Olark is a popular live chat platform that allows real-time communication between businesses and customers. Founded in 2009 through Y Combinator, Olark serves over 10,000 paying customers worldwide. Its user-friendly interface allows sales and support agents to chat with customers as they browse the company website.

The platform includes features like customizable chat boxes, automated messaging, detailed analytics, and team management. These tools integrate into existing business systems through different third-party integrations.

Olark helps businesses with sales, marketing, and customer support. Companies can guide customers during their buying journey, answer questions quickly, prevent cart abandonment, and offer personalized help. Automation lets businesses engage more customers efficiently, while the transcript archive and analytics give insights into customer preferences.

With support for over 100 languages, Olark connects businesses with customers globally. This makes it a versatile choice for enhancing online customer engagement. However, the lack of direct phone support and a sometimes clunky interface may turn away some users.

Olark: Plans and pricing

Olark has a simple pricing structure with three tiers: Free, Standard, and Pro. The Free plan isn’t heavily promoted but allows one agent and 20 chats per month with basic features. This plan kicks in automatically after a 14-day free trial if users don’t upgrade. It’s great for very small businesses or those wanting to test the platform.

The Standard plan costs $29 per month per agent when billed monthly. This plan is Olark's main offering and includes features like customizable chatboxes, advanced reporting, agent groups, targeted chat, basic integrations, and strong security measures. You can get discounts from 20% to 35% for longer subscriptions. Rates drop to $23 per agent monthly for annual billing and $19 for two-year subscriptions.

For organizations needing more features, Olark offers a Pro plan with custom pricing. This premium option includes everything in the Standard plan, plus AI tools, all PowerUps, a dedicated account manager, live training, professional services, enhanced support options, custom chat routing, and priority support. The Pro plan suits larger organizations with complex needs and enterprise-level requirements.

Olark also provides optional add-ons called "PowerUps" to enhance functionality. These add-ons range from $29 to $99 per month, regardless of team size or plan. Some common PowerUps include Visitor Cobrowsing ($99/month) for screen sharing, Live Chat Translation ($29/month) for real-time translation, Non-branded Chatbox ($59/month) to remove Olark branding, and Visitor Insights ($59-$99/month) for data gathering. This à la carte approach lets businesses pay only for the features they need.

For customer protection, Olark offers a full refund within 60 days if the service wasn't used. This generous refund period allows new customers to assess whether the platform is right for them. Plus, Olark's 14-day free trial requires no credit card, letting businesses explore all features before committing.

Olark: Features

Olark provides a full set of live chat features that boost sales, marketing, and customer support for any business. It combines strong communication tools with solid analytics, automation, and team management. This makes it a complete solution for customer engagement. Its easy-to-use interface and customizable options help businesses connect with website visitors in real-time. They can also gather insights that promote growth.

The features are organized to help businesses meet specific goals, like generating leads, increasing sales, or improving customer service. Olark offers everything from basic chat functions to advanced automation and data analysis. This helps businesses engage customers effectively while keeping a consistent brand experience. Moreover, Olark has specialized "PowerUps" that let businesses upgrade their base plan with extra features. This way, they only pay for what they need.

Real-time chat

Olark's chat tools let your team engage with website visitors in real-time. This means they can answer questions and offer support directly on your company site. The platform includes key features like file sharing, which supports JPG, PNG, PDF, and more. It also allows chat transfers to reassign conversations and visitor tracking that shows details like location and current page while chatting.

By enabling instant communication, Olark's chat tools help businesses convert leads, close sales, and solve customer issues quickly. Viewing visitor details and tracking their site movement adds valuable context. This leads to more personalized conversations, higher customer satisfaction, and better conversion rates.

Automation

Olark's automation tools help businesses connect with more customers while reducing manual work. The platform lets you set up automated greetings based on conditions like time spent on a page. It can also send custom messages based on visitor actions and route chats to the right department. Offline messaging captures leads when live agents are unavailable, ensuring no opportunity is lost.

These features increase team efficiency and save everyone's time. Companies can engage more website visitors without hiring more staff, capture leads round the clock, and provide consistent customer experiences. They are especially useful for consumer-facing businesses that handle many inquiries but still wish to offer personalized service.

Transcript archive

Olark offers a complete transcript archive that stores every conversation in a searchable database. This feature helps your team easily find and reference past chats, revealing valuable insights into customer communication. The user-friendly interface allows for efficient searching, sorting, and filtering of transcripts. Finding specific information or analyzing trends over time is very simple.

