The website chat widget with your own AI behind it

A website chat widget is a small chat window that sits in the corner of a website so visitors can ask a question without leaving the page. It's usually a round launcher button that opens into a conversation. Behind it there's either a person, a scripted bot, or an AI agent that answers from your own content, and that's the whole difference between the tools that sell one.

The widget is the window on the page. Live chat means a person answers in it. A chatbot means a script with buttons and canned replies answers in it. An AI chat widget means a language model answers from your content, and an AI agent is the same thing with the ability to act: look something up in your systems, write a note for your team, or hand the thread to a person. Optlo's widget is the last kind, with a person one step away.

Paste one script before the closing body tag of every page, then tell it who's chatting with one line of JavaScript. That's the whole install, and the snippet is printed on this page. On WordPress there's a plugin that does it with no code at all. The installation guide covers Astro, React and single-page apps.

Yes. The only code involved is the snippet you paste, and on WordPress the plugin pastes it for you. Everything else, from what the agent reads to how it looks and when it hands off, is set in the dashboard. You don't write prompts unless you want to.

The one whose AI you can afford on your busiest month. Every widget looks the same to a visitor. They differ in what's behind the bubble and what it costs to run. Ask each vendor three things: does the AI answer from my content, does a person get the same thread, and what does the AI cost per conversation once I'm past the free tier.

Yes. tawk.to is free forever with a badge, Crisp's free plan has two seats and no AI, and Tidio's covers 50 conversations a month. Optlo has no free plan. There's a 7-day trial with AI included and no card, and after it plans start at $16 a month on annual billing. What's rarely free anywhere is the AI: that's sold in credits, per conversation or per resolution, except on Optlo, where you pay your own provider directly.

A little, and the amount varies a lot. We measured what five widgets send to the browser on a plain page view in September 2026: 97 KB for Crisp, 156 KB for Optlo, 220 KB for tawk.to, 287 KB for Intercom and 381 KB for Tidio, compressed. Optlo's script on your page is about 1 KB. The rest is the chat window, which is fetched at low priority when the browser is idle and runs in its own frame, so it never blocks your page or fights with your stylesheet.

Yes. The launcher stays in the corner on a phone and the window opens full width. Nothing about it needs a separate mobile setup.

Yes. Under Settings, Messenger, Themes you set the primary color, light or dark mode, the corner the launcher sits in and how far from the edge, and an optional custom launcher icon. Save a light theme and a dark one and the widget follows each visitor's system setting. The small "We run on Optlo" line stays unless you add the $99 a month add-on to remove it.

Whatever your provider charges for tokens, and nothing on top. On a paid plan the agent runs on your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini account, and a conversation on a mid-range model costs about 2 cents at list price. Optlo charges for the platform by active conversations and seats, and never per resolution. The savings calculator prices your own volume against the bundled tools.

Conversations are stored in your Optlo workspace, isolated from every other workspace, encrypted in transit and at rest. Your AI provider sees the messages it answers, under the data terms of your own account with them, and Optlo never resells or trains on them. The security page has the detail.