11 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Service Free

Messenger bot is your best bet If you require a tool that brings a lot of engagement. They do have a ton of similarities, but recognizing the differences may help you to make the crucial decision about which one to use for your business. For freelancers and enterprises, Zendesk is likely to be a better fit. Your selection of Zendesk vs Intercom may depend on the size of your company. Call it Intercom vs Zendesk or Intercom vs Zopim, let’s start with this interesting comparison. It is worthwhile to explore the features of both, prior to making a decision on which one you should use.

In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Zendesk chat is right for your business. Also Smooch provides setting of pop-up notifications and targeted messages and possibility of customization. So, it becomes very important for any business to handle this aspect well. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

We’re excited to announce that we have acquired the award-winning web app company Zopim! Zopim is easy-to-use, live chat software that we are thrilled to add to our family of products. As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn’t be more happy about it.

Similarly, Zendesk supports live chat for both messaging apps and your website. Live chat functionality is a must for any customer service software in this day and age. Desku is also a more cost-effective solution that does not compromise on features.

I almost missed the ease of access from my device while using Helpscout. You can keep a track of all conversations across different days, time, week, etc. and compare the same with earlier reports to evaluate current trends. Lead capturing and retention forms the core functionality of Freshchat unlike Intercom, enabling you to onboard, educate, retain and re-engage your customers.

Tidio is another alternative to Intercom that is a chat and communication support software and provides live chat, messenger, e-mail, and chatbots in one place. It’s a great way to save time as this software allows you to communicate with your customers seamlessly. You can monitor customer success metrics to evaluate team performance.

They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. I tested both of their zopim vs intercom live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day.

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I’ve decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on “live-example” of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)). When a lead fills out the form on our website, it creates an opportunity on Zendesk. We have an entire pipeline of automation that goes from our website, to Zendesk, it then creates a contract in Pandadoc and creates an invoice in Xero.

For example, Intercom itself doesn’t provide a Telegram integration. But, by using an App in their App store, you can create this integration yourself. With Intercom, you can send a broadcast to your users on your website, by using large Posts or Banners. Intercom starts at $39 per seat/month and gives a 14-day free trial on every plan. To start with Intercom vs Helpscout – Intercom provides a mobile app developed by a mobile app development company for android devices.

Zopim Integrations

The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine.

Desku puts strong importance on its self-service abilities, providing a solution for users to find answers themselves. We find Kustomer a bit lacking in this aspect, so Desku becomes an evident choice for those looking to decrease the burden on service agents. The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. You can use Intercom’s live chat system for support, sales, product, and marketing teams.

With its competitive pricing strategy, Desku is a very lucrative choice for businesses of all types. Also, Zendesk has many deficiencies that Desku covers, proving it to be a better customer service solution. This easy-to-use live chat app comes with customizable widgets and good reporting dashboards. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

Zopim offers features such as chat transcripts, chat ratings, chat routing, and proactive chat invitations. While it may lack some of the more advanced features found in Intercom, Zopim excels in its simplicity and reliability. It allows businesses to have real-time conversations with customers, resolve queries efficiently, and monitor chat performance through analytics. HubSpot is a marketing and sales software company that helps businesses grow by attracting website visitors and converting them into customers.

Up until recently, we had a mono-repo with our Rails and React code living happily together and all served from the same web process. In order to deploy our SSR app into a Heroku environment, we needed to split out our front-end application into a separate repo in GitHub. The driving factor in this decision was mostly due to limitations imposed by Heroku specifically with how processes can’t communicate with each other.

Tidio offers four plans Free, chatbots, communicator, and email marketing. The chatbot plan offers features like unlimited active chatbots, chatbot templates amongst some of the features. Depending on your needs you can either take one or more plans as needed.

Pros of Olark

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. A new SSR app was created in Heroku and linked directly to the frontend repo so it stays in-sync with changes. The Capterra Arrow logo, the GetApp and the Software Advice logo are service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. Switch between the tabs to get insights about your chats, agents, and customers. Get a Zendesk® alternative that provides around‑the‑clock support across all plans. Intercom provides 65 templates you can use to build your chatbot flows. Unfortunately, you cannot create these templates yourself and share them with others.

• The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month.
• It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.
• I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn’t want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.
• It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day.
• On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools.

Biswajeeta here and I am a customer experience and community management leader with over 9 years of hands-on expertise. As a guest writer, I provide authoritative insights on #uxresearch, #designthinking, #businessanalytics, #customercentricity, and #communitymanagement. With a data-driven and ever-curious approach, I help clients become more customer-focused through research, strategy, and technology implementation. https://chat.openai.com/ I have deep knowledge across SaaS testing, social media marketing, influencer engagement, and operational improvements. I leverage skills in user research, market research, design thinking, data analysis, and stakeholder management to elevate customer centricity. My experience driving end-to-end community engagement for brands gives me unique perspective on customer needs and pain points.

You control your customer experience, not AI

The chat enables you to send targeted, behavior based Zendesk messages to customers. Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. It’s modern, it’s smooth, it looks great and it has so many advanced features.

Ticketing systems can help to increase customer satisfaction and reduce complaints received each month. Ticketing systems keep track of messages, response time, and types of issues brought up. Let’s review them one by one to find the best messaging platform or customer database software for your business. We acquired Zopim to accelerate our chat functionality and to bring our users a beautifully simple product they can use to engage their customers in real-time. Zopim has a great track record of providing tools for proactive customer experiences to customers worldwide. They offer both free and paid plans for customers, and have focused on making their product intuitive, transparent, and fun.