With this, teams can review past chats for quality assurance, spot common customer issues, and gather useful product feedback. This information can enhance products and services, improve customer support, and guide business decisions. Also, the searchable archive is a great resource for training new team members on typical customer queries.

Team management

Olark offers real-time reports on agent activity. These reports show each member's chat volume and rating, helping managers make smart staffing choices. Chat limits stop agents from being overloaded by setting them to "away" when they hit their maximum chat number. Routing options like round-robin and all-agents distribution keep workloads balanced.

Team management also includes a Shortcuts system. This gives agents access to a shared database of quick, consistent replies. It cuts down typing time and ensures accuracy when sharing greetings, links, product details, and answers to common questions.

Customizable chatbox

Olark lets businesses customize their chat experience to fit their brand. The platform provides options to change the chat box's look, allowing it to match the website easily. Companies can also build custom pre-chat forms with a simple drag-and-drop editor. This helps collect useful visitor information before a chat starts, from basic contact details to product choices or issues.

A well-designed chat box can increase engagement rates and improve the way customers view the brand. Meanwhile, custom forms give agents the context they need for personalized service. Together, these options help businesses create a unique chat experience that

Olark: Integrations

Olark promises to integrate “with the software your team loves” and, certainly, many of the most popular tools connect seamlessly with the platform. This includes some of the best CRM software around, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and a host of others. This gives your agents greater insights and allows them to talk them via your website in a more natural way.

Olark also makes big claims about its ecommerce integrations, connecting with popular tools like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Again, this demonstrates that Olark does not focus on managing dialogue as much as it does using data to deliver important customer insights. As a case in point, Olark can be accompanied by live chat plugins for several ecommerce platforms, including Wordpress, Magento, and BigCommerce.

Olark: Analytics

Olark provides reporting and analytics tools that give businesses insights into customer interactions and chat performance. Real-time dashboards show current chat volume, customer satisfaction, and agent activity — helping your company make informed staffing and prioritization choices.

You can filter conversations by satisfaction ratings, spot trends, and organize chats by topic to understand customer concerns. Olark sends automatic email summaries and integrates with Google Analytics to answer key questions. Agent activity reports help managers assess team performance and ensure proper staffing.

Olark: Ease of use

Olark's user interface is known for its clean and simple design. This makes daily use enjoyable for support teams. Many users appreciate the platform’s straightforward layout, which needs little training to master. It’s a great choice for small businesses and startups seeking an easy chat solution. The visual design emphasizes clarity, so agents can quickly find tools and information without dealing with complex menus.

The platform has features that improve the experience for support agents. The shortcuts function offers quick access to common responses. This saves typing time and ensures consistent communication. The transcript archive is organized and searchable, making it easy for teams to review past conversations and track customer issues. These features help support teams work efficiently, even during busy times.

Yet while Olark shines in simplicity, some users point out its limitations. The platform is often called "a chat tool, pure and simple." Some users find integrations challenging to set up and lacking in functionality. Additionally, there are occasional service outages, but these are usually brief and well-communicated by the Olark team. For businesses needing advanced automation, some reviewers mention limited options for chatbots and automated responses compared to other customer service platforms.

Despite these drawbacks, Olark's focus on basic chat functions makes it a reliable tool. The learning curve is low, so new agents can become productive quickly. For businesses that value direct, real-time communication with website visitors over complex automation, Olark offers a user-friendly experience. It consistently earns positive reviews for its straightforward approach to live chat.

Olark: Support

Olark has a pretty detailed support offering, with a help center that points users in a number of different directions depending on what they need help with. First up is a search bar, which will send you to an article on the relevant issue. Some popular topics include billing, installation, setup, and others.

If there’s no article available to solve your problem, Olark suggest individuals creat a support ticket, promising to respond within one working day via email. As per usual with support enquiries, Olark suggests that individuals will be more likely to receive a useful response if they provide as much information as possible, even a screenshot if possible.

If the support ticket isn’t what you’re looking for, other help options are offered, including chatting with an “Olarker,” although this is only possible Monday to Friday, 7am - 4pm (Pacific time). For simpler queries that will (hopefully) not require a detailed response, X (formally known as Twitter) might be your best bet, so tweeting @olarksupport is on hand.

