Krispy vs Crisp: Open-Source Live Chat Compared

Buttr spent three minutes running the numbers. Said "no contest" and went back to sleep.

Crisp is a mature live chat platform — polished, well-integrated, and priced at $25–95 per seat per month plus a separate AI add-on. Krispy is MIT-licensed, self-hosts on Cloudflare's free tier in one command, and ships AI replies out of the box with no extra billing relationship.

How do Krispy and Crisp compare head-to-head?

Best for Krispy: founders and small teams who want to own their data and keep costs near zero, and already live in Telegram.

Best for Crisp: teams that need a polished multi-agent inbox, CRM integrations (HubSpot, Slack), and are comfortable paying per seat for a complete support suite.

The per-seat line is the obvious differentiator, but data ownership changes your risk profile. Crisp lets you export conversations as JSON, but the database lives on their infrastructure — outages hit you and migrations require their cooperation. With Krispy, conversations sit in your own Cloudflare KV namespace. There's nothing to negotiate.

How does Krispy's AI work without an OpenAI key?

Krispy's AI layer runs on Cloudflare Workers AI, which is bundled into the Workers free tier at up to 10,000 inference requests per day — enough to answer every inbound question for most small and mid-size products at zero marginal cost.

Crisp's AI features run on OpenAI under the hood. That adds a third billing relationship: Crisp subscription, OpenAI account, and a usage cap to monitor. It's a fine setup, but it's a different cost structure.

Krispy ships with @cf/meta/llama-3-8b-instruct and lets you swap to any model in the Workers AI catalog with one line:

// krispy.config.ts
export default {
  ai: { model: "@cf/mistral/mistral-7b-instruct-v0.1" },
};

Beyond the free cap, Cloudflare's pay-as-you-go rate applies — roughly $0.01 per 1,000 requests (Cloudflare Workers AI pricing). For a fuller look at why self-hosted inference is worth it beyond the cost angle, why you should own your customer conversations makes the case.

How does the Telegram handoff work in Krispy?

When a visitor asks something the bot can't answer — or asks for a human — Krispy sends a Telegram message to whoever is on call. That person replies in Telegram. The reply appears live in the chat widget on the visitor's screen.

No app to install. No context switch. Your team is already on Telegram; the bot taps them in.

Crisp's handoff model is a polished web inbox with a dedicated mobile app, assignment queues, and first-reply time analytics. That's meaningfully better if your team runs support as a dedicated function with SLAs. For a founder handling ten visitor questions a day from their phone, Telegram is the faster path.

How do you spin up Krispy?

npx create-krispy-app my-chat
cd my-chat
wrangler deploy

That deploys the Workers API, creates the KV namespace for your knowledge base, and wires the Telegram webhook in one shot. The widget drops into your site as a single <script> tag. Cloudflare handles scaling, cold starts, and edge routing — there is no server to babysit.

For a direct look at how this infrastructure model stacks up against a heavier alternative, Krispy vs Intercom: infrastructure trade-offs explained goes deeper on the numbers.

What do you give up switching from Crisp to Krispy?

Fair accounting: Crisp has years of UI polish, a dedicated mobile app, HubSpot and Slack integrations, canned responses, and a full team behind it. Krispy is newer and scrappier.

What Krispy doesn't have today:

• A dedicated mobile app (Telegram is the handoff; there's no Krispy-native mobile)
• A visual inbox with agent assignment and conversation tagging
• Pre-built CRM integrations

If those are dealbreakers, Crisp — or one of the other options in the best open-source live chat tools in 2026 — might fit better. That's a genuine recommendation, not a polite brush-off.

Which should you choose: Krispy or Crisp?

If the table above looks good, star the repo and deploy: github.com/lonormaly/krispyai. If you'd rather skip the infrastructure entirely, Krispy Cloud has a 14-day free trial at $19/month flat — same open-source stack, no card required to start.

FAQ

Is Krispy a serious Crisp alternative or just a side project?

Krispy is MIT-licensed, runs on Cloudflare's global edge network, and handles AI replies, human handoff via Telegram, and a self-hosted knowledge base. It's actively maintained and production-grade for small teams. Whether it fits depends on how much you value data ownership and near-zero cost versus a polished multi-agent inbox — both are real trade-offs, and Crisp genuinely wins on the inbox side.

How do I migrate my Crisp conversation history to Krispy?

Crisp lets you export your conversation history as JSON from the dashboard. Krispy includes an import script that loads that export into your Cloudflare KV namespace so your support history moves with you. It's not a one-click wizard yet — it's a documented script — but there's no manual copy-paste involved.

Do I pay for AI features when self-hosting Krispy?

No. Krispy uses Cloudflare Workers AI, included in the Workers free tier for up to 10,000 inference requests per day (Cloudflare Workers AI docs). No OpenAI key, no separate AI billing. Beyond the free cap, Cloudflare's pay-as-you-go rate applies — roughly $0.01 per 1,000 requests — so costs scale with actual usage, not with team headcount.

Who owns my chat data when I self-host Krispy?

You do, completely. Conversations are stored in Cloudflare KV under your own Cloudflare account. Krispy — the project and the company — never receives, processes, or stores any of your visitor data. You can also migrate away at any time with no export friction: the data was always yours. Your account, your data, your terms.

Is there a hosted version for teams that don't want to manage infrastructure?

Yes — Krispy Cloud. It runs the same open-source stack with a 14-day free trial and costs $19/month flat after that — no per-seat pricing. The code powering it is the same repo you can deploy yourself, so you're never locked in: export your data and self-host whenever you want.