Crisp is a customer messaging suite: a shared inbox across chat, email and social channels, with a knowledge base, AI features metered by credits, and a free plan. LayBuild is an AI agent that answers from your documents on a web widget, WhatsApp and a REST API, at a flat monthly price, with no email inbox and no free plan. If your team lives in a shared inbox and wants AI as one feature of it, Crisp is the more complete product. If what you want is a bot whose answers you can constrain, at a flat price (with your choice of model on Premium), LayBuild is built for that.
Crisp facts below come from Crisp's pricing page (checked September 2026). Crisp prices in US dollars per workspace; LayBuild charges INR in India and USD everywhere else.
What Crisp charges for
Crisp charges a flat price per workspace, not per conversation, and each plan includes a number of seats and an allowance of AI credits.
| Crisp plan | Price per month | Seats included | AI credits included | Crisp's estimate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2 | None | |
| Mini | $45 | 4 | $5 | Around 90 automated conversations |
| Essentials | $95 | 10 | $25 | Around 450 automated conversations |
| Plus | $295 | 20+ | $75 | Around 1,350 automated conversations |
| Enterprise | Custom |
Extra agents cost $10 per month. By Crisp's own estimates, each automated conversation uses about 5.5 US cents of credit ($5 for 90, $25 for 450, $75 for 1,350). The pricing page does not spell out what happens when you run past the included credits, so check that with Crisp before you model a high-volume month.
The feature split matters as much as the price. Mini adds a shared email inbox. Essentials adds the omnichannel inbox (WhatsApp Business, Instagram DMs, SMS, Line, Viber and more), an omnichannel AI chatbot with a workflow builder, a knowledge base, analytics and routing rules. Plus adds AI agent task automations that connect to third-party tools, a ticketing system with a customer portal, 100+ integrations and white labelling. Crisp's AI agent is branded Hugo.
What LayBuild charges for
LayBuild has three plans, each a flat monthly fee with a conversation cap:
| LayBuild plan | Monthly | Billed annually | Conversations/month | Seats | Agents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | ₹1,499$19 | ₹1,199$17/month | 300 | 5 | 5 |
| Pro | ₹3,999$49 | ₹3,199$39/month | 500 | 15 | 25 |
| Premium | ₹9,999$125 | ₹7,999$99/month | 1,200 (20,000 with your own provider key) | 50 | 100 |
There are no AI credits: every conversation up to the cap is included, with no per-resolution fee. There is also no free plan or trial. Starter runs on LayBuild's fast models and Pro routes harder questions to stronger ones, with no token charges on top. On Premium you can bring your own provider key, and that provider bills you for tokens directly.
Where Crisp is stronger
Crisp covers more channels. Its omnichannel inbox covers email, WhatsApp Business, Instagram, SMS, Line, Viber and more, and its integrations include a Slack app for replying from Slack. LayBuild covers the web widget, WhatsApp (text only; voice notes, images and video are rejected) and the REST API. There is no email, Slack, SMS, Instagram or Messenger channel.
It is a full inbox for humans, with a shared inbox, private notes, shortcuts, routing rules, mobile apps, a hosted knowledge base and, on Plus, ticketing. LayBuild's dashboard lets agents take over AI conversations, but it is not a helpdesk and has no ticketing or help center.
Crisp has more integrations. It lists Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Stripe, Zapier, Make and n8n, among others. LayBuild has no native CRM or helpdesk integrations; you get four outbound webhooks (conversation created, message received, handoff, conversation closed) and the REST API.
Crisp also has a free plan, with two seats and a chat widget. LayBuild starts at ₹1,499$19 a month.
Where LayBuild is a better fit
You control how the bot answers. LayBuild runs strict knowledge-base mode all the time. If retrieval returns nothing, the LLM is skipped and a fixed reply goes out. After generation, if fewer than 25% of the answer's stemmed words appear in the retrieved sources, we replace the answer with that same reply ("I do not have specific information about that in the knowledge base..."). This is a lexical check, not citation verification: it can block a correct paraphrase and can pass a wrong answer that reuses source vocabulary. But the rule is documented, so you can test against it.
Retrieval is inspectable. Documents are split into parent chunks of 350 tokens and child chunks of 150 tokens, and each query runs pgvector vector search, Postgres full-text search, Q&A-pair search and a knowledge-graph leg in parallel, merged with Reciprocal Rank Fusion. If you care why an answer came back, you can reason about it.
On Premium, you choose the model. Hugging Face is the default provider, and OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Cloudflare Workers AI, OpenRouter, NVIDIA or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint can be configured, and you can switch between them. Starter and Pro run on LayBuild's default model, which falls back to another provider we have configured if one fails.
Costs do not depend on credits. At 300 conversations a month, the Starter fee is the whole bill.
What LayBuild does not do
- No shared email inbox, ticketing, help center or mobile apps.
- No channels beyond web, WhatsApp text and the REST API.
- No knowledge sync. You upload files (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV, TXT, Markdown and more, 10 MB default max) or list URLs; we fetch only those URLs, with no crawling or scheduled refresh. Plans cap documents at 10, 25 or 50 and URLs at 5, 25 or 50.
- Retrieval is tuned for English. The default embedding model and full-text search are English, so non-English questions against English docs retrieve worse, even though the bot replies in the customer's language.
- Handoff on request is on by default, and an admin can switch it off in settings. When a customer asks for a person, or once a conversation passes 25 AI turns, agents are alerted in real time; there is no AI summary or sentiment detection.
- The learning loop auto-publishes learned answers without human approval, and only a rating of 2 stars or lower retracts them.
- No SSO, and no SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001 or GDPR certification.
How to choose
Choose Crisp if you want one inbox for chat, email and social messages, a knowledge base and integrations with your store or CRM, with AI as a feature on top. It is also the obvious pick if budget is zero.
Choose LayBuild if the main job is an AI agent on your site or WhatsApp that answers only from your content, with a fixed monthly price and, on Premium, a model you pick. LayBuild is hosted only; there is no self-hosted version.
Some teams run both: Crisp as the human inbox, LayBuild as the first-line bot, with the handoff webhook alerting your team. That setup takes some glue code on your side, because the two do not integrate out of the box.
Next steps
Compare plan limits on pricing. For how the retrieval side works, read hybrid search with PostgreSQL + pgvector, and for the escalation design, safe human handoff.