Top 10 Intercom Alternatives in 2024: Pros, Cons, and Pricing Analyzed
16 min read
Last edited:
Have you heard about Intercom?
I bet you have.
Intercom is a versatile platform for sales, marketing, and customer engagement.
However, when it comes to specific needs like advanced customer query resolution, omnichannel support, AI-powered chatbots, seamless integration with development teams, and robust knowledge base creation, Intercom falls short. These concerns have been highlighted across various Intercom reviews.
In this blog, we dive into the world of Intercom alternatives. We will explore the top 10 alternatives that will not only fill the gaps left by Intercom but also bring their unique strengths to the forefront. Each alternative will be closely examined for its features, pricing, and how it stacks up against Intercom. So, let’s get started.
DevRev OneCRM
Use the power of GPT & Analytics to transform customer support
Why consider Intercom alternatives?
Having a varied feature set is not enough; paying attention to small details is also mandatory. Here’s the area where the Intercom lagged:
1. Frequent bug occurrences
Frequent glitches and bugs are common challenges faced by business owners. Despite its prowess, Intercom isn’t immune to bugs. It’s not about bug generation, it’s about efforts to fix those bugs and Intercom lags in this scenario. Despite getting constant negative reviews and bug complaints, Intercom barely takes steps to eradicate it.
2. Inadequate customer service
Every customer deserves a gold standard in customer service. Despite being a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, it fails to deliver effective customer support, according to customer reviews. This becomes another reason for customers to explore alternatives that prioritize prompt and effective support.
3. Comparatively costly pricing plans
The value derived from any tool should justify its cost. Intercom is affordable if you have fewer agents to use it. But as the number of agents increases, Intercom starts becoming costly. If Intercom's pricing plans are stretching your budget without providing commensurate benefits, seeking alternatives with competitive pricing models becomes essential.
Top 10 Alternatives to Intercom
1. DevRev - Best Intercom alternative
Whether it is about features, cost-friendliness, customer support, or AI implementation, DevRev marks the top spot in the list. Also known as OneCRM for a reason - enabling customer support teams and development teams to work simultaneously to deliver a seamless customer experience.
DevRev compared to Intercom
1) Top-notch customer service
DevRev sets a benchmark in customer service excellence. The platform prides itself on responsive and knowledgeable support, ensuring that users receive on-time assistance whenever they encounter hurdles. This commitment to exceptional service translates into a more personalized and satisfying customer experience compared to Intercom.
2) Smooth performance with no glitches
One of DevRev's standout features lies in its stability. Users laud its consistent performance, highlighting a lack of persistent glitches that often plague similar platforms. This reliability contributes significantly to uninterrupted customer interactions, a factor that sets it apart from Intercom.
3) Simple, affordable, and transparent pricing structure
DevRev adopts a straightforward pricing model that's easy to comprehend. Its transparent structure ensures that you know precisely what you’re paying for without hidden costs or complex tiers. This promise of customer transparency, coupled with affordability, positions DevRev as a compelling alternative to Intercom, especially for cost-conscious businesses seeking value without compromising on quality.
DevRev OneCRM
Use the power of GPT & Analytics to transform customer support
Here are some of the key features of DevRev that you should check out:
- Facilitate seamless teamwork: DevRev empowers support teams to collaborate effortlessly, fostering a harmonious environment where shared efforts drive efficient and personalized customer assistance.
- Real-time collaboration dynamics: It facilitates instant communication between your developers and support executives, ensuring quick resolutions to customer queries with dynamic real-time collaboration tools.
- Interactive customer engagement: DevRev introduces PLuG, a virtual widget embedded in your website, enhanced by Turing, a powerful GPT-driven chatbot. This dynamic combination effortlessly engages with your customers, allowing seamless interactions with the support team, ticket viewing, and intelligent responses, revolutionizing customer engagement and support experiences on your website.
- Customized support experience: DevRev guarantees tailored and responsive customer support by efficiently managing user data and customer profiles, ensuring a personalized service at all touchpoints.
