Smith.ai vs. AnswerConnect

For small businesses, a chat solution should be both efficient and affordable. Smith.ai’s starter plan includes up to 20 chats at $7/chat. We also offer simple à la carte pricing at $10/chat — where you only pay for what you need. With this type of pricing, it makes it both predictable and budget-friendly. Plus, our white-glove setup includes everything you need to get started including custom playbooks, chat widget customization, and agent instructions based on your business needs.

AnswerConnect is much more expensive. Beginning with a setup fee of almost $50, their per-minute pricing can become expensive rather quickly. Imagine you have a distracted customer who has multiple browsers open and takes multiple minutes to respond to each chat. One or two time-consuming conversations a week could easily eat up your entire monthly budget. 

Beyond pricing, AnswerConnect doesn’t have a no-code playbook builder, can’t respond to customer text messages, and doesn’t use advanced AI. We do. Smith.ai’s next-generation AI provides rapid responses to customer chats. Using large language models, we ingest your website — and any other public URLs you provide — to start building your custom knowledge base, relieving your team from having to provide any of that information manually. Our AI then goes to work and provides rapid responses to customer inquiries based on that data.

Meanwhile, our 24/7, bilingual agents are ready to intervene, when needed. Our live, North America-based agents provide that human touch that’s often needed for complex or sensitive conversations. They can also take actions to best meet customer needs which could include gathering contact information, qualifying leads, collecting payments, and setting appointments. We can also answer text messages from customers.

Smith.ai also offers more integrations than AnswerConnect. We sync with the most popular calendar systems, billing software, and CRMs — including Salesforce and Hubspot. We also connect to Make and Zapier, which opens up thousands of more integration and workflow solutions. Not only that, but you have access to chat analytics in your client dashboard, where you can easily measure the impact of your chat’s performance.

Smith.ai is a comprehensive customer engagement solution. Available to add on to any plan is our Virtual Receptionist service, starting at $285/mo, which handles all your inbound calls. Additionally, our Outreach Campaigns provide sales outreach services, starting at $600/mo. Combined with our Web Chat solution, we can handle the entire frontline of your lead flow — freeing your team up to spend more time on higher-value tasks.

If you’re looking for a solution that includes AI capabilities, text answering, affordable pricing, and rich technology integrations, Smith.ai is the superior choice over AnswerConnect.