Ethora: The tawk.to Alternative for AI Answers You Control
An AI agent that answers website visitors from your own website and documents, with a person able to join the same conversation. You write its instructions, pick its model, including one you host, and run it on our cloud or your own servers. Developers get an open API, chat SDKs and an MCP server. Free plan with 1,000 monthly active users.
The honest short answer
Ethora vs tawk.to: the honest short answer
tawk.to is free live chat software with ticketing, a hosted knowledge base and a CRM, paid for through add-ons such as branding removal and AI Assist, its AI chatbot that answers from your FAQs, help center, website and documents. 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 human handoff in the same conversation and SDKs to put the same chat inside your own apps.
Stay with tawk.to if
- You want free live chat for a team of human agents, with ticketing and a help center included
- People answer most chats and AI replies are an occasional extra
- You want the vendor to staff your chat with hired agents
Choose Ethora if
- The AI agent is the main job and you want control over its knowledge, instructions and model
- You want the option to run the whole platform on your own servers or in a cloud region you pick
- Developers will build on it: open API, chat SDKs for web and mobile, an MCP server
Best for: tawk.to for free human live chat with help desk tools; Ethora for an AI website agent you own and can grow into a full chat product.
Side by side
Ethora vs tawk.to: capabilities at a glance
The ten questions buyers ask most when choosing an AI chat agent for their website. tawk.to facts come from its public website, pricing page, AI Assist page and developer page.
Ethora
How to read this table
tawk.to facts are taken from tawk.to, its pricing page, its AI Assist page and its developer page, checked 16 October 2026. Add-on prices and AI Assist limits change, so check its pricing page for current figures. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Why teams switch
Why teams move from tawk.to to Ethora
tawk.to is hard to beat on free human live chat. Teams look elsewhere when most first replies should come from an AI agent and they want to decide how that agent is built, where it runs and what it is built on.
tawk.to
Free live chat with AI as an add-on
Ethora
Open-source chat and AI platform
An honest view
When tawk.to is the better choice
Ethora is not a help desk. If these describe you, tawk.to is likely the better fit, and some teams use both: tawk.to for tickets and the help center, Ethora for the AI agent on the website.
Free chat for human agents
If people answer most of your chats and you need no AI, tawk.to’s free live chat with desktop and mobile apps is hard to beat on price.
Tickets and a help center
tawk.to includes ticketing, a hosted knowledge base and a CRM. Ethora has no ticket system or help center of its own.
Chat staffed for you
tawk.to sells hired chat agents by the hour. Ethora gives you the AI agent and the tools; the people are yours.
Build it on Ethora
Everything you need to replace tawk.to’s AI Assist
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 FAQs and help articles, and see which sources each answer used.
How the RAG chatbot worksSelf-hosted LLM AI agent
Point an agent at Ollama, vLLM or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint and keep prompts and answers on your servers.
Run it on your own modelPricing
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 Crisp?
If you are weighing an AI-first support suite, see how Ethora compares with Crisp.
Ethora vs CrispAlso comparing JivoChat?
If your visitors write in several languages, see how Ethora compares with JivoChat.
Ethora vs JivoChatAI 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 AI answers from tawk.to 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.
Collect your knowledge
Export the knowledge base articles, FAQs and shortcuts AI Assist answers from, and list the website pages and documents it uses.
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, and when to ask for a person. Set its name, avatar, greeting and colours with the live preview.
Swap the embed script
Remove the tawk.to widget code or plugin 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 tawk.to chat history 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.
tawk.to alternative FAQ
Is Ethora free like tawk.to?
Ethora has a free plan at $0 per month with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, and it includes the chat and AI features. Above that, Small Business is $149 per month and Enterprise starts at $599 per month. tawk.to keeps human live chat free and charges for add-ons such as AI Assist and branding removal, so compare the two on the AI part you actually need.
Does Ethora replace tawk.to’s ticketing and knowledge base?
No. Ethora lets a person join a conversation and shows admins every widget conversation, but it has no ticket system or hosted help center. Some teams keep tawk.to for tickets and the help center and use Ethora for the website AI agent.
Can I self-host Ethora?
Yes. The core is open source (AGPL) and installs with Docker Compose, a Helm chart, or the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace images. Ethora can also run a dedicated server in your own cloud account and the region you choose.
Can the AI agent use my own model?
Yes. Each agent can 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.
How do I switch my site from tawk.to to Ethora?
Remove the tawk.to widget code and paste one Ethora script tag before the closing body tag, or install the Ethora Chat Assistant plugin on WordPress. On Shopify or another site builder, paste the script into the theme’s custom code or footer area. Visitors chat without signing in.
AI answers from your own content, 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.
