List of major alternatives to Intercom
| Alternative Name | Per Month | What's included | What's missing | Good-fit to change Intercom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BigRadar.io | $99 | Live Chat, Chatbot, Email Campaign with outbound with data-events. | Helpdesk and Help Centre Docs | Great alternative while maintaining the same customer experience. |
| Drift | $2500 | Live Chat, Chatbot and Playboooks, Reporting | Design and end-user experience of Drift is a bit different. | Not even close to what Intercom provides. |
| HelpScout | $25 | Primarly help desk software | Chatbots, Email, Outbound, Whole experience of marketing | If you don't have marketing use case. |
| Freshworks | $20 | Livechat software for customer support team | Design is not appealing, marketing and other automation | If you're going for Customer Support only and doesn't give much preference to design. |
| Customerly | Free & 29$ | LiveChat + video, Email, CRM, Marketing Funnel | Chatbots, Whatsapp Business, Outbound | Give it a try if this fits you. |
| Reamaze | $29 | A godaddy business, Live Chat, Chatbots etc | Design is not appealing, marketing and other automation | Looks amateur to Intercom |
| Kayako.com | $125 | Helpdesk meets live chat and some sister features | Not ideal for customers acquisition and retention | Not at all |
| User.com | Talk to sales | It's a large stack software from customer data platform to omni-channel experiences. | Signup is not easy, you need to get a demo to get inside 🙂 | Try it to know whether it fits you |
| Chaport | $19 | It has some early features of user journey like Live Chat, Chatbots etc. | The whole experience of user jouney is missing | Somewhat, if you need only livechat |
| Getgist | Free & $29 | Looks like an ideal copy of Intercom | Since too many big features, reliability to handle large scale datasets is not good. My personal experience. | Give it a shot and see if it suits you. |
| Chatwoot | Open Source | A good experience for Live Chat and other channel | Doesn't have features like Email engagement and outbound. | Only good for chat or customer support chat ops. |
About Intercom
Intercom was founded in 2011, boasting more than 25000 customers in 117 countries, and has been growing since then. This platform supports around 500 million conversations per month and had been doubling with rapid growth.
Intercom is one the fast-growing customer engagement software which is used by businesses worldwide. Recently, they closed a funding round of $125m and growing at a rapid pace and is being called a “Next Generation Sales Force”. This means everything in the SaaS industry. The fund raised would be used for further developing customers’ platforms.
Pricing
It is an expensive software meant mostly for premium customers. The charges are based on the number of contacts and penalize growing websites, visitors, and users.
A 14-day free trial is available. Companies such as small teams, early-stage startups, those with small user bases, or new customers who meet qualification requirements are eligible for a flat rate of $49 a month for up to one year. You can contact the vendor for details. The following packages are offered:
- Respond: from $53/month – Manage conversations with leads and customers at scale.
- Engage: from $53/month – Send targeted messages to the right people at the right time.
- Educate: $49/month flat rate – Create, organize and publish help articles
- Live Chat for Sales (powered by Respond + Engage): from $106/month – Capture, qualify, and nurture leads to convert them to customers.
- Customer Engagement (powered by Engage): from $53 /month – Send targeted messages to onboard users, make announcements, and re-engage people.
Customer Support (powered by Respond + Educate): from $102 /month – Solve customer problems faster with an integrated help desk and public knowledge base.
Intercom’s position in the market:
- Intercom is one of the top 3 customer experience management software products.
- Intercom is one of the top 10 customer support software products.
- Intercom is one of the top 10 help desk software products.
- Intercom uses stripe for online payments and chases failed credit card payments by setting up chaser emails.
Drift
It is one of the traditional marketing and sales platforms that deals with using a form and follow-ups. It connects businesses with leads in real-time. Drift uses bots to deal with visitors and also identifies the sales rep to be assigned.
Features
ABM (Account-Based Marketing): A new dashboard account where the target account can be managed. To add an account sync with salesforce or manually. Once added or synced all the information for the designated account will be available. With Drift all the activities like who visited your website, every conversation with a VIP account, meetings booked, and much more. All this information is provided.
Sequence: This helps the sales rep create an amazing buying experience for their potential customers. It helps the sales rep send emails to the customers. They have reinvented sales email services. Drift sequence lets the sales rep connect with their potential customers when they visit your website. It works on machine learning and natural language which allows easy opting out. It also includes sending smarted emails by analyzing the behavior of the leads and avoiding repeated emails with a customer.
