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Zoho SalesIQ alternative

OyeChats vs Zoho SalesIQ

Zoho SalesIQ is live chat that has added AI. OyeChats is an AI agent that has added live chat.

Both products answer visitor questions and both put a human in the chat. They disagree about which of those is the default. Here is where each one genuinely leads, including the rows where SalesIQ wins.

Start freeSkip to the short answer
OyeChats
added live chat
Leads with: AI agent grounded in your content
vs
Zoho SalesIQ
added a bot builder
Leads with: Live chat and visitor tracking
Where the eight rows land
  • 4OyeChats
  • 2Even
  • 2Zoho SalesIQ
Short answerAt a glanceDifferencesQualificationPricingWhen Zoho winsSwitchingFAQ
The short answer

Which one is right for your team

Choose OyeChats if

You are not already standardised on Zoho, and what you want out of chat is qualified pipeline rather than a staffed inbox.

  • You want an AI agent answering from your own content on day one, not a bot-building project
  • You want every conversation scored on BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP or GPCTBA+C&I before a rep sees it
  • Your CRM is HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho or a spreadsheet, and you want leads pushed to any of them
  • You would rather your bill track conversation volume than how many people log in

Choose Zoho SalesIQ if

You already run on Zoho. This is not a courtesy line: for a business inside that suite, SalesIQ is usually the right call.

  • Your CRM is Zoho CRM and your helpdesk is Zoho Desk, and you want chat wired natively into both
  • You need to meet customers on WhatsApp, Instagram and other channels, or take audio and video calls
  • You want a mature human live chat product first, with the AI layer as something you configure over time
  • Indian data residency inside a suite you already trust is a requirement rather than a preference
  • You are buying the wider Zoho suite anyway, where the marginal cost of adding chat is small

What each product actually is

Before the feature grid, the category. Most of the differences further down follow from these two paragraphs.

OyeChats

AI agent with live chat

You point OyeChats at your own content (your site, your PDFs, your docs) and it builds a private knowledge base. The widget goes live with one script tag. Answers are generated by retrieval over that content, every conversation is silently scored for sales-readiness in the background, and a human on your team can take over the same thread at any moment.

Zoho SalesIQ

Live chat with a bot builder

SalesIQ is a live chat, visitor-tracking and engagement product inside the Zoho suite. Its centre of gravity is human live chat plus visitor intelligence, with the Zobot builder on every tier and its Answer Bot and Zia AI layer on Enterprise. Its defining strength is native integration with Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk and the rest of the ecosystem.

Feature by feature

The comparison at a glance

The check marks the tool with the edge on each row. Two of the eight go to SalesIQ, and they are two of the rows buyers care most about.

8 rows, scored honestly
  • 4OyeChats
  • 2Even
  • 2Zoho SalesIQ
CapabilityOyeChatsZoho SalesIQ
Grounded answers from your own contentHybrid semantic + keyword RAG grounded in your own content and site crawlAnswer Bot & Zia AI, gated to the Enterprise tier
Built-in BANT lead scoringEvery visitor scored on Budget, Authority, Need & Timeline before handoffBehavioural lead scoring, no named BANT framework
Live human handoffBot-to-agent handoff with the full transcript and BANT score attachedMature live chat, routing, plus voice & omnichannel
Conversation & lead analyticsIntent, drop-off and qualification analytics out of the boxVisitor tracking & engagement analytics
Webhooks & integrationsHMAC-signed outbound webhooks on every event, CRM-agnostic by designNative inside Zoho; broader is limited
Time to go liveUnder 5 minutes: add your content, paste one script tagMore configuration to reach an AI bot
Pricing modelFlat monthly tiers, no per-seat tax, no per-resolution surprisesLow per-operator price; AI is Enterprise-only
Best fitSMBs and sales teams that want qualification + support in one botExisting Zoho customers; omnichannel teams
In detail

Where the two genuinely differ

Five axes. What we do, what SalesIQ does, and the fair reading of the two.

Grounded answersEdge: OyeChats

Retrieval over your content vs a bot you build

OyeChats

OyeChats runs hybrid retrieval: semantic vector search over your content combined with Postgres full-text keyword search, so an exact product name matches as reliably as a vaguely-phrased question. Content comes from a crawl of your live site or from PDF, DOCX and TXT uploads. A relevance gate, on by default, lets the agent decline rather than improvise when nothing relevant comes back.

Zoho SalesIQ

SalesIQ has real AI: the Zobot flow builder on every tier, and on the Enterprise tier the Answer Bot plus the Zia Agents launched in 2026, which retrieve from your knowledge-base articles and uploaded documents and can bring your own LLM. It is capable, and two things are true of it: the AI answering layer sits on the top tier, and it grounds on a knowledge base you assemble rather than a one-step crawl of your site.

The fair reading

Not whether grounded answers are possible on both. They are. It is what a new account does on day one and where the AI sits in the price list. Ours crawls your own site and answers from it from the entry tier; theirs is a build on knowledge-base content, on Enterprise. In a hands-on test in July 2026, given the same website content, OyeChats answered from the pages while SalesIQ’s out-of-box bot either declined or, allowed to use built-in knowledge, invented a price.

~/oyechats · train
// point it at your own content
crawl https://acme.com
indexed 1,247 passages · vector + keyword
visitor
Do you offer next-day delivery to Mumbai?
agent
Yes. Orders to Mumbai placed before 3pm ship same day and arrive next day. Standard delivery elsewhere in India is 2 to 4 business days.
A crawl of your site, then a grounded answer. Sources stay internal, not shown to the visitor.
Lead qualificationEdge: OyeChats

Sales frameworks, not just engagement scores

OyeChats

Pick a framework per agent: BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP or GPCTBA+C&I. Weighted dimensions produce a composite score out of 100 that maps to a tier: MQL at 30, SAL at 55, SQL at 75. Extraction runs after the answer has already streamed to the visitor, so it never adds latency, and it infers signals from ordinary conversation rather than interrogating. Every signal is written to an append-only audit trail, and a score never downgrades. Crossing into SQL fires an email and a webhook.

Zoho SalesIQ

SalesIQ has visitor scoring and lead ranking built around engagement and on-site behaviour, fed by genuinely strong visitor tracking. What it does not present as a configurable product primitive is a named B2B sales framework.

The fair reading

This is the widest gap on the page, and it is a difference in the question being answered. Behavioural scoring tells you who is engaged. Framework qualification tells you who is ready to buy, and which dimension they are still weak on.

87BANT
Composite score

Read from the conversation in the background, never asked as a form.

  1. MQLat 30
  2. SALat 55
  3. SQLat 75
One conversation scored, and the tier that score lands on.
Human handoffRoughly even

Both do live chat well

OyeChats

Handoff runs on an explicit state machine (bot, waiting, live, closed) with enforced transitions rather than ad-hoc flags. Operator routing, departments, canned shortcut replies, offline message capture, an immutable audit log, and WebSocket delivery. The operator inherits the full transcript and the qualification score.

Zoho SalesIQ

Live chat is what SalesIQ is for, and it is mature: routing, departments, canned replies, operator mobile apps, and richer in-chat modalities than we offer today.

The fair reading

We are not going to claim we out-live-chat a dedicated live chat vendor. Call it a tie. Our narrow advantage is a consequence of the row above: the operator picking up a handoff already knows the tier of the lead before they type a word.

Session state
  1. bot
  2. waiting
  3. live
  4. closed
operator
Priya here, taking over. I can see you are on the 40 seat question.
visitor
Great, no need to repeat myself then.
The four session states, and what an operator picks up with.
IntegrationsEdge: OyeChats

CRM-agnostic, with an honest gap

OyeChats

Every event (a lead captured, a tier crossed, a handoff, a booking) is delivered as an HMAC-signed outbound webhook, with five delivery attempts backing off 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes and an hour if your endpoint is down. Install is documented for HTML, Next.js, React, Vue, Angular, Shopify, Squarespace, Svelte, Webflow, Wix, WordPress, Framer, Bubble, Astro and GTM.

Zoho SalesIQ

Native, first-party, deeply-wired integration with Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk and the wider suite. It is the kind of integration only the vendor who owns both sides can build.

The fair reading

Stated plainly: OyeChats has no native Zoho CRM integration. Leads reach any CRM through HMAC-signed webhooks. That is genuinely CRM-agnostic, and it is genuinely more work than a first-party connector. If your CRM is Zoho, that is a real point for them.

💬
◐
↗
▤
chat
score
webhook
your CRM
If your endpoint is down, we retry
  1. 30s
  2. 2m
  3. 10m
  4. 1h
Where a qualified lead goes, and the retry ladder behind it.
Time to liveEdge: OyeChats

One script tag

OyeChats

Add your content, copy the snippet, paste it before the closing body tag. The file your visitors download is about 3KB gzipped; the chat app itself only loads when someone actually opens the widget. It mounts inside a shadow root, so the CSS of your site cannot break the widget and the widget cannot leak into your site.

Zoho SalesIQ

A suite product carrying visitor tracking, routing rules, departments and a bot builder is configured before it is useful. That is the cost of its flexibility, not a defect.

The fair reading

Setup depth, not vendor competence. If you want to be answering questions this afternoon, the shallower setup wins. If you want to model a 12-person support org, the deeper one earns its configuration.

index.html
// paste once, before the closing body tag
<script src="cdn.oyechats.com/oyechats-widget.js" data-bot-key="bot-6a42…"></script>
loader 3KB gzipped · chat app loads on first open
The whole install. There is no second step.
Qualification

Four frameworks, chosen per agent

Dimensions are weighted and normalised into a composite out of 100, so enabling fewer of them does not cap the score.

BANT

  • Budget
  • Authority
  • Need
  • Timeline

MEDDIC

  • Metrics
  • Economic buyer
  • Decision criteria
  • Decision process
  • Identify pain
  • Champion

CHAMP

  • Challenges
  • Authority
  • Money
  • Prioritisation

GPCTBA+C&I

  • Goals
  • Plans
  • Challenges
  • Timeline
  • Budget
  • Authority
  • Consequences
What a tier change triggers. Crossing into SQL sends an email to your team and fires a webhook, so a hot lead reaches your CRM without anyone watching a dashboard.
Pricing

Per operator vs per conversation

Zoho SalesIQ prices per operator, with a free entry tier, a discount for paying annually, and its best value inside the wider Zoho suite. On headline price for a small team it is frequently the cheaper line item, and if you already buy the suite the marginal cost of adding it is small. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

OyeChats prices in credits, where one AI reply is one credit, with operator seats included on each plan. The difference is not the number, it is the shape: our bill tracks how much your visitors talk to the agent, not how many people on your team can log in.

One more thing shapes the comparison, and it is easy to miss on a headline-price read. SalesIQ’s AI answering, its Answer Bot and Zia layer, sits on the Enterprise tier. Grounded AI answers are included on OyeChats from Free and Starter. So the like-for-like comparison is often our entry tiers against their top one.

Zoho SalesIQ

Per operator

Seats billed

Your bill moves when someone joins the team.

Every teammate who logs in is a billed seat.

OyeChats

Per conversation

Credits used this month

Your bill moves when visitors talk to the agent.

Seats come with the plan. One AI reply is one credit.

What OyeChats costs

PlanPer monthCreditsSeats
Free$01000
Starter$7.991,0001
Standard$15.992,5002
Professional$45.998,0003
Enterprise$89.9910,000Unlimited
Extra seats. $5 per operator per month, added or removed in one click. Paying annually saves about 20%.
Tax. Sales to customers outside India are an export of services, so no Indian GST is added. The listed price is the full charge.
Zoho SalesIQ, as of Aug 2026. SalesIQ prices per operator, roughly $10 to $25 per operator per month across its paid tiers, cheaper annually and geo-discounted in India, with AI answering on the Enterprise tier. Rival pricing moves without warning, so read their current pricing page next to ours before you decide.
The honest bit

When Zoho SalesIQ is the better choice

If your CRM is Zoho CRM and your helpdesk is Zoho Desk, SalesIQ plugs into both natively in a way no third-party tool can match. Your chats land next to your deals with no webhook plumbing, your team is already inside the suite, and the marginal cost of adding chat is small.

  • You want a mature human live chat product first, and would rather grow into the AI layer than start there.
  • You need omnichannel and voice: WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and audio or video calls in one product. We are a website widget, and do not pretend otherwise.
  • Indian data residency is a hard requirement. Zoho runs India data centres; our infrastructure leans India but makes no residency guarantee.
  • You want CRM, helpdesk, books, campaigns and chat on one bill. That is the whole proposition of Zoho One, and we are one focused product, not a suite.
  • Your team already lives in Zoho, so the tool nobody has to be trained on is worth more than any feature row above.

Where OyeChats is built to win is the other case: you are not standardised on Zoho, you want an agent answering from your own content on day one, and you want sales to receive a scored, ranked lead rather than a transcript to read.

Switching

You do not have to cut over

Both products are a script tag, so the honest way to choose is to run them side by side for a week and read the transcripts.

  1. 01

    Run both at once

    Nothing forces a cutover. Put OyeChats on a single high-traffic page, or on a staging site, while SalesIQ keeps serving the rest. Both are one script tag.

  2. 02

    Point it at your content

    Crawl your site, or upload the PDFs and docs your team already sends to prospects. This is the step that decides answer quality, and it is measured in minutes, not sprints.

  3. 03

    Pick a qualification framework

    BANT is the default and fits most SMB sales motions. Switch to MEDDIC, CHAMP or GPCTBA+C&I per agent if your team already sells that way.

  4. 04

    Wire the webhook

    Point the tier-transition webhook at your CRM or automation tool so a lead crossing into SQL lands where your reps already work. If that CRM is Zoho, this is the step where you are doing work SalesIQ would have done for you.

FAQ

Questions buyers actually ask

Still deciding? Every plan starts free, so the cheapest answer is usually to run it on one page and look at the transcripts.

Start free
Zoho SalesIQ is live chat that has added AI; OyeChats is an AI agent that has added live chat. SalesIQ starts from human chat and visitor tracking, with the Zobot builder on every tier and its Answer Bot and Zia AI layer on Enterprise. OyeChats starts from an AI agent that answers from your own content and scores every conversation on a sales framework, with human handoff built in. Both products have both halves. The difference is which half is the default, and where the AI sits in the price list.

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Run it on your own site this week

Add your content, paste one script tag, and read the transcripts next to the ones you already have. The Free plan does not ask for a card.

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