Best Intercom Alternatives & Competitors Compared

There are a number of distinct features and use cases for Intercom. Customer service reps, distribution reps, and product teams may use it.

So, why do you need Intercom alternatives?

Due to its costly price tag, which is specified on the basis of total user conversations, many small to medium-size businesses are scouting for Intercom alternatives. If you are one of them, we have listed the top 15 intercom alternatives that you can use to improve customer experience.



13 Cheap Intercom Software Alternatives

Before we start discussing the Intercom alternatives, let’s have a look at the primary reason why the users are switching to other options rather than Intercom.

  • High prices
  • Unscalable & unpredictable billing (per number of active users)
  • Not always attentive and helpful customer service
  • Unsatisfying email automation tools
  • Some missing features and long-to-fix bugs

Intercom App Alternatives

  1. CloudTutorial

    The Cloud Tutorial Knowledge Management Software

    CloudTutorial is the first in our list of alternatives to Intercom that is an advanced knowledge-base solution.

    This knowledge-sharing platform is an Intercom alternative that provides responsive customer support services in terms of knowledge-based service like the range of questions & answers, guidance, and impressive documentation for product or service.

    With the help of this knowledge-base or help desk software, one can easily create a FAQ page or site to provide impressive customer support.

    The most exciting feature of this KM software is creating multiple knowledge base articles and sites with ease. You can even create a custom domain for each site.

    CloudTutorial is solely responsible for enhancing customer support and business productivity as it provides:

    • Data segregation using category and sub-category
    • SSL security parameters on the custom domain site
    • Creating multiple internal knowledge base articles 
    • Customer service solutions in terms of FAQs, queries, company knowledge, and other essential marketing strategies

    So, take a look at free and paid plans with distinct functionalities to include on your company website.

    Key Features

    • Tailormade FAQ page
    • Customized domain, theme, and an interactive contact form
    • Impressive content editor
    • Managing information from a centralized location
    • Import files in-between categories
    • Effective report generation

    Ease of use

    • With the help of this knowledge base software, the organizations deal with easy-to-use and better customer service experience in the form of FAQs.
    • The users or customers can easily create multiple knowledge base articles with a simple and interactive editor.
    • The customers find their answers quickly and efficiently; thereby helping them to get rid of answering the repetitive questions.

    Pricing

    • Free version available
    • Bronze: $14.99/month
    • Silver: $49.99/month
    • Gold: $99.99/month

    CloudTutorial vs. Intercom

    • With the help of CloudTutorial, you can create a customized FAQ page directly into your site, but Intercom does not provide any kind of customer support using FAQ based solutions.
    • CloudTutorial allows the users or teams to search with more convenience and get inspiring results according to the category and subcategory option. But in Intercom, there is no such option Intercom.
    • CloudTutorial allows you to create custom domains for the knowledge base site and perform customization options to each site. Intercom does not provide any such feature to deal with knowledge base articles.

    Build an advanced knowledge base for your customers and give them answers fast – real fast.

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  2. HelpCrunch

    HelpCrunch

    HelpCrunch, one of the best alternatives to Intercom, allows your businesses to provide quality customer service with your support team’s minimized time investment.

    As an alternative to Intercom, HelpCrunch has adopted features like omnichannel, unlimited contacts, and chat functionality with cost-effective solutions. It also offers a sleek, fast, and interactive chat widget UI similar to Intercom.

    With its support for multi-channel messaging features, HelpCrunch allows a single user to combine all messages from various sources: email, chat widget, or social media.   

    HelpCrunch is a customer platform designed explicitly for a small business to gather personal or behavioral chat history data and gain actionable insight into them. Moreover, the platform deals with multiple follow-ups based on customer’s queries with emails or instant solutions.

    Key Features

    • Email marketing automation
    • Pre-chat and offline forms available
    • Advanced chat widget customization
    • Free personal onboarding assistant
    • Use on multiple websites
    • Knowledge base platform 

    Ease of use

    • You can quickly access a centralized dashboard to enhance customer experience
    • The customers find it relatively easy to handle chats, create automated and manual messages, and view a customer service report. 

    Pricing

    • Standard: $12/month
    • Premium: $20/month
    • Enterprise: Custom plan

    HelpCrunch vs. Intercom

    • Comparatively, small and medium-sized organizations take more time to search for an impressive tool to perform automated tasks, or they have an exceptional product with HelpCrunch
    • Unlike Intercom, HelpCrunch takes less time and follows a simple process to start using the software and offers multiple automation and streamlining opportunities
  3. Crisp

    crisp

    Crisp is one of the best Intercom alternatives that allow companies to enhance the customer support experience by using the feature-rich set of live chat functionality.