Email Marketing: It gives fewer emails and a faster buying experience. It helps with a real-time conversation at the sale. Now it will be easy to delight your customer. Put an end to annoying emails sent very often accidentally to the leaders who are already engaged with sales with smart filters. You can also check the ROI on email activity and any kind of marketing email can be sent.
Chatbots:
- Leads on your website without using forms.
- Booking meeting for sales.
- Conversations can be based on your routing rules.
- Bots are available 24/7.
- Booking Meetings for VIP leads.
- Bots answer the questions based on your knowledge base.
Meetings:
- Never get double booked
- Meeting management
- Efficient meetings
Pricing: $2500/- per month, billed annually
Kayako
This customer support service was started by a young man in a remote area of India (Jalandhar), with very little money.
It was founded in 2001 by Varun Shoor, a dropout from college. He began coding at the age of 13 and built Kayako when he was just 17 years old.
It has help desk software and customer service software that helps businesses grow more productive and build customers. Even though not having many external investors Kayako worked just fine which is a rare thing in a SAAS startup and now it has around 131000 customers already.
Kayako allows companies to connect with their customers at a better level while providing them with real-time services. Companies can install a simpler form of live chat services and drastically use it for a lower price.
There can be multiple conversations at once and can also view who has replied who is typing and who is online.
No message will be missed now since a customer can start a conversation even when your team is not online. If a customer steps away and does not see the message an email is sent in that regard the same message. And if the conversation was left mid-way your customer can pick up the conversation from there itself.
Features
Modern messaging software: It has created ease with which you can message your customers.
Follow your customers: Use Kayako on your mobile website or integrate SDK into your own apps. Embed it in your mobile app for mobile messaging and in app support.
Help Center: Provides live chat services on your help center.
IOS and Android: Embed into your mobile apps for an integrated experience.
Measuring performance: All the activity by your customer can be tracked like log page views, orders, history, help center searches or events conducted for your own product or services.
Team analytics; Use the feedback and know how your team deals with it.
Customer satisfaction rating: With customers rating improvement if required can be done.
The modern help center includes:
- Content management
- Help center comments
- Full content localization
- Internal help center
- Rich articles
- Article attachments
- Help center article tags
- Article statutes
- Article Keywords
- Proactive answers
- Full customizations
- Requests
Social customer services: Engage customers through Twitter and Facebook easily. Turn followers into customers.
Pricing: It starts from $125 per month
Customerly
Easy to get started it is integrated with customer support services with live chat screen sharing and live video.
It helps your customer have an easy way to contact you. Customers can find the help desk at the bottom of the page.
Features
Customer live chat –
- Video calling
- screenshots easy
- Share attachments
In-app surveys –
Customerly makes it easy to conduct a survey with an unbelievable competition rate. The surveys are delivered instantly to the audience by Customerly widget.
Email campaign: It is easy to use and customizable templates are available to express yourself in different ways. Analyzing these campaigns for better optimizations of your marketing goals.
Marketing automation: Automate your communication with your customers. Choose who enters your automation and create an audience based on those customers.
- Email message: send customized emails to customers
- Widget message: send in-app messages on the web and mobile app
- Wait until: add a wait condition in case the customer doesn’t satisfy the terms and conditions.
- Wait time: add a time to stop customers for an amount of time.
- If else condition: splitting the flow depending on the condition.
- Leave point: add a left point when customers want to leave.
Pricing: Free to start and $29 onwards per month.
Reamaze
Reamaze combines email, social media, mobile, and chat conversations so smoothly to reach your customers however they want. Customer conversations can be easily managed from multiple storefronts and websites no matter if you have one or a hundred of them.
Start a conversation with your customers and build better engagement in real-time even when you’re not at your desk. Customizable office hours to fulfill the need of the customers. Reamaze helps to preview the customer’s message before hand while typing to stay a step ahead.
Features
Live dashboard: Keep track of live customers as they visit your website and engage them by sending messages directly.
Personal insights: Gather customers’ data to keep them engaged with your team. Pull the data from 3rd party apps and integrate your own app data through SDK.
Satisfaction survey: Conduct a survey to know your team’s effectiveness.
Multi Brand: Manage support sites for multiple brands.
