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Espressive Barista vs LiveChat comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

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
6.9
Number of Reviews
659
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 (1st), 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 (38th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (2nd)
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) (21st), Live Chat (1st)
 

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

"Automation Anywhere offers better value and is more effective for organizations seeking cost-effective solutions."
"Using automation, these processes are completed in between one and two hours, using one robot, and with these savings in time, the staff can do more in other areas, improving productivity and creativity while reducing the need for overtime and positively impacting the company overall."
"Learning Automation Anywhere prepares our students for a better future because the future belongs to RPA Automation."
"The process to add licenses has been very straightforward and seamless."
"AA has improved our efficiency and saved on manual hours because no manual interaction is required."
"No other competitor has this email trigger, so it saves a lot of time if you automate the process. We don't need to fix a time for a task to run. It gives the feature of on demand execution for any task. Whenever a user wants, it can send a mail and get the task done as soon as possible."
"What I like most about Automation Anywhere is that it saves a lot of time because it rarely makes mistakes, which could have been made if we were to do that work repeatedly."
"UI and document automation are two features I like. Document automation is helpful because it simplifies extracting and putting data into different ERP systems. I have three or four use cases for document automation. I also like the recorder objects feature, which was called object learning in the previous version, and screen scraping."
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"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."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"Customer Service: Top notch! The support team is available all the time and have been able to solve all our questions instantly."
"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."
"In my experience, the best features LiveChat offers include a clean interface, robust analytics, and the ability to provide human-to-human website chat."
"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."
"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."
"I majorly love the ticket and knowledge base features, which allow us to save automated answers to the most popular customer queries."
 

Cons

"There are improvements needed in error handling processes, as currently, they rely on start and end error commands."
"The technical support is critical for this product, but we have found them a challenge to work with."
"I would like the ability to extract the code. You can go line by line, then open up each line of code and dig into the details, but it would be nice to extract all of the lines of code and all of the details into a document so we could read through everything. Right now, there is no way to really consume all of the code at once, except line by line, which can be fairly time consuming if we don't really know what we are looking for."
"There is a limitation with Automation Anywhere where if you want to build your own packages and deploy them, it is very difficult."
"Support is not very satisfactory."
"If it had the ability to make decisions in complex situations, the bot would perform more smoothly. More advanced decision-making skills are needed for improvement."
"Technical support needs to be much faster."
"Unwanted windows are popping up. We have to train a bot to recognize the window if it comes up, know what it is, and click it. If it is interrupting our bot, I just want to avoid that window, because I am getting failed logs."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"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 biggest friction point I have experienced with LiveChat so far is the lack of a free plan."
"There have been times where Live Chat's servers have had DDOS attacks and have made communication difficult."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From my experience, I can say that the initial setup cost is easily recovered over a period of time once the bots start running in production."
"We paid separately for the Runner and Creater components. The final cost depends on the structure of your environment."
"We are currently negotiating a contract. Depending upon that, we will definitely look at increasing usage."
"Because it reduced the time duration of our processes, our costs went down."
"Automation Anywhere is affordable."
"I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator."
"Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent."
"They recently launched a Community Edition, which is okay, but they should have done this a long time ago."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The solution is affordable."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"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."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Construction Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise83
Large Enterprise552
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
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.
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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 ...
 

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

Demo not available
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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: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.