    A team member in your company can easily use this Intercom alternative’s features like rich-media messaging, email campaigns, and chat configuration for social media. It allows you to play a game using live-chat features.

    Key Features

    • Email marketing automation
    • Persistent chat
    • Two-way audio & video chat
    • Impressive chatbot
    • Instant messaging
    • Hubspot integration

    Ease of use

    • The live chat software allows you to track the recent updates easily; thereby enhancing the user-friendly customer experience
    • The mobile app version is relatively easy to use and navigate that helps the companies to stay connected with the customers

    Pricing

    • Basic: Free version
    • Pro: $25/month/website
    • Unlimited: $95/month/website

    Crisp vs. Intercom

    • Unlike Intercom, Crisp allows you to deal with co-browsing, slack reply, and even support robust CRM functionality.
    • Crisp offers free and paid plans that support complete transparency in pricing such that all plans are available with unlimited users and messages. In the case of Intercom, different plans have different user criteria.
  4. Olark

    Olark

    Olark is an impressive Intercom alternative that majorly focuses on embedded live chat functionality to provide interactive customer support.

    Olark is a live customer messaging platform that lays a great emphasis on creating real-time reports for web chat volumes, frequent automated replies, and even searchable transcripts with ease.

    With the help of Olark, you can easily select the best option for background type, whether light or dark, chat widget position/shape, and other constraints.

    Key Features

    • Supports proactive chat
    • Set chat limits
    • Supports Google Analytics
    • Track website visitors details
    • Supports mobile and desktop version
    • Offline message 

    Ease of use

    • Olark provides an interactive and easy way through which integration with other ticketing systems is possible that enhances the better customer service experience
    • The software is a boon for the managers as it allows them to review chat history quicker and smooth way

    Pricing

    • $19 per agent per month, if billed monthly
    • $15 per agent per month, for one year
    • $12 per agent per month, for two years

    Olark vs. Intercom

    • The chat windows of Olark allow for full-customization where the users can easily change the theme, colour, fonts, and even change the display form of the chat icon. But in the case of Intercom, it has a standard chat window.
    • Intercom bundles with more technical modifications making complexities for the customers, whereas Olark is relatively easy-to-use and setup.
  5. LiveChat

    Livechat

    LiveChat is one of the best Intercom alternatives that supports many features that enhance the chat experience between customers and the support team.

    LiveChat is the perfect choice for beginners or learners and the developers who can grab the advantages of using APIs to include the chat features into their application or project using this alternative to Intercom.

    LiveChat primarily works on all primary desktop and mobile platforms. Generally, businesses make use of this platform for live chat functionality and improving better conversational marketing strategy.

    Key Features

    • Enhance more sales using live chat
    • AI chatbot automation
    • Qualify leads using custom forms
    • Boosts revenue using chat features
    • Supports 170+ third-party integrations
    • A user-friendly customer service platform

    Ease of use

    • Setting up LiveChat is relatively easy to perform
    • The dashboard is intuitive and easy to use
    • When you begin, you’ll be walked through the key features via an example chat with a support bot.

    Pricing

    • 14-day free trial
    • Starter: $16/month
    • Team: $33/month
    • Business: $50/month
    • Enterprise: Custom plan

    LiveChat vs. Intercom

    • Almost all the features in LiveChat are the same as Intercom, but LiveChat allows you to deal with message sneak peeks, agent ratings, chat routing, and other chat widget integrations
    • The LiveChat platform is ideal for small businesses looking for a chat and ticketing solution without sparing additional costs.
  6. Freshchat

    Freshchat is an alternative to Intercom that provides responsive customer messaging and sales platform.

    As an alternative to Intercom, Freshchat provides the customers with a clean chat experience with unlimited contacts, chat history for 30 days, supporting ten agents, and other similar basic functionality for free.

    Being one of the Freshworks applications, it provides a user-friendly environment with some advanced features and integrations with WhatsApp and Slack to enhance business performance. 

    Freshchat is an ideal choice for your organization’s sales and marketing department as it bundles up with help desk software. In addition to it, it helps the sales team to deal with response prioritization and conversation categories.

    Key Features

    • Customizable chat widget
    • Event-triggered messaging
    • Supports chat transfers
    • Proactive and persistent chat
    • Provides various message channels
    • Real-time customer engagement

    Ease of use

    • The customers find it relatively easy to use, install, and even configure multiple chat categories into the system based on their requirements.
    • Performing integration with third-party applications is relatively comfortable for the company.

