Ethora: The Olark Alternative With a Free Plan and Your Own Model
An AI agent that answers website visitors from your site and documents, with a person able to join the same conversation. Start free, pick the model for each agent, and run it on our cloud or your own servers.
The honest short answer
Ethora vs Olark: the honest short answer
Olark is a website chat company founded in 2009 that now sells an AI website agent, powered by its Aiden engine, which is trained on your site, answers and qualifies visitors, and hands off to a human; it also sells human-only live chat. Ethora is an open-source chat and AI platform: an AI agent trained on your website and documents that you embed with one line, on the model you choose (including one you host), with a person joining the same conversation and SDKs to put the same chat inside your own apps.
Stay with Olark if
- Your main goal is lead capture and qualification flowing into HubSpot, Salesforce or ActiveCampaign
- You want a done-for-you agent that engages visitors proactively based on pages viewed and return visits
- You only need human live chat, without AI, for a small team
Choose Ethora if
- You want to start on a free plan rather than an annual AI agent subscription
- You want to choose the AI model, or run it and the chat on your own servers
- Developers will build on it: open API, chat SDKs for web and mobile, an MCP server
Best for: Olark for a marketing team that wants a ready lead-qualification agent wired into its CRM; Ethora for an AI website agent you own, can start free and can grow into a full chat product.
Side by side
Ethora vs Olark: capabilities at a glance
The ten questions buyers ask most when choosing an AI chat agent for their website. Olark facts come from its public website and pricing page.
Ethora
How to read this table
Olark facts are taken from olark.com and its pricing page, checked 16 October 2026. Check its pricing page for the current billing terms and limits. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Why teams switch
Why teams move from Olark to Ethora
Olark’s AI agent is built to work a marketing funnel for you. Teams look elsewhere when they want to control the agent themselves, start small, or keep the model and the data on their own infrastructure.
Olark
Done-for-you AI website agent
Ethora
Open-source chat and AI platform
An honest view
When Olark is the better choice
If these describe you, Olark is likely the better fit.
Leads straight into your CRM
Olark’s agent qualifies visitors and connects to HubSpot, Salesforce and ActiveCampaign. If that pipeline is the point of your website chat, it is built for it.
Proactive engagement, done for you
Olark uses visitor context such as referral source, pages viewed and return visits to start conversations, with defaults instead of setup work.
Human live chat only
If you do not want AI at all, Olark sells full-featured human live chat at $29 per agent per month.
Build it on Ethora
Everything you need to replace Olark’s AI agent
The pieces most teams use when they move their website AI agent to Ethora.
AI chat widget for your website
One script tag adds a floating AI chat widget to any site. Visitors chat without signing in.
See the AI chat widgetRAG chatbot on your own content
Crawl your website, upload your documents, and see which sources each answer used.
How the RAG chatbot worksPricing
Free plan with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, then Small Business at $149/mo and Enterprise from $599/mo.
Compare plansAlso comparing LiveChat?
LiveChat is seat-based live chat with an AI agent added. See how an AI-first setup on Ethora compares.
Ethora vs LiveChatNeed EU data control?
If GDPR and where your data lives drive the decision, see how Ethora compares with Userlike, now Lime Connect.
Ethora vs UserlikeAlso comparing Chatbase?
If you are weighing a hosted AI agent builder trained on your content, see how Ethora compares with Chatbase.
Ethora vs ChatbaseAI agents on customer websites, built with Ethora
Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant AI assistant (RAG) over a medical video library
Dr. Talks is one of the most prominent organizers of online healthcare conferences and summits.
Ethora enabled them to create a context-aware AI-powered chatbot to help users navigate thousands of pages of medical content, correctly referencing pages, authors, videos and timestamps. 100% secure and HIPAA-compliant.
This assistant enhances user experience by simplifying interaction with the platform and reducing search time.
- 1000+ summits indexed by AI bot
- Instant user engagement
- Vector embeddings enable intelligent domain expert AI responses
Communities: fan chat app with second-screen rooms and digital collectibles
A cross-platform social app uniting the automotive community around racing events.
Fan rooms for teams and drivers, second-screen events, and collectibles handed out and traded through chat bots.
