Widget performance
How heavy is the Crisp chat widget?
DebugBear measured it at 155KB. Here is what that means for your page, how it compares, and how to check your own installation.
Last checked 1 September 2026
Widget size/Crisp
The short answer
How big is the Crisp chat widget?
DebugBear measured the Crisp chat widget at 155KB of download. That places it 6 of 7 among the mainstream widgets they tested, which ranged from 79KB to 749KB. For scale, that is roughly 6 times the 26KB TGLiveChat widget.
What Crisp is
A lighter alternative to Intercom with a shared inbox, chatbot and help desk, priced per workspace rather than per seat at the lower tiers.
How it compares
| Widget | Download | JS execution |
|---|---|---|
| Tawk.to | 749 KB | Not published |
| Zendesk Chat | 533 KB | 991 ms |
| Drift | 464 KB | Not published |
| LiveChat | 385 KB | Not published |
| Intercom | 301 KB | Not published |
| Crisp | 155 KB | Not published |
| LiveAgent | 79 KB | Not published |
| TGLiveChat | ~26 KB | not in the test |
Competitor figures are DebugBear's, updated 10 November 2025. The TGLiveChat figure is our own measurement, with the method on the widget size page.
Where Crisp is the better choice
A much better built product than its price suggests, with a proper shared inbox, a knowledge base and integrations we do not have.
Where we are different
Removing the branding is included at $19 rather than sitting behind a higher tier, and the widget is roughly six times lighter.
Worth being plain about the trade: TGLiveChat is not a helpdesk. There is no ticketing, no SLA engine, no assignment rules and no reporting suite. If you were using those, a lighter widget is not a saving, it is a downgrade. If you were not, you were carrying the weight of a product you never opened.
Measuring your own installation
Every published figure, including ours, is somebody else's configuration. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, filter by the vendor domain and hard reload. Read the transfer column, not the resource size column. Then look at the Performance tab for scripting time. Two minutes, and it is the only number that describes your site.
The bottom line
Crisp downloads 155KB. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you get for it. A heavy widget attached to a helpdesk your team lives in is a fair trade. A heavy widget attached to a chat bubble nobody answers is not.
Defer it before you replace it. That is the cheaper fix and it usually works.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the Crisp chat widget?
Does the Crisp widget hurt Core Web Vitals?
How do I make Crisp load faster?
How do I measure this myself?
Is there a lighter alternative to Crisp?
What does Crisp do well?
Sources and references
- DebugBear: How Do Different Chat Widgets Impact Site Performance? Published 14 July 2019, updated 10 November 2025. Source of the Crisp figures on this page.
- Google: Core Web Vitals What widget weight actually affects, and how.
- Chrome DevTools: Network reference The transfer versus resource size distinction used above.
Measurements of Crisp belong to DebugBear and are cited for comparison. We measure our own widget and nobody else's.