    Pricing

    • 21-day free trial
    • Sprout: Free plan for 100 agents
    • Blossom: INR 999/agent/month
    • Garden: INR 1999/agent/month
    • Estate: INR 3299/agent/month
    • Forest: INR 4999/agent/month

    Freshchat  vs. Intercom

    • Freshchat provides an effective solution to integrate it with  WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other social media platforms to enhance your customer leads. Intercom, on the other hand, provides essential integration support with limited platforms.
    • As a customer engagement solution, Freshchat offers a low-cost option as compared to a high-costing solution named Intercom.

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  7. Drift

    Drift

    Drift, one of the leading Intercom alternatives, helps businesses deal with the help desk platform supporting a powerful UI chat widget. Drift also supports a sales-first ethos just like Intercom to provide better customer support.

    The primary reason many businesses are adopting Drift as an alternative to Intercom is that it allows them to include an AI virtual assistant in the live conversation to collect the best leads. 

    Key Features

    • Real-time live chat notifications
    • Multi-language chat widget
    • Chat filtering options
    • In-app messaging
    • Conversation history
    • Supports chat transfer

    Ease of use

    • Drift provides an easy-to-use UI that helps anyone to use the inspiring features of the tools.
    • The users can smoothly integrate Drift with their personal or business website, which is a simple process.

    Pricing

    • Free version
    • For the Premium and Enterprise plan, you need to contact the sales department of Drift

    Drift vs. Intercom

    • Drift is a little more streamlined, having the main focus on customer communication as compared to Intercom.
    • Unlike Intercom, Drift offers a smaller feature set at a more realistic price for many small businesses.
  8. Zendesk

    ZenDesk

    Zendesk Chat is one of the best Intercom alternatives that help you provide customer support via websites, mobile apps, and messaging services. 

    Zendesk has been known as the perfect choice for dealing with your existing CRM platform in this competitive market. But, now it has jumped into the live messaging widget ecosystem using Zendesk Chat.

    With the help of Zendesk, you can enhance the chat experience by converting the chat into a self-service support center. Zendesk supports cross-platform capabilities, making it easy for the customers to access it using the most popular platforms.

    The most exciting part of Zendesk is that it possesses robust chatbots to handle the conversation from agents, navigate to older messages quicker, and link to user profiles. 

    Key Features

    • Personalized chat messaging experience to customers
    • Offline messaging is available
    • Analytics of website visitors like country or page
    • 50+ language translation
    • File Transfer during chat
    • Customizable chat windows

    Ease of use

    • The core implementation of setting up and configuring Zendesk Chat is relatively smooth and straightforward.
    • It’s easy to navigate features and helps even non-technical people to work without any complexities.
    • Zendesk is an impressive and best customer support platform that comes up with a list of features, sometimes more than Intercom.

    Pricing

    • Lite: Free version
    • Team: $14/agent/month
    • Professional: $29/agent/month
    • Enterprise: $59/agent/month

    Zendesk Chat vs. Intercom

    • Unlike Intercom, Zendesk provides interactive chatbots that help your customers to deal with better customer support.
    • The ticketing system in Zendesk offers some advanced options that make your business operations more smooth compared to Intercom.
  9. Zoho Desk

    Zoho Desk is the best Intercom alternative that supports a range of tools, just like Intercom, that improve the customer experience to a great extent.

    Zoho Desk helps small businesses to save their time by performing the automated tasks more frequently to gain more insights into business performance. Moreover, this software provides multiple integration support just the same as Intercom.

    Zoho Desk is solely responsible for enhancing the customer interactions and customer conversations as it comes up with critical tools like email, phone, live chat, and even social media platforms. 

    Moreover, the platform provides more flexibility in dealing with improving customer communication to a great extent.

    Key Features

    • Supports embeddable chat widgets
    • Conversion of chat conversation to tickets
    • Define assignment rules for multiple channels
    • Feedback within live chat solution
    • Supports integration with other Zoho products
    • Easy to assign agents

    Ease of use

    • The connection between the customers and the support team occurs seamlessly
    • Customers find it quite easy to install and set up the live chat software solutions for their local systems

    Pricing

    • 15-day free trial
    • Free plan for three agents
    • Standard: INR 720/agent/month
    • Professional: INR 1200/agent/month
    • Enterprise: INR 2100/agent/month

    Zoho Desk vs. Intercom

    • Unlike handling complex attributes with Intercom, Zoho Desk supports in-depth analysis that works as an excellent asset for a small business to figure out the right trends.
    • Zoho Desk allows you to create email ticketing, help center, and private knowledge base quickly; whereas Intercom deals with limited ticketing functions.
  10. LiveAgent

    LiveAgent

    LiveAgent, one of the leading Intercom alternatives, provides a feature-intensive CRM service that offers responsive customer support.

