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Espressive Barista vs LiveChat comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (37th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (4th)
LiveChat
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (23rd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (22nd), Live Chat (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Vikas Kejriwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Clean chat interface has supported basic AI handoffs but now needs omnichannel and a free plan
LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan. These limitations made me switch to another solution. I believe LiveChat should support at least a basic free plan so that potential customers can try out their features before paying for the full suite.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have almost 27 use cases in production and, as of now, we have saved almost eight FTEs per annum."
"The advantage of Automation Anywhere is that you don't necessarily have to come from a programming background."
"I'd say there are new useful features that will definitely help us as we do more development in the near future."
"We were able to replace a lot of the manual and data entry workload that our accounts payable clerks were doing, and the work that was done before by this original group can now be done by four people."
"The tool is now more stable, with more opportunities and new commands, like recording for the UI or advanced Excel features."
"The flexibility which has been built into it is its most valuable feature."
"It has improved a lot. We could identify a lot of manual processes that can be automated for our customers. The scope of automation by using Automation Anywhere has become wonderful. IQ Bot and AI sense are the incredible features provided."
"We have automated a few processes, which take four to five hours to do manually, and when we automated these processes that time became less than one hour with RPA."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"Through the capabilities of LiveChat we are able to fully customise each live chat implementation to suit the goals of our clients."
"We can attribute most of our high ticket sales to this software."
"Customer Service: Top notch! The support team is available all the time and have been able to solve all our questions instantly."
"In my experience, the best features LiveChat offers include a clean interface, robust analytics, and the ability to provide human-to-human website chat."
"I majorly love the ticket and knowledge base features, which allow us to save automated answers to the most popular customer queries."
"It truly does what I need it to do and anything else I would say, I would be making it up."
"The best feature of LiveChat in my evaluation is the AI chatbot module that I prefer most."
"Since we started to use LC we managed to increase our customer satisfaction level, increase sales and most important thing to speed up our interaction with our customers because it's all in real time."
 

Cons

"Regarding the UI, once you're on some of the screens there are fixed dialogues, they are a set size, so there's a lot of horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. If I want to do something that is purely business-related and is somewhat complex to write or is nuanced, I sometimes have trouble implementing that inside of the Automation Anywhere script."
"Automation Anywhere could assist in this transition."
"IQ Bot should have an easier way to tag the document's source after extracting information from the document. (Which group does the document or a transaction belong to)."
"Automation Anywhere can be improved by addressing the server issues we occasionally encounter when running the bot on the runner."
"Automation Anywhere has a persistent click-related issue that can make automation difficult, particularly in unattended environments."
"We did face some issues last year when there was an upgrade in Automation Anywhere control room, and at that time our web application automations were failing."
"Automation with bots runs fine only if it is an attended bot. With unattended bots, the bots run only 25 to 30 percent of the time."
"This solution could be more stable because sometimes I see some bugs."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"There have been times where Live Chat's servers have had DDOS attacks and have made communication difficult."
"The biggest friction point I have experienced with LiveChat so far is the lack of a free plan."
"I'd like to be able to create teams and filter the reports by team, in addition to the ability to currently filter by group, date, agent, tag etc."
"The service needs to be more popular than it currently is."
"LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing and licensing of Automation Anywhere plays an important rule in the Indian market because in the Indian market $10,000 USD is too much. Hence, the pricing tends to go down depending on the customer relationship with the partner: A starter pack is $10,000 and an enterprise pack is $100,000. If you go through an implementation partner, you can get good deals. They can save some money."
"I do not know the price, but I am told that it is cheaper than UiPath."
"We paid separately for the Runner and Creater components. The final cost depends on the structure of your environment."
"The price is a little bit high but the support is good."
"It is somewhere in the middle. The price and value of Automation Anywhere are better than UiPath. The pricing is good globally. It could be a little bit cheaper, but it is good."
"The licensing cost is approximately $4,000 USD, which is a seed license."
"Annually, we are paying almost one million reais."
"It's cheaper than other similar solutions."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The solution is affordable."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
Ask a question
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What needs improvement with LiveChat?
LiveChat did not support omnichannel messaging or multi-channel inbox, and it was not offering any free plan. These l...
What is your primary use case for LiveChat?
I started using LiveChat six months ago when we explored it. My main use case for LiveChat was to implement it as an ...
What advice do you have for others considering LiveChat?
We conducted a demo with LiveChat during our evaluation period. When I opened LiveChat during my evaluation, I checke...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
No data available
chat.io
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
Our product is used by over 29,000 companies in 140 countries worldwide. List of our customers includes brands such as: ASUS, Samsung, ING, Roku, LG Electronics, Better Business Bureau, Kaspersky Lab, Daimler, Air Asia, Tele2, Adobe, Orange, Zalora, HarveyNorman, Bombardier and many more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. LiveChat and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.