Orka vs Crisp.in 2026

Crisp is not a straw-man enterprise product placed beside a friendly startup. It has workspace pricing, a shared inbox and a public knowledge base. A small business can reasonably put both Crisp and Orka on its shortlist. The useful question is where the included features, team bundles and working style diverge, not whether one has discovered customer support and the other has not.

Orka emphasizes unlimited projects in one subscription, a free multilingual help center and an AI teammate you can keep in draft mode or allow to answer. Crisp offers its own integrated workspace and automation tools. If your existing support process already feels natural in Crisp, that familiarity is worth something.

A move should solve a concrete problem such as plan access, project organization or the way your team maintains knowledge.

Crisp lists Free for two seats, Mini at $45 for four, Essentials at $95 for ten and Plus at $295 for twenty. These are workspace prices, not amounts to multiply by every agent. Orka offers Free €0 for one, Light at €9 for two, Pro at €29 for three and Max at €99 for 12, with additional members at €8/month each.

A 20-person Orka team costs €163/month before AI usage and taxes. Crisp prices here are in USD, while Orka prices are in EUR: currency and feature differences matter before drawing a cost conclusion.

This is why the calculator lets you choose a Crisp plan instead of announcing an automatic winner. Essentials includes the knowledge base, while other capabilities and AI allowances vary by package. Compare the plan you would really buy. If you need several separately billed workspaces, enter that into your own budget too; our calculator lets you count those workspaces explicitly and shows the total before any eligible multi-workspace discount.

Crisp’s knowledge base supports Markdown, categories, multiple languages, custom domains and content for Hugo. Orka also uses Markdown and supports branded public help, collections and widget access. Calling Markdown an Orka-only advantage would be false. The meaningful difference is that Orka includes its help center on the free plan, while Crisp’s published documentation places the knowledge base on Essentials and Plus.

Translation maintenance is another detail to inspect. The Crisp quickstart describes adding languages and manually localizing articles. Orka includes background automatic translation with editable results and outdated markers after source changes. For either system, check a real article in a language you serve.

The words should be correct, the links should still work, and the visitor should reach a useful answer without discovering half-translated navigation along the way.

Crisp documents a workflow builder with conditions, message steps, internal actions and AI actions. That is a meaningful tool when your team wants a deliberately structured process. It can express decisions about visitor information and route the interaction through steps. Orka’s current catalogue establishes automatic replies, drafts, summaries, shortcuts and human takeover; it does not establish a directly equivalent general-purpose visual workflow builder.

Think about whether you need a conversation assistant or an explicit automation design. For a routine product question, a reviewed answer from current documentation may be enough. For a sequence involving several conditions and updates, a visual workflow may be the reason you buy a platform.

Test the hardest branch in your process, including the unhappy path, before deciding that a simpler interface can replace it.

Crisp packages include stated AI credits at different levels. Orka separates team subscription pricing from model-specific AI usage and offers a bring-your-own-key option without markup. Neither arrangement can be translated into a universal number of useful answers without assumptions about the workload. A vendor’s illustrative answer count is not a promise that your longest conversations will fit the same average.

Keep two measurements during a trial: what you spend and how often a person has to repair the answer. A cheap draft that needs three corrections is not necessarily efficient. A more expensive response that handles a difficult question cleanly can be worthwhile.

For Orka, the pricing page names the models and separates input from output. Use that calculation as a budgeting aid and bring your actual context lengths into it.

Orka gives a teammate context before and during the conversation: the current project, visitor information, recent activity and cart details when connected. Private notes and mentions help another person join without asking the customer to repeat everything. Availability and night, break-day or panic banners explain the human side of response times.

These are especially useful when the support team is also building or running the business.

Crisp has a substantial inbox of its own, so a trial should compare the same sequence on both sides. Search for an earlier exchange, involve a colleague, find a help article and continue the conversation. Then ask the person who uses the inbox least often to repeat it.

The system that makes occasional contributors comfortable may be more valuable than the one that only your power user navigates quickly.

Orka makes a strong case for a founder or a small crew managing several projects, especially if public documentation and multilingual support should be available from day one. Pro is an approachable step up, and Max leaves room for a larger crew without adding a seat charge for each person within its 12-person allowance, with extra members at €8/month each.

The option to use your own AI key also deserves a place in the comparison.

Crisp remains compelling when its ten-seat Essentials bundle fits neatly or when its broader automation and workspace tools match an established process. There is no need to invent a deficiency to recommend Orka for a different situation. Try both with one normal question, one ambiguous question and one exception.

Then choose the workspace that makes those three conversations clearer for the people on both sides.

Orka Free is €0 for one person. Light is €9/month for two people, Pro is €29/month for three, and Max is €99/month for 12. Additional Max members are €8/month each. Unlimited projects and the help center are included across the plans. Message search, image sharing and analytics are paid-plan features.

Max adds removal of Orka branding and a custom name and image for Orky. AI usage is a separate budget; using a provider key does not create an Orka markup.

The support toolkit includes live chat, live typing, saved replies, attachments, read receipts and email continuation. Your team can assign conversations, add private notes and mentions, use tags and filters, mark work resolved and set reminders. Visitor tools include a live map, a visitor list, profile information, recent page context, custom attributes and cart context when connected.

Availability, reply-time expectations and night, break-day and panic banners explain when a human is around.

On Light and above, team chat for two or more people, project permissions, saved replies, conversation search, file sharing, reminders, availability schedules, offline forms and analytics help organize the support day. On Pro and Max, Orky can use your help center, website, uploaded files and business instructions for drafts and automatic replies.

Human handoff includes custom keyword triggers, a confidence threshold, team notifications, assignment and the full conversation history. Orky also translates chats and help articles, summarizes conversations and scores urgency. Max adds satisfaction scores, teammate performance reports, the MCP server and higher API rate limits.

Widget branding, layout choices and seasonal themes sit alongside mobile apps, installation tools and an SDK. Our linked feature catalogue covers the full toolkit, including help-center publishing and translation maintenance. Features that depend on a plan or connected data are labeled. The comparison table concentrates on the documented differences that are most likely to affect your choice.

This guide is published by Orka, not an independent review site. This guide was updated on 18 October 2026. Competitor facts are supported by the linked official product pages, documentation and developer-maintained listings; the update date describes this editorial revision, not a claim that every source was published or fully rechecked on that day.

Our recommendations and trial ideas are our analysis. Pricing can change, and a negotiated offer or annual commitment may differ from the monthly examples shown here.

The comparison table uses documented product and pricing facts, with links to the original sources. Similar names are not treated as equivalent workflows: a typing indicator differs from a preview of unsent text, training knowledge differs from a public article site, and viewing a cart differs from changing an order.

The accompanying trial checklist helps you test the tasks that matter to your own team.

We compare published capabilities without making claims about certifications, ownership structure or data location that the evidence does not establish. The only deliberately unserious category is the orca connection. For everything else, bring a real support example, use the right plan and check the result.

A fair comparison should help you choose well, even when the right choice is not Orka.