Live chat widgets on Indian websites: Tawk.to leads five to one, and what a widget can't do

Tawk.to is the most installed chat widget on Indian websites, and it isn’t close. Of the 113,102 .in homepages in Common Crawl’s August 2026 crawl, 2,079 carry its code, 1.84%. HubSpot’s chat is next at 386, then Tidio at 296, Zendesk at 130 and Crisp at 118. All ten widgets we looked for together: 3,128 homepages, 2.77%. Set that beside the 24,059 .in homepages that link WhatsApp and the website chat layer in India is small, concentrated, and dominated by one name.

Two sentences on method. We took every .in homepage in Common Crawl’s August 2026 crawl archive, one per registrable domain, fetched the archived HTML and looked for three things: a WhatsApp click-to-chat link, the domain or widget code of a WhatsApp platform vendor, and the script of one of ten generic chat widgets (Intercom, Freshchat, Tawk.to, Crisp, Tidio, Zendesk, Chatwoot, Drift, LiveChat and HubSpot chat). The full method and every caveat is in our study of WhatsApp on Indian websites. Three caveats apply here: we read homepages only, so a widget on a contact page alone counts as absent; industry labels come from words in the page title, so “homepages whose title mentions IT services” is the accurate phrase; and the .com figures below are worldwide, with a site counted as Indian only when the WhatsApp number on it starts with 91.

Which live chat widgets are on Indian websites?

Tawk.to is on more .in homepages than the other nine widgets combined. The counts are after removing parked and placeholder pages.

Widget	.in homepages	Share of 113,102
Tawk.to	2,079	1.84%
HubSpot chat	386	0.34%
Tidio	296	0.26%
Zendesk	130	0.11%
Crisp	118	0.10%
LiveChat	71	0.06%
Freshchat	48	0.04%
Chatwoot	30	0.03%
Intercom	26	0.02%
Drift	2
Any of the ten	3,128	2.77%

The scan counts installations. It records nothing about price, features or how well any of them work, and we are not going to guess. The question “which live chat is best for an Indian website” has no answer in this data; “which one is installed most” does.

How the .in picture differs from the .com world

On the 8,497,286 .com homepages we scanned worldwide, the order at the top is reversed. HubSpot’s chat is on 62,154 .com homepages (0.73%) and Tawk.to on 46,155 (0.54%), then Zendesk 23,932, LiveChat 19,074, Tidio 15,099, Intercom 9,780 and Crisp 6,385. Any widget: 176,536 homepages, 2.08%.

Widget	.com homepages worldwide	.in homepages
HubSpot chat	62,154	386
Tawk.to	46,155	2,079
Zendesk	23,932	130
LiveChat	19,074	71
Tidio	15,099	296
Intercom	9,780	26
Crisp	6,385	118
Chatwoot	1,923	30
Freshchat	1,705	48
Drift	452	2

Two things stand out. India’s widget rate (2.77%) is a little above the world’s (2.08%), so Indian sites are not shy of chat boxes. And the mix is different: on .in, Tawk.to leads HubSpot about five to one (2,079 against 386), while Intercom and Drift, both visible on .com, are close to absent on .in.

Widget but no WhatsApp

Of the 3,128 .in homepages with a widget, 1,927 carry no WhatsApp click-to-chat link at all. 1,162 carry both. Those 1,927 are the sites where a visitor’s only way to ask a question is the box on the page, and where the conversation ends when the tab closes.

Set against the whole set, though, the widget layer is thin. 24,059 .in homepages link WhatsApp and 3,128 carry a widget: 24,059 divided by 3,128 is 7.7, so WhatsApp links outnumber widgets nearly eight to one on Indian homepages. Only 1,162 of the 24,059 WhatsApp-linking homepages also run a widget, under 5%. The common Indian homepage has a WhatsApp button and nothing else.

Which industries put a chat widget on the homepage?

We sorted the 26,505 .in homepages with any signal by words in their title. IT services and education homepages carry the most widgets, by a wide margin. The “widget only” column is pages with a widget and no WhatsApp link; the Tawk.to column counts every signal page in that group with Tawk.to’s code, whether or not it also links WhatsApp.