    An Intercom alternative, LiveAgent, provides not only chat features but also allows you to deal with ticket management, social messages, and customer care support, enhancing the business performance.

    LiveAgent is an Intercom alternative that allows its users or customers to use a help desk software that is bound to live chat and enables them to include phones with your SaaS product or service.

    Key Features

    • Real-time chat options
    • Proactive chat invitations
    • View chat history
    • Monitor online website visitors
    • Chat embedded tracking
    • Chat distribution

    Ease of use

    • LiveAgent is easy-to-use, set up, and even performing the migration from Zendesk is faster and smoother.
    • A team member finds it quite easy to perform the navigation from one chat to another, thereby enhancing customer messaging platforms to a great extent.

    Pricing

    • Free version
    • Ticket: $15 per agent per month
    • Ticket+Chat: $29 per agent per month
    • All-inclusive: $39 per agent per month

    LiveAgent vs. Intercom

    • LiveAgent works a little bit differently than Intercom, as it does not allow to simply type a message and wait for a reply from support people. It first searches for available customer service representatives that can answer the queries and follows a two-way conversation.
    • As compared to Intercom, the pricing structure of LiveAgent is entirely transparent, low-cost, and is the best option for the small support team to grab exceptional values.
  11. Tawk.to

    Tawk. is one of the leading Intercom alternatives that allow companies to embed a chat widget on the website or app and improve customer support.

    With the help of an Intercom alternative Tawk., you can efficiently perform the customization to chat widgets, co-browsing, analyze multiple website visitors, remove the Tawk branding, add video+voice calling, and apply specific actions to enhance the performance of the businesses.

    Key Features

    • Supports customizable chat widgets
    • Audio and video chat options
    • Email marketing automation
    • Tracks customer engagement
    • File transfer
    • Provides group messaging

    Ease of use

    • Tawk.to is simple and easy to set up
    • The sales team finds it easy to perform the monitoring the website visitors to enhance the lead generation to a great extent

    Pricing: 

    • It’s 100% free software

    Tawk.to vs. Intercom

    • Intercom does not support and kind of offline form support, whereas Tawk.to is a customer communication platform that offers both offline support as well as 24/7 (Live Rep) to the customer., 
    • Intercom does not have any support for Windows, Mac operating systems. Tawk.to supports not only Windows and Mac but also Android and iOS platforms.
  12. User.com

    User

    The next one in our list of Intercom alternatives is User.com. User.com is reasonably simple and provides a range of customization options.

    User.com is an Intercom alternative that provides a robust integration with Facebook, Tumblr, Weebly, PrestaShop, Magento, Zapier, Trello, Google Analytics, and other platforms the customer communication with ease.

    Key Features

    • Unlimited proactive live chat invitations
    • CRM integrated with marketing automation
    • Customized chat widget
    • Lead generation form
    • See what the user is typing
    • Supports multiple languages

    Ease of use

    • The sales team can easily find out what users want as it provides responsive user engagement
    • With this customer platform’s help, you can quickly learn the basics of using the dashboard when you log in for the first time.

    Pricing

    • Available with a 14-day free trial
    • Personal: $49/month
    • Business: $249/month
    • Premium: $1349/month

    User.com vs. Intercom

    • User.com is the preferred option compared to Intercom to provide customer support of services/products.
    • User.com and Intercom typically have all the same features, but the price is low with User.com. So many users adopt User.com.
  13. Customerly

    Customerly

    Customerly, one of the leading Intercom alternatives, allows growing businesses to automate their customer support with much more efficiency. 

    Customerly is an Intercom alternative that allows you to deal with time-saving and help-center capabilities to enhance customer leads in your sales funnel.

    Key Features

    • Customized live chat experience
    • Supports Google Analytics 
    • Real-time live video chat
    • Supports knowledgebase
    • Multi-language live chat
    • Email campaigns

    Ease of use

    • Customerly is a live chat software that possesses an intuitive dashboard that allows you and your customers to handle incoming conversations from Live Chat, Messenger, and Support