In total, then, Olark offers a good range of support options, which could prove useful. We noticed a few performance issues when testing the service and customer feedback has reinforced that this is an issue that's more common than we'd like.

Olark: Security

Although the platform stresses that it is always extremely careful with user data, using encryption for all chats, it's also important to note that there is a human element to securing your information. Olark repeatedly emphasizes that the visitor’s browser and computer are beyond its control, so it recommends against sharing sensitive information using its chat platform.

This isn’t an admission of any security failing on Olark’s part. In fact, it’s good to hear this kind of honesty from a vendor - there’s only so much a live chat solution to protect user information. Its privacy policy is clearly explained, it is GDPR-compliant, and it runs a bug bounty program so rewards are available if a security researcher discovers a vulnerability.

Olark: The Competition

To increase its subscriber base, Olark will have to fight off a large number of other live chat providers. These include LiveChat, Zendesk, and a whole host of others. Olark may be able to outdo these other vendors when it comes to meeting the needs of small businesses as this is a highly customizable platform.

Olark compares well against its rivals in lots of ways, including integrations, connecting with CRM software automation tools, email services, and reporting platforms. Its pricing is a bit different from other similar tools, particularly if you explore the PowerUps on offer. For some organizations, this could be a drawback as it means that there isn’t the simplicity that you get with all-in pricing plans. For others - especially smaller firms - the flexibility is likely to be welcomed.

Furthermore, some of the performance issues mentioned above are unlikely to be acceptable to larger enterprises, which could potentially lose a lot of customers if an unexpected outage were to occur at peak times. And collaboration with larger teams isn’t always straightforward - again, something that is likely to be more of an issue within bigger companies.

Olark: Final Verdict

Olark ticks a lot of boxes, especially for smaller players, offering a live chat solution with plentiful integrations and good ease of use. The interface is clean and, more importantly, highly customizable so you can tinker with the design to suit your brand and your customer’s demands.

But, Olark is unlikely to be a good fit for every business. Larger firms may desire more from their live chat software and the sheer number of PowerUps could mean that the pricing plan doesn’t work for them. The performance issues that some users have experienced are another cause for concern — one that would annoy organizations of all sizes.

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: 30-second review

The Teamgroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC takes the performance of UHS-I MicroSD cards up a notch with impressive transfer speeds, making it an ideal choice for demanding applications and hardware such as action cameras and drones that are used in a professional capacity. Offering read and write data speeds that keep up with the demands of devices like the DJI Mavic 3 Pro recording D-Log at 4K, the card not only handles the data rate but also offers plenty of capacity to store hours of footage. During testing, the card was used alongside drones, action cameras, and a Sony A7 IV, demonstrating its compatibility with a wide range of devices, from cameras and drones to smartphones, tablets, and computers.

The card's build quality is standard for many of the best MicroSD cards we've tested, with a durable plastic enclosure that can withstand harsh conditions. The black colouring with white and gold text is acceptable, but if dropped, the colour profile combined with the small size can make it tricky to locate, especially in grass or on the forest floor. A brighter finish would be preferable for most exterior locations for practical rather than aesthetic reasons, as these cards are easy to drop in the cold.

Overall, this small MicroSD manages to perform impressively, working seamlessly with all devices without a hitch and keeping up with demands across the board.

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Pricing & availability

• How much does it cost? $250 for 2TB version
• When is it available? Now
• Where can you get it? It is available for sale in the US, UK and Australia

The TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC. is available in various capacities, including 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1 T.B., and 2 T.B. It can be purchased from major retailers such as Amazon and Newegg and directly from the TeamGroup website here.

The price for the 2TB version varies based on the retailer. At time of review, the approximate price is around £200 in the UK and $250 in the US.

• Value: 4/5

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Benchmark

Using a selection of benchmarking software the TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC achieved a maximum read speed of 164MB/s  using ATTO and a write speed of 164MB/s with CrystalDiskMark. 

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Specs

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Build & handling

This card adheres to the standard MicroSDXC form factor. Throughout testing, it fit every device, camera, and drone it was inserted into and was instantly recognized without issue. All dimensions follow the usual guidelines, measuring 15.0 x 11.0 x 1.0 mm and weighing in at just 1 gram, so there are no issues with overall compatibility. Checking the small card over, it all appears good, with a durable plastic enclosure that offers protection against everyday wear and tear, including exposure to extreme temperatures of -40˚C to 85˚C in use and -25°C to 85°C when stored.