Homepages whose title mentions…	Pages with any signal	Widget only, no WhatsApp	Tawk.to	HubSpot chat	Tidio
IT services, agencies, software	2,683	291	280	74	50
education (school, college, coaching, institute)	2,698	241	274	52	32
manufacturing, exporters	2,751	86	112	9	8
retail (jewellers, sarees, electronics)	917	69	66	12	14
healthcare (hospital, clinic, dental, lab)	1,540	64	101	15	15
travel (tours, hotel, resort, visa)	1,293	61	91	11	6
e-commerce (online store, fashion, apparel)	858	50	63	14	8
financial services (loan, insurance, CA, GST)	557	49	50	14	5
real estate (property, builders, flats)	1,133	47	80	18	10
home services (interiors, packers, solar)	775	30	43	5	6
events, weddings, photography	388	28	24	3	7
automotive	375	27	27	6	3
beauty, spa, wellness	411	21	20	2	4
restaurants, catering, sweets	399	17	21	6	4
legal and professional	160	12	23	3	3
unclassified	9,333	820	789	140	118

The shape is what you’d expect once you think about who builds the site. IT services firms build their own, and a chat box is a thing a developer adds while building. Education sites are often built by those same firms, and a college or coaching institute runs admissions from a desk, where a widget fits. Among ac.in and edu.in domains with any signal, 109 carry a widget, 90 of them Tawk.to. Manufacturers and exporters, the largest classified group at 2,751 signal pages, have 86 widget-only pages, about 3%; their homepages link WhatsApp and little else.

Freshchat, with 48 .in homepages overall, has 17 of them on education pages, the clearest single-trade cluster among the smaller widgets.

Why a widget at all, when WhatsApp is on 24,059 homepages

A widget asks nothing of the visitor. No app, no number, no permission. Someone reading your site on an office computer at 3 pm can type “do you do GST registration for a partnership firm” and get an answer without their personal WhatsApp ever being involved. The scan doesn’t record why a site owner picked a widget over a WhatsApp link. What it does show is that the 1,927 widget-only sites skew hard to IT services, education and professional services, which are the trades where the customer is sitting at a desk and the business has someone sitting at one too.

Take Lakshmi Venkatesan, an invented example: she runs an 11-person software services firm in Madurai, and her site has had a chat box in the corner since the developer built it in 2023. It gets perhaps six messages a week, mostly from people who found the site while comparing three or four firms. Two of those six turn into a call. Her WhatsApp number, on the contact page and in every email signature, gets more messages than that in a day, but those come from people who already know the firm. The widget is where strangers start.

What a widget can’t do that WhatsApp does

The visitor leaves the page, and that’s that. Unless the widget asked for a phone number or email before the chat started, there is nobody to follow up with. The chat history sits in a dashboard that one person checks. The visitor has no copy of it on their phone. When they come back a week later, they start again, and often with a different person.

WhatsApp keeps the thread. The conversation lives in the customer’s phone, under your business name, and they can scroll back to the quote you sent. You have their number from the first message, which makes a second message possible. The cost is Meta’s: on the WhatsApp Business Platform, a customer’s message opens a 24-hour window, and your replies inside it are service messages, charged from 1 October 2026 after the first 1,000 on each business number each month, at ₹0.1150 per delivered message to an Indian number, before GST. That is from Meta’s pricing page, updated 30 September 2026, and our October pricing explainer works through what it does to a bill. Widget messages are not WhatsApp messages, so Meta’s charges don’t apply to them.

What WhatsApp can’t do that a widget does

It can’t take a question from someone who won’t give you their number. On WhatsApp the number is the identity; there is no anonymous visitor. Plenty of people, especially those comparing vendors for an employer, don’t want a stranger’s business in their personal chats, and on a desktop they may not have WhatsApp open at all.

It also comes with Meta’s rules. A visitor who messages you on WhatsApp has started a conversation, not opted in to your offers. Meta’s opt-in page requires that a person agrees to receive messages from your business before you send them marketing; the page is dated 16 June 2026. A chat that starts in a widget carries no such question, because nothing is sent to a phone. The widget is the right door for a one-off question from a stranger; WhatsApp is the right door for anyone you want to talk to twice. Our guide to adding WhatsApp to a website has the HTML for the link, the button and the QR code, and when to add a widget beside them.

The case for both, answered from one place

The 1,162 .in homepages that carry both a widget and a WhatsApp link have the right idea and, we’d guess, the wrong plumbing: two dashboards, two logins, two sets of unread messages, and the person who asked on the website on Tuesday is a stranger again when they message on WhatsApp on Thursday. A widget that one person checks on Mondays is worse than no widget.

If you run one of the 1,927 widget-only sites, the cheapest change is a WhatsApp link next to the widget, with page-specific pre-filled text, so that the stranger who wants to keep talking has a way to. If you run one of the 23,860 WhatsApp-only sites and sell to people at desks, the widget is worth a month’s trial, measured by one number: questions that would otherwise not have been asked. Terms such as customer service window, service message and opt-in are in the glossary, and the routing and reply-time side of running both is in our customer support guide.

Our scan describes August 2026 homepages and nothing after. If you maintain a widget named here and believe we’ve misread your script, write to us through the contact page with the marker you’d expect; we’ll re-run the check and date the correction.