- Cross-platform iOS and Android app
- Fan rooms and second-screen events
- Collectibles distributed in chat
Energy: dedicated chat server, AI-agent rooms and a React Native app for a procurement platform
Preshent is a US platform for energy-project procurement with AI-driven decision support.
Ethora provides the conversation layer: a chat room per project workspace shared by people and the AI agent, a dedicated chat server in Preshent’s own cloud, push notifications and a React Native app.
- 1,130 chat rooms, one per workspace
- AI agent as a participant in every room
- Dedicated chat server, 99.99%+ uptime
Professional services: a private, self-hosted AI assistant for a corporate intelligence firm
A London corporate intelligence and investigations firm whose analysts could not use public AI assistants on confidential client work.
Ethora designed a private AI assistant: a single-tenant server with AI agents, document search and an open-weight model on the firm’s own GPU, managed by Ethora in a London cloud region or installed on a workstation in the office.
- Local open-weight LLM, no public AI services
- Single-tenant server, UK hosting
- Cloud GPU or on-premise workstation
Virtual worlds: a 3D multiplayer world built from a book, with AI characters, in one weekend
An internal R&D showcase by Ethora’s founder: Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest and A Christmas Carol as 3D worlds you walk through in first person.
Each room is an Ethora chat, each character an Ethora AI agent with the book as its knowledge; a generator and the hosted MCP server build a new world from any book in about four minutes.
- Built in a weekend on the public SDK, API and MCP
- Characters answer in character from the text
- Daily AI budget keeps a public world affordable
AI agents on customer websites: support, intake and teaching assistants
Clinics, schools and small businesses build AI agents on Ethora themselves and put them on their own websites, often on the day they sign up.
3 examples, from a US mental health provider and a wellness brand to a university pharmacology course.
- WordPress plugin or one script tag
- Answers from the customer’s own pages and documents
- Self-serve, no developer needed
Migration
Moving your website AI agent from Olark to Ethora
You can run both for a few days and switch when the answers match. A US mental health provider went live on Ethora the same day it signed up; see the AI website agent case studies.
List what the agent must know
Note the pages and documents your Olark agent answers from, and the questions visitors ask most in your chat transcripts.
Crawl your site in Ethora
Sign up free, create an app and an AI agent (start from the support agent template), crawl your website and upload the documents.
Set the instructions
Write the agent’s system prompt: tone, what it must not answer, which details to ask a visitor for, and when to bring in a person. Set its name, avatar, greeting and colours with the live preview.
Swap the embed script
Remove the Olark snippet and add
<script src="https://widget.chat.ethora.com/assistant.js" data-app-id="YOUR_APP_ID"></script>before</body>, or install the Ethora plugin on WordPress.Test 10 real questions
Take ten questions from your Olark transcripts and run them in the Try it chat. It shows which sources each answer used.
Watch conversations for a week
Read the widget conversations in the admin, add missing knowledge, rebuild, and join the conversations where a person should answer.
Olark alternative FAQ
What is a good free Olark alternative?
Ethora has a free plan at $0 per month with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, which includes the AI agent, the website widget and the chat features. Its core is open source, so you can also self-host it.
Can Ethora’s AI agent learn from my website like Olark?
Yes. Ethora’s website crawler reads your pages, and you can upload documents such as PDFs. The agent answers with hybrid keyword and meaning search, and the Try it test chat shows which sources each answer used. You can see knowledge health and rebuild it after changes.
Can a person take over from the AI agent?
Yes. A person from your team can join the same conversation as the AI agent, and admins can read every widget conversation with its message history.
Which AI model does Ethora use?
You choose per agent. Use a cloud model API such as OpenAI, or a model you host through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama or vLLM, so prompts and answers can stay on your own infrastructure.
Is Ethora suitable for healthcare or other regulated businesses?
Ethora is HIPAA and SOC 2 compatible, and a BAA is available on Enterprise and dedicated deployments. Whether a specific project is compliant depends on its configuration and hosting. Chats are encrypted in transit and at rest by default; end-to-end encrypted rooms are an optional per-app setting that is off by default.
An AI website agent you own, live on your site today
Crawl your site, set the instructions, paste one line. Free to start, on our cloud or your own servers, with the model you choose.
