Pidge vs Crisp

The short version

Side by side

What it costs for one website

Crisp charges per workspace and includes a fixed number of seats. Pidge's paid plan charges per website and doesn't count people. With one website:

• One or two people, website chat only: both are free. Crisp Free doesn't keep the full conversation history. Pidge's free plan has no translation, and its API can only read.
• Three or four people: Crisp Mini, $45. Pidge, $10.
• Five to ten people: Crisp Essentials, $95. Pidge, $10.
• Translated chats: on Crisp that's LiveTranslate, Essentials and up, so $95. Pidge includes it at $10.

With one or two people on one website, there's no money to save either way, so pick on features.

Where Crisp is better

Crisp has been around for years and does far more than Pidge. Things it has that we don't:

• Other channels in the same inbox: email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, SMS and more.
• A knowledge base, a status page, email campaigns and a no-code chatbot builder.
• Hugo, an AI agent that answers on its own, paid for with AI credits.
• Native apps for iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac.
• Ready-made plugins for WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Adobe Commerce, and integrations with HubSpot, Zapier and others.
• Video and audio calls, and co-browsing.

Where Pidge is different

It's light on every page

Crisp's chat loads 105.5 KB of compressed code before anyone opens it, over 9 requests. We measured that on doomhosting.com on 14 October 2026. Pidge's loader is 4.8 KB and the bubble shows after 2 requests. The rest, 23.8 KB, downloads when someone clicks the bubble. Our build fails if the loader goes over 5 KB, so that number can't creep up.

Ad blockers don't hide it

AdGuard's widget filter has a rule for client.crisp.chat, so visitors who use it don't see a Crisp chat. Pidge loads from a subdomain of your own site, like chat.yoursite.com. We run every request the widget makes through 14 filter lists from uBlock Origin, AdGuard, EasyList, Brave and Peter Lowe. None of them block it. To be fair to Crisp, the same AdGuard list blocks many other chat widgets too.

One price, no seat counting

One website with two people replying is free. After that, $10 per website per month covers everyone on your team and every chat. Several websites share one inbox, and each keeps its own widget, colours and domains.

Small things we care about

• You see what a visitor is typing before they hit send.
• Translation works both ways: they read your reply in their language, you read theirs in yours.
• If a visitor leaves before you answer, your reply goes to them by email, and they can answer from their inbox.
• A banned visitor stops seeing the chat on all your sites, without being told.

What moving looks like

Most sites can switch in an afternoon. You keep window.$crisp and CRISP_WEBSITE_ID and change where the script comes from:

<!-- before -->
<script src="https://client.crisp.chat/l.js" async></script>

<!-- after -->
<script src="https://chat.yoursite.com/client/l.js" async></script>

# your backend
CRISP_API=https://api.crisp.chat/v1
CRISP_API=https://app.pidge.chat/v1

$crisp calls that keep working

user:email (signed emails too, with the same HMAC-SHA256 scheme), user:nickname, session:data, session:segments, chat:open, chat:close, chat:show, chat:hide, message:send, message:show, session:reset and $crisp.is(…).

REST API

Same paths under /v1/website/{website_id}/, same Basic auth and the same { error, reason, data } responses. It covers listing conversations, reading and sending messages, the typing indicator, conversation meta, the visitor's pages, state, blocking and people profiles. The API docs have the full list. If your integration uses an endpoint outside it, it won't work yet. Tell us which one in the chat on this page.

Webhooks

Same body, same X-Crisp-Signature header, so verifyHook from Crisp's Node library accepts them unchanged. Events include message:send, message:received and the session:set_* updates.

Sources

• Crisp plans, prices, seats and the feature table: crisp.chat/en/pricing, checked 16 October 2026.
• Hugo AI credits per plan: Hugo pricing and billing explained.
• Where Crisp stores data: Crisp EU GDPR compliance status.
• Crisp webhooks on every plan: Website Hooks.
• AdGuard's widget filter, which has the client.crisp.chat rule: filters.adtidy.org/extension/ublock/filters/22.txt.
• Crisp's page weight: measured by us on doomhosting.com, 14 October 2026, Chrome, brotli. File by file on the homepage.

Spotted something out of date? Tell us in the chat and we'll fix it.

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