Team presence: Keep a check on when your team is replying to the customers.
Freedom without any hassle: Download the mobile app and receive notifications for a direct messages from the customers.
Pricing: $29
Chaport
Chaport is a modern messenger that makes your communication more easy and more convenient with your customers.
Talk to your website visitors in real time, solve their problems, and increase your sales. And for this, you do not need to be online all the time. Chaport will reply to the customers in form of an email from any location.
Increase your sales by having more conversations with your customer by sending them automatic chat invitations.
Chaport is available for IOS, Android, Web, Windows, and macOS. Synchronization is available between all the devices.
Features:
- Sending of files – send files to your visitors.
- Typing insights – read the messages even before they are received for faster response.
- Saved replied
- Visitors information
- Multilingual chat widget
- Customization of the widget
- Chat invitations to visitors
- Group chats are accessible
- Reports regarding the chats
Pricing: $19 per month onwards.
GetGist
Getgist formerly known as Convertfox helps the sales, and marketing, and supports the team to communicate with the customer.
Features
Live chat: It helps turn leads into customers. Start communication with the customers and visitors proactively. Make users take action and use customized messages based on user behavior.
Live user profiles: Provide support to the customer by understanding the activity data such as name, location, and more.
Saved replies: Can give a quick response by inserting canned responses.
Get your entire team on board: It provides a shared team inbox to manage all the chats and emails.
Email marketing:
- Create email campaigns
- Segment users based on interest
- Deliver emails with total control
- Gather powerful campaign reports
User analytics:
Getgist auto-tracks the clicks, form submissions, page views, and more without the coding required.
- Track every action
- Segment users by their action
- View live customer profiles
Track custom events: You can also track custom events that GitGist doesn’t track automatically.
Pricing: $29 per month onwards.
User.com
Send automatic messages and build a new relationships easily. Easy way of communicating.
Features
Live chat:
- In-app messaging
- Unlimited proactive invitations
- Customizations
- Mobile app
- Notifications
- Chat messages as emails
- Default replies
- Automatic assignments
- Agent groups
User tracking:
- Filter
- User behavior
- Device and social media information
- List and tags
- Dynamic events
- Custom events and attributes
- User timeline
- API
- Contacts import/export
Analytics and dashboard:
- CRM statistic
- Track aggregates sales
- Conversion impact management
- Number of registrations over time
- Number of ongoing conversations
- Number of total visits
- Users of each segment
- Companies for each segment
Email marketing:
- Campaign
- HTML templates
- Tracking and testing
- Set a cookie from link
- SMTP
- IMAP integration
- A/ B test
- Clicks and open emails
Call center:
- Automated calling
- Calling from the user profile
- Record calls
- Scripts
- Receive calls
CRM:
- Deals
- Activities
- Companies
- Workflow integration
- Permission management
List of all the interactions used by user engagement:
- Page views
- Email click
- Events
- Email Subscription
- Chat messages
- Forms filled out
- Notes
- Email sent and opened
- Phone calls and sms
- CRM deals and activities
Pricing: Take a demo to know the price.
Open Source alternatives to Intercom
Chatwoot
Chatwoot is a customer communication platform that helps businesses manage their customer interactions across multiple channels, including email, SMS, social media, and chat. It offers a variety of features designed to streamline and optimize communication, such as automatic routing, customizable workflows, and real-time monitoring.
With Chatwoot, businesses can provide a seamless and efficient customer experience, improve response times, and increase customer satisfaction. Some of the key benefits of using Chatwoot include the ability to handle large volumes of messages, the ability to integrate with other tools and systems, and the ability to customize and automate workflows to suit the specific needs of a business.
Live Helper Chat
Live Helper Chat is an open-source customer support platform that allows businesses to communicate with their customers in real-time through a variety of channels, including live chat, email, and social media.
It offers a range of features designed to improve efficiency and streamline communication, such as customizable workflows, automatic routing, and real-time monitoring. Live Helper Chat is highly flexible and can be customized to meet the specific needs of a business. It can also be integrated with other tools and systems, such as CRM and ticketing systems. Some of the key benefits of using Live Helper Chat include the ability to handle large volumes of messages, the ability to provide personalized and efficient customer support, and the ability to track and analyze customer interactions.
Pricing: Free, Open Source
About the author
Co-Founder @ BigRadar. Building conversational interfaces for small and large enterprises.
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