We expect the first iteration of this new app to be available in May, after which there will be a steady stream of improvements. Like most AI systems, NLP and machine learning operate by analyzing massive datasets in order to continuously yield more sophisticated outputs. In the case of conversational AI, these outputs are the responses it provides to users. As for the final add-on service, Advanced support automation (which we may need just to calculate the total here…) was $249 per month, but that’s only for 5 user seats. With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

LiveAgent has three great paid plans that will not ruin your budget. They are packed with tools, features and integrations to provide you with everything you need to support your customers. Businesses, ecommerce in particular, have recognized the value of this technology. LiveAgent is multilingual, making it easy to overcome language zopim vs intercom barriers. LiveAgent is proud to have the fastest live chat widget on the market, with chat displayed speeds at 2.5 seconds. Zendesk offers a basic plan that is affordable and will suit my needs.

Expand on the ways you use the tool by connecting it with over 200 integrations, including SnapCall that elevates showcasing your products to video calls. Intercomes provides many features and I think the price is totally worth it, but paying $99/seat/month isn’t for most small businesses. Chat GPT Workflow automations can be used to create custom chatbot flows, while you can use the Fin AI Agent to train a chatbot on your own data, such as your website and documents. With this in-depth Intercom review, you’ll discover all of Intercom’s features, pros and cons, its pricing plans.

If you’re looking for an Intercom alternative specifically designed for ecommerce platforms such as Magento or Shopify, Gorgias is among the best Shopify chat apps. With Gorgias, you can connect with customers in real-time on your site or over social media. Zopim is a popular live chat software that enables businesses to interact with their website visitors in real-time. Key features include chat monitoring, customization options, chat transcripts, and analytics.

It offers advanced chat tools, integration options, and affordability. Zendesk and Kustomer are both customer service tools that offer different features and pricing plans. Both tools have their own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s important to consider which features are most important to your business before making a decision. HelpCrunch is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses to keep track of customer interactions, chat with customers, and measure customer engagement. It also offers a suite of tools to help businesses create and manage customer support tickets. Intercom is a comprehensive customer messaging platform that goes beyond live chat.

Increase sales, target your audience effectively, and create compelling campaigns with our help. LiveAgent is a powerful customer service software with efficient communication and response times. Zendesk also natively supports integrations with various CRM systems, which include NetSuite and Salesforce. LiveAgent is a very popular alternative to Intercom that works great with smaller support teams.

Read on to learn the potential benefits and limitations of each tool. Fonseca, 51, was named as the new AC Milan manager after a successful spell at Lille, where he brought the French side to a fifth and fourth-place finish. Before that, he managed Porto, Braga, Shakhtar and AS Roma among others.

Although the features that you get with it are pretty limited but still help you with your needs of customer support services. Olark won’t be your best bet if you are looking for the holistic customer support solution. Here is trivia for you – Olark started out to support e-commerce businesses only later branching out to provide features and service for small businesses and startups. According to the customer review that I read of user.com chat software, “All data, action events in one place.

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling. I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn’t want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go. We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. LiveAgent is the most reviewed and #1 rated help desk software for SMB in 2023. As a freelancer, I don’t need all the integrations and support that Intercom provides. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.

So, let’s start by Kustomer vs Zendesk comparison with each other on various grounds in 2023. Gorgias also allows you to set up automatic replies to common questions, set up order tracking bots, apply loyalty points, manage subscriptions, and more. Kustomer provides integration to major social media platforms like Facebook messenger, Twitter, SMS via Twilio, and Voice calls via Nexmo. The knowledge base is also very important in automation and AI, as it enables training them to handle certain repetitive requests. The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month.

What is Intercom?

You’d need to chat with Intercom sales team for get the costs for the Premium subscription, though. It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day.

Let’s use their pricing tables to get a better idea of what Intercom would cost for 12 user seats and 15K people reached on the Scale plan. Although these are technically a-la-carte products, they are very complementary, and you’ll almost always need multiple Intercom products to achieve your business goals. If you’re looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

Be it your online store, CRM or team- communication software – User.com will integrate for your convenience. It provides database import through MailChimp, or Intercom or CSV file. This, in turn, led to frustration on the part of consumers and the cycle of avoiding “chat service” altogether thus ruining all the marketing sales efforts. It is designed to help your business grow revenue, shorten sales cycles, deliver excellent customer experiences, and strengthen brand loyalty. It does it all by focusing on the customer lifecycle with conversational marketing and conversational sales. And even though it’s difficult to find a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to customer service software, we’ve got your back.

• It also offers automated bots that can help you with various tasks, such as answering questions or providing customer support.
• The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features.
• Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I’ve decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;).
• And we had one goal in mind—finding the best alternative to Intercom.
• It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

You can also train an AI chatbot to learn from customer queries and handle their queries. Therefore, your customers don’t have to search the knowledge base themselves. Moreover, it also has features for you to offer live chat on your own website.

No single software package can meet the needs of every business, which is why there are so many different options presented in this comparison. If you are interested in affordable alternatives to Intercom, it is your safest bet. When it comes to customer service software, it is difficult to find a one-size-fits-all solution. As the name suggests, a knowledge base is a database containing all of the information related to solving customers’ issues. It plays a vital role for both service agents and customers to solve their issues.

Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. SMBs, especially from the ecommerce sector, should focus on features that allow for fast and convenient communication with customers. It should also be easy to track and manage all customer interactions in one app.

Zendesk’s adaptable Agent Workspace is the modern solution to handling classic customer service issues like high ticket volume and complex queries. Additionally, for a company that’s product is built to improve customer support, Intercom somehow drops the ball on providing support of their own. Again, for a product that is as expensive as it is, the customer support they provide their clients is truly disappointing. Developers use Intercom APIs, SDKs and client libraries to automate processes and integrate Intercom with other products and services. Intercom offers a well-documented REST API, webhooks and a framework for building apps to integrate into the Messenger.