers live in their help centre rather than on their pricing page, which shows only the entry price. Their figures are monthly, since we sell no annual plan to compare against, and they include the $39 a month their help centre charges for badge removal, though their own marketing pages display $29 for the identical add-on. Each scenario counts a conversation as three message completions, which is an assumption rather than a published rate: nobody in this category publishes turns per conversation, so three is derived from the vendors who bill on that unit and from the largest measured conversation corpora. It deliberately omits the AI Commands and the discarded Smart Reply suggestions that consume the same allowance, so it reads their bill conservatively rather than aggressively. All of it is per website, not per account.

Your numbers

$39miniDesk$0.104 each$138tawk.to$0.368 each

miniDesk Starter, one flat price per workspace, sized by the 375 AI conversations you set above. tawk.to is priced on the cheapest tier that fits these seats and has an AI agent answering customers, at their month-to-month rate wherever they publish one, because we sell no annual plan to hold an annual rate against. tawk.to is cheaper on a yearly commitment, so this is the dearer of their two rates and the only one comparable to ours.

Three real teams

Startup

5 seats, 375 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Starter, all in
$39
tawk.to
~$138
+255%

Growing team

8 seats, 2,250 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Growth, all in
$99
tawk.to
~$438
+340%

Large support team

25 seats, 12,000 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Scale, all in
$349
tawk.to
~$758
+115%

Each vendor's own list prices, September 2026, in USD, on the cheapest plan that fits the seats and includes an AI agent. Monthly rates where published, so no annual discount. Volumes count the conversations the AI handles. tawk.to's tiers and its $39 badge removal come from their help centre, not their pricing page. Credits are counted at three a conversation, our assumption. Check their pricing pages before you decide.

Which one should you actually buy?

The AI handles most of your conversations

We count a conversation once, regardless of how many turns the AI takes within it. tawk.to tallies every response the AI produces, so a four-turn thread is four completions and a discarded Smart Reply is a fifth. The more work the AI does, the wider the gap between those two counting methods grows.

Pick miniDesk

You want your own branding without paying extra

Stripping the badge and using your own domain costs $39 a month on tawk.to, per property. On miniDesk it is on every paid tier, beginning at $39 for the entire workspace with AI already bundled.

Pick miniDesk

You have a large team of human agents and minimal AI volume

tawk.to charges nothing per agent, period. Fifty people responding to chats costs the same as one. We price seats by tier, so at that profile tawk.to is several times cheaper and no feature comparison changes that.

Pick tawk.to

Your budget is zero and must remain zero

tawk.to's free platform is genuinely free and genuinely unlimited on team members, provided you retain their badge on the widget. Our free tier is one seat. If you need five people in a shared inbox at no cost, accept tawk.to and treat the AI as a future purchase.

Pick tawk.to

Questions, answered honestly

The platform is, and it is a legitimate offer: live chat, unlimited team members, and a knowledge base at no cost. Their sole condition is the badge: "Don't remove it, and it is free for life." The two elements that make it feel like a product rather than a widget are paid add-ons billed per property, so ten sites means ten subscriptions. AI Assist from $29 a month, and badge removal at $39 a month or $348 a year, which works out to $29 a month if you commit. Their pricing page displays the $29 with no annual condition attached, so expect the two figures to conflict.

Other comparisons we have written

Alternativevs IntercomFin bills $0.99 every time it resolves something. Ours is in the plan.Compare
Alternativevs ZendeskPer agent, plus add-ons, plus $1.50 to $2.00 for every AI resolution.Compare
Alternativevs CrispThe closest on price. The difference is the MCP server and the free plan.Compare
Alternativevs FreshchatFree up to 10 agents, then per agent and $49 for every 100 AI sessions.Compare
Alternativevs ChatwootOpen source and free to self-host. Their cloud bills per agent and per AI credit.Compare

One price. All of customer support.

Start free, no card. When you upgrade, every feature is included, rather than a starting point with a list of add-ons to buy.

See pricingStart free