The card utilizes the UHS-I interface, marked by a single row of connectors. This ensures good compatibility with a wide range of devices, from cameras and drones to smartphones and tablets, while offering performance in line with the devices it is designed to work with.

• Design: 4/5

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Features

The EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. card is designed to cater to high-performance needs and is advertised as a card choice for professionals. The feature set reflects this with some of the highest UHS-I quoted transfer rates, with read speeds of up to 170MB/s and write speeds of up to 160MB/s, making it an ideal choice for 4K video recording, high-resolution photography, device data gathering, and storage.

The card supports the exFAT format, ensuring cross-compatibility with all operating systems and devices. As is standard, it is also backwards compatible with MicroSDHC and MicroSD slots. Performance is complemented by a lifetime warranty and the T-CREATE EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. MicroSDXC SMART tool (it's a bit of a mouthful, but it lets you check the card's health and function).

Only a few manufacturers offer this level of card monitoring, with OWC's Innergize being a comparable product that enables you to monitor the quality of your card's storage and highlight potential issues well before they arise. This is a huge benefit for professional users.

• Features: 5/5

TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC: Performance

There is a huge volume of MicroSD cards on the market, with the majority aimed at the mass market and general use. While these cards are good, the TeamGroup offering takes things a step further by offering maximum compatibility through the UHS-I speed class contacts and the T-Create Smart tool, which enables you to check the card's health.

To test out the card, we started by running the software tool, available for Windows systems, to check that the card was in as-new condition. Sure enough, the card returned a result of 100%. We then ran through a series of tests, starting with standard use, with the card being used in a DJI Mavic 3 Pro, GoPro Hero 12 Black, and Insta360 Ace Pro. In all devices, the MicroSD card kept up with the demands of the cameras and stored the 4K footage those cameras produced.

After those initial tests, the cards were then subjected to benchmark tests, with read speeds reaching up to 164.10MB/s and write speeds up to 144.86MB/s in the ATTO benchmark. While these speeds are slightly slower than those quoted by TeamGroup, the difference is slight. The top benchmark read speed of 164 was achieved in A.T.T.O., while the maximum write speed of 164 was made in Crystal Disk Mark.

After running the standard tests, the AJA. was left running continuously for an hour to see how the card would cope under the strain of constant use. Again, the results were impressive, with the card maintaining performance with only a slight fall in transfer speeds but nothing that would cause dropped frames or corruption.

The final test was more physical. Firstly, dropping the card, which, considering the weight and size, is more likely you'll lose it than it will become damaged by impacting the floor. Suffice it to say, dropping it from a height of 2m resulted in no damage. The next test was to seal it into an airtight freezer bag and pop it into the freezer for 24 hours, then remove it and leave it to return to room temperature before retesting. Again, the card worked without issue, and retesting in the Smart tool still produced a 100% score.

• Performance: 4.5/5

Should I buy the TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC?

This MicroSD card is a great choice if you need substantial storage coupled with impressive read and write speeds. This makes it suitable for professional use, especially in drone work, where the resilience of the card is paramount. What really makes this card stand out is the inclusion of the T-CREATE EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. MicroSDXC SMART tool, which can be downloaded from the Teamgroup website. This tool enables you to monitor the integrity of the card, and while it won't be 100% foolproof, it provides an additional level of reassurance that is essential when working professionally.

It is an expensive card, but it is designed for the professional rather than the consumer market. Its additional resilience features make it a reliable option when it counts.

How I tested the TeamGroup EXPERT S.M.A.R.T. Micro SDXC?

For this test the card was used in several different devices all of which support the exFAT. Before starting this test the card was reformated to give the greatest compatibility for the real world tests and also for testing through the benchmarking software.

The softare used included the latest versions of CrystalDiskMark, Atto, AS SSD and AJA benchmarks, noting the best scores achieved in each. They are all free and can be downloaded by anyone. After the standard benchmarks I then use the card in a variety of tech, including a GoPro Hero12 Black, Insta360 Ace Pro and DJI Mini 4 Pro to ensure compatibility and performance over a sustained period. I then transfer a folder of files, roughly 10GB in size, to get a rough idea of real life performance. 

For speedier storage, we've reviewed the fastest external SSDs

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