- Multi-channel support management: With DevRev, manage diverse support tickets across multiple channels effortlessly, with AI-driven initial responses easing the load on your team while ensuring quick customer assistance.
- Real-time notifications and updates: Stay constantly updated with real-time notifications, ensuring timely actions and responses to support cases and improving overall efficiency.
- Efficient bulk support management: Perform bulk actions for simultaneous support case resolutions efficiently, streamlining operations and optimizing time management.
- Insightful reporting for decision-making: Generate comprehensive reports on customer support metrics and team performance, providing invaluable insights for informed decision-making and continuous improvement strategies.
2. HelpCrunch
HelpCrunch stands out as a compelling Intercom alternative, simplifying migration with its seamless transition process. It offers a robust suite of features, including help desk ticketing, Facebook Messenger integration, email marketing, pop-ups, and automated messaging—all at more budget-friendly pricing than Intercom.
With a focus on multi-channel messaging, HelpCrunch excels in managing customer interactions from various platforms in a unified dashboard. Users appreciate its transparent pricing, customer-centric support, customizable chat, and self-service help center, though lacking web or product analytics may require additional tools for complete automation setup.
Top features of HelpCrunch:
- It has a smart chatbot that provides instant responses and assistance to its customers
- Comes with a shared inbox that leverages collaborative handling of customer messages
- It also has a knowledge base that works as a repository of information for self-service customer support
- Has email marketing tools for creating and managing email campaigns
- Create attention-grabbing pop-ups or forms on your website
- Mobile applications and software development kit for app integration and customization
HelpCrunch excels by providing effortless transitions from other CRMs, including Intercom, streamlining the onboarding process for users. While Intercom focuses on certain channels, HelpCrunch offers comprehensive support across various communication platforms. Additionally, HelpCrunch's chat widget versatility is noteworthy.
It provides the flexibility to transform into a 24/7 self-service hub when chat features are disabled. This feature allows businesses to maintain constant availability for customers seeking information or assistance even outside regular support hours, fostering a self-reliant customer experience while preserving accessibility and support quality. HelpCrunch distinguishes itself with a user-friendly pricing model, offering its robust suite of features at a competitive rate of $20 per month per user.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk stands out as a comprehensive tool catering to diverse business needs, particularly in service and sales solutions. Ideal for large enterprises, it offers a shared workspace encompassing a versatile set of features: shared inbox tracking SMS, calls, and emails, knowledge base management, robust automation, and comprehensive reporting capabilities.
Moreover, its efficient ticketing system streamlines customer support, minimizes wait times, and enhances overall service. Geared toward larger businesses, Zendesk's centralized CRM and help desk software promise cross-channel support, fostering employee satisfaction and optimizing licensing costs. Additionally, Zendesk Chat facilitates support across websites, mobile apps, and messaging platforms, seamlessly integrating with self-service support centers for enhanced customer assistance.
Top features of Zendesk:
- Zendesk provides a comprehensive repository of information (knowledge base)
- Zendesk's ticketing system efficiently organizes and manages customer inquiries, ensuring quick resolution and streamlined customer support processes
- With an extensive array of integrations, Zendesk seamlessly connects with 1000+ third-party applications
- Zendesk's dashboard offers an intuitive interface coupled with comprehensive reporting tools
- It empowers you to create and send tailored, targeted marketing emails, allowing for personalized communication with customers
Zendesk boasts a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to Intercom, making it an attractive option for businesses aiming to optimize costs without compromising on essential features. Its scalability ensures a smooth growth trajectory with minimal downtime, a notable advantage over Intercom, which may experience more interruptions during scaling processes.
While Intercom prioritizes sales and marketing functionalities, Zendesk shines in its emphasis on enhancing Customer Experience (CX). Zendesk's suite of tools and customer-centric approach focuses on delivering exceptional support and service, catering to businesses aiming to prioritize customer satisfaction and improve their customer retention rate. Notably, Zendesk's starting price commences at $89 per agent/month (Suite Growth plan). In case you are not sure whether to opt for Zendesk, explore the Zendesk alternatives.
4. Olark
Olark stands out as a potent alternative to Intercom, offering a robust live chat platform that ensures continuous engagement with website visitors. Its advanced live chat software provides essential insights, organized customer data, and AI-powered bots for efficient automation, enabling seamless interaction even during off-hours.
With features encompassing CRM integration, detailed reporting, conversation automation, and user-friendly accessibility, Olark proves to be an ideal choice for businesses seeking effective customer communication and engagement. Its real-time chat functionality empowers immediate support and personalized assistance, ensuring prompt query resolution and efficient ticketing.
Top features of Olark:
- It offers a suite of live chat and messaging tools designed to facilitate real-time interactions
- With an intuitive and user-centric interface, Olark provides an accessible platform that enhances the overall user experience
- Olark's canned responses feature enables swift replies by allowing the creation and utilization of pre-written responses for commonly addressed queries
- It has chat routing functionality that redirects chats to the concerned personnel or departments
Olark distinguishes itself as a specialized live chat software, focusing primarily on immediate customer interaction, while Intercom offers a broader customer service software suite encompassing various communication channels and customer engagement tools.
Notably, Olark provides valuable visitor insights, offering a streamlined approach to understanding user behavior, albeit with fewer features than Intercom. Despite this, Olark stands out for its extensive reporting capabilities offered at a notably lower price point compared to Intercom.
With its starting price at $29 per seat per month and a 14-day free trial, Olark emerges as a cost-effective Intercom alternative.
5. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub stands out as an expansive customer service platform, offering an array of features and accessible free tools. It serves as an all-in-one CRM solution, empowering businesses to elevate customer communication significantly. With advanced reporting capabilities, it provides comprehensive insights into user interactions, leads, and deals, ensuring top-tier customer service.
HubSpot's foray into customer service complements its renowned sales and marketing suite, offering an omnichannel messaging platform, live chat, and inbound calling features. With a cloud-based ticketing system, it facilitates efficient inquiry management and elevates customer satisfaction through innovative features like canned replies, video recordings, automation, knowledge base creation, and customer satisfaction surveys.
Top features of Hubspot:
- HubSpot Service Hub empowers you to gather insights through customizable customer satisfaction surveys
- The customer portal offers customers a dedicated space for self-service, access to information and inquiry management
- HubSpot's VoIP calling feature enables your customer support agents to communicate seamlessly by making and receiving calls within the platform
- It provides a comprehensive suite of support features for superior support experiences
HubSpot Service Hub excels in lead management capabilities, offering robust tools for effectively managing and nurturing leads, while Intercom shines in user identification, providing comprehensive insights into user behavior and profiles.
As a seamless component integrated within HubSpot's AI-powered Smart CRM, Service Hub offers businesses an integrated solution for efficient customer issue resolution, streamlining support processes, and enhancing customer experiences.
However, it's important to note that while HubSpot Service Hub offers an extensive range of features, these come at a comparatively lower price point of $90 per user per month. It also offers a 14-day free trial to help you get your hands on it.
6. Freshdesk
Freshdesk emerges as an ideal choice for growing businesses due to its agent-dependent pricing, allowing seamless scaling by easily adding customer support staff as needed. Renowned as a leading Intercom alternative, Freshdesk boasts advanced security measures, performing regular audits to ensure maximum user and data protection.
Freshdesk's Freddy Answers bot, powered by the knowledge base, ensures round-the-clock user assistance. Additionally, it accommodates businesses with call centers, offering features for easy management and support. Its suite spans help desk software, messaging, chatbot support, and omnichannel communication, complemented by seamless third-party integrations and AI-driven ticket prioritization, catering to businesses of all sizes.
Top features of Freshdesk:
- It allows collaborative ticket management by enabling the sharing of ticket ownership among different customer support teams
- With its unified messaging system, Freshdesk consolidates messages from various channels into a single interface
- You can integrate various social media platforms into Freshdesk
- It allows you to conduct satisfaction surveys in multiple languages through Freshdesk
- Supports multiple time zones, allowing you to operate and manage customer interactions efficiently across different geographical regions
Freshdesk distinguishes itself with an AI-powered support chatbot and offers support for up to 15 customized dashboards, providing enhanced automation and personalized insights. Renowned for its user-friendly setup and administration, Freshdesk presents an intuitive interface that is easy to set up and equally effortless to administer, streamlining operations for efficient customer support.
Freshdesk offers a rich array of features at a price tag as low as $15 per user per month. It also has a free plan with limited functionalities, adding itself to the free Intercom alternative list.
7. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk offers a versatile array of customer management tools, enabling email ticketing, help center creation, and private knowledge base management. Integrated with Zoho CRM, it provides a unified inbox across service channels, organizing user data efficiently.
The live chat solution in Zoho Desk empowers instant conversations via embedded chat widgets, integrating with popular chat apps and leveraging AI chatbot ZIA for automation. Tailored for support-focused teams, Zoho's suite encompasses automation, AI chatbots, and omnichannel communication, ideal for sales-centric teams seeking a comprehensive suite of tools.
Top features of Zoho:
- Zoho facilitates efficient project management with tools for task allocation, progress tracking, and collaborative project oversight
- It enables you to monitor and track employee activities, fostering transparency and accountability within teams
- Create custom forms easily using its builder tool and share them across various platforms
- Keep your users informed about critical updates or responses by sending timely notifications
- Empowers informed decision-making with its robust data analytics capabilities
Zoho distinguishes itself by offering profanity management and a voice note feature, ensuring a comprehensive approach to customer interactions. Additionally, it includes social media platform integrations as part of its offerings, contrasting with Intercom, where some integrations are add-ons, providing users with a more inclusive integration experience.
However, according to G2 reviewers, Intercom is perceived as easier to use compared to Zoho. Despite this, Zoho presents a compelling advantage in terms of pricing, starting at $7 per agent per month, offering a budget-friendly solution along with a 15-day free trial.
8. Tidio
Tidio is a popular live chat and messaging platform used by businesses to engage with their website visitors and customers in real-time. It offers a suite of tools, including live chat, chatbots, email marketing, and CRM integration, to help businesses communicate effectively with their audience.
The platform is known for its user-friendly interface and ease of integration with various website platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and others. It's often praised for its affordability, especially for small and medium-sized businesses looking to improve customer communication and support without investing in complex systems.
Top features of Tidio:
- Tidio seamlessly integrates with various social media platforms, centralizing customer interactions across different social channels within the platform
- It offers robust email marketing automation capabilities and provides access to a library of 500 templates for personalized email campaigns
- Tidio facilitates the management of customer relationships by providing tools for efficient communication, tracking interactions, and nurturing customer connections within a unified platform
Tidio sets itself apart by offering a free plan, a distinguishing factor from Intercom's subscription-based model. Additionally, Tidio provides over 35 plug-and-play chatbot solutions, showcasing a variety of ready-to-use options for businesses looking to enhance customer interactions.
While Tidio and Intercom both offer AI-driven solutions, Tidio charges $0.7 per bot conversation, contrasting with Intercom's $0.99 charge for each correct AI answer. However, the starter pack of Tidio will cost you $29 and includes 3 seats.
DevRev OneCRM
Use the power of GPT & Analytics to transform customer support
9. Drift
Drift, a conversational customer service platform, leverages AI-powered chatbots for immediate and customizable assistance, focusing on revenue growth and pipeline expansion. It's designed for seamless integration across sales, marketing, and support teams, offering live chat functionalities for engagement, up-selling, and advertising within single conversations.
Primarily targeting sales and marketing objectives, Drift remains an alternative to Intercom, encompassing live chat, custom chatbot flows, and lead generation tools for effective customer communication. With real-time engagement and automated interactions, Drift enables immediate support, lead capture, advanced reporting, and flexible workflows, positioning itself as a powerful revenue acceleration tool.
Top features of Drift:
- Drift's self-service bots facilitate automated customer assistance, offering immediate and personalized support within conversations.
- Enables you to track and analyze your KPIs with comprehensive service metrics
- It comes with a ticketing system to organize your customer inquiries and support interactions efficiently
- It seamlessly integrates with various sales solutions, ensuring synchronized data exchange between sales and customer service.
Drift stands out for its focus on pipeline generation, leveraging AI automation to improve sales team efficiency. Its emphasis on driving revenue through streamlined processes and automated workflows highlights its primary objective of boosting sales effectiveness.
However, while Drift offers impressive features for sales optimization, it comes at a higher cost, starting at $2500 per month. This pricing structure might make Drift less accessible for businesses seeking similar functionalities at a more affordable rate, which could be a consideration when comparing it to Intercom.
10. Liveagent
LiveAgent is a helpdesk and live chat software that integrates various customer support channels into one platform. It allows you to manage customer inquiries from multiple channels like email, live chat, phone calls, social media, and more, all from a single interface.
LiveAgent, an alternative to Intercom, stands out for its comprehensive support tools like built-in call center support, SLA management, and workflow automation. Offering various communication channels and 135 features, LiveAgent emphasizes seamless support processes through automated ticket distribution and personalized live chat interactions, showcasing its edge in the market.
Top features of LiveAgent:
- LiveAgent includes agent collision detection to prevent multiple agents from handling the same customer query simultaneously, ensuring streamlined and efficient customer service
- LiveAgent provides you with a call center system that facilitates direct communication with customers via phone
- It supports over 200 integrations with various third-party tools and platforms
- Offers comprehensive tools for managing customer support operations, encompassing ticketing systems, knowledge base management, and communication channels
LiveAgent boasts an extensive array of features and a broad integration ecosystem, offering over 120 functionalities and 220 integrations. Its internal and external knowledge base empowers both your agents and customers to access information efficiently, streamlining support processes. When it comes to product support, LiveAgent often emerges as the favored choice, providing robust assistance and solutions to its users.
Regarding user experience, both LiveAgent and Intercom share a similar ease of use, ensuring a relatively seamless interface. LiveAgent delivers a wealth of features at a comparatively lower cost of $9 per user per month. Additionally, it offers a 30-day free trial, allowing you to explore its capabilities before committing to a subscription.
Summarizing the journey of finding your next Intercom alternative
Exploring Intercom alternatives opens the door to many various options tailored to unique business needs. Your choice should amalgamate advanced features, affordability, and dependable customer support. While each platform boasts strengths and weaknesses, the ideal one aligns seamlessly with your distinct requirements.
Selecting the best Intercom alternative isn't merely about swapping one brand for another; it's about discovering a reliable solution that evolves with industry trends, such as AI advancements. DevRev stands as one such solution, enabling you to listen to your customers while streamlining the operations of your technical and support team within a single interface. Instead of mere words, consider exploring its 45-day free trial to experience the advantages it brings to your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Intercom, despite its strengths, has noticeable gaps in certain key features. Notably, it lacks functionalities such as product hierarchy visualization, a robust knowledge base creation tool, and comprehensive omnichannel support. These limitations hinder a seamless user experience and can pose challenges in managing diverse customer interactions across various platforms. Moreover, while these are significant shortcomings, other additional features are missing within the platform, impacting its versatility and comprehensive customer support capabilities.
DevRev offers several notable advantages. Firstly, it's known for its speed, ensuring swift interactions and responses to customer queries. Additionally, it proves to be cost-effective compared to some alternatives. The platform boasts a smart chatbot, “Turing,” facilitating efficient customer interactions, along with a robust knowledge base and AI-powered features that enhance customer support capabilities and personalize user experiences. Overall, these strengths contribute to an efficient and intelligent customer engagement system.
In reality, there aren't exactly "free Intercom alternatives." These solutions are designed to address diverse business challenges and thus come at a price. However, most of these alternatives typically offer a free trial lasting a few weeks, allowing you to test the software's functionality before committing to a subscription. This trial period enables businesses to assess the software's suitability and performance before making a purchase.
