What this actually is
It's software that sits on your website and talks to visitors. It answers their questions from your own content, works out what they need, asks the follow-ups your sales team would ask, and either books them in or hands them over. Think of it as a person on your website rather than a search box.
A rule-based chatbot follows a decision tree somebody drew in advance. Ask it something slightly off that tree and it collapses into "I didn't understand that". An agent reads your real business content, holds a proper back-and-forth, remembers what was said three messages ago, and decides what to do next based on what it has learned about the visitor.
The widget is how it appears. The work it does — answering from your knowledge, qualifying, recommending, booking, escalating, and reporting on all of it — is the actual product. If all you need is a place for visitors to leave a message, you don't need this.
Small and medium businesses whose websites get questions: coaching institutes, clinics, estate agents, online stores, SaaS products, B2B services, agencies, gyms, salons, travel companies. We've written configurations for the common ones — see industries — but the engine isn't limited to them.
How it learns your business
You give it sources: your website, documents, FAQs and product or service information. It answers from those and the instructions you write. It isn't drawing on general internet knowledge about your company.
Yes — point it at your domain and it crawls the pages you allow. You can exclude sections, and re-crawl on a schedule so it stays in step with your site.
Yes. Price lists, brochures, policy documents, course outlines, spec sheets and internal FAQ documents all work as sources.
Edit the source and re-sync, or edit the answer directly in the knowledge base. Changes take effect on the next conversation — there's no retraining wait.
You set source priority, so the current price list beats the old brochure. Conflicts that matter tend to surface fast in the conversation log, which is one of the reasons it's worth reading in the first weeks.
What it does with a visitor
Yes, inside the conversation rather than on a separate form. It asks for details at the point the visitor is interested, which is why in-chat capture usually outperforms a static form on the same page.
Yes. You define the questions that separate a real prospect from a browser — budget, timeline, requirement, size, location — and it works them into the conversation naturally rather than firing them off as a quiz.
Yes, provided the catalogue, course list, plan comparison or service menu is in its knowledge. It narrows a long list to the one or two options that match what the visitor described.
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive directly; anything else through Zapier, Make, n8n or a webhook. Full list on the integrations page.
Yes — it checks availability against a connected calendar, offers slots, confirms and sends the invite. Where no calendar is connected, it captures the preferred time and passes it to your team.
Keeping it inside your rules
It says so, offers to take a message or fetch a person, and logs the gap in your dashboard. It's configured to prefer admitting ignorance over improvising, because on a business website a confident wrong answer costs more than a "let me find out".
Yes — written instructions for tone and behaviour, topics you put permanently off-limits, answers you lock word-for-word for sensitive questions, and rules for when it must escalate instead of answering.
No system that generates language is right one hundred per cent of the time, and we won't claim otherwise. What we give you is control over the material it draws from, instructions it must follow, a full log of everything it has said, and a fast way to correct an answer permanently.
At any point, by asking. You can also trigger handoff automatically — on a keyword, on repeated failure to answer, or on a high-value intent. Your team picks the conversation up with the whole transcript in front of them.
Every one of them, with filters for leads, escalations and unanswered questions. Most customers read the first week's logs closely and then check the weekly gap report.
Getting it live
Most businesses go live the same day. Connecting content and reviewing the first answers takes about an hour; installing the widget takes minutes.
No. If you can paste a line of code into your site — or use the WordPress, Shopify or Webflow install — you can run it. Webhooks and the API are there if you have a developer, not because you need one.
Colours, logo, avatar, agent name, welcome message, suggested questions, position on the page and which pages it appears on. The aim is that it reads as part of your business, not a bolted-on widget.
Yes, and it's designed not to cover your content or hijack the screen — it opens on tap, closes cleanly, and respects the space your page needs.
It replies in whichever language the visitor writes in, from the set you enable — useful for regional-language enquiries that your team currently handles by phone.
By conversation volume, not per seat, across three plans. Bring in as many team members as you like at no extra cost. Full detail on the pricing page.
14 days on any plan, full feature set, no card required. If it doesn't work for your business you'll know inside a week.
Ask the thing itself
The fastest way to judge whether it would handle your customers' questions is to ask it a few of yours. This one is trained on Openline's own website.
Demo script — replies are pre-written, not generated.
Two weeks is enough to know.
Full features, no card, and your conversations and leads come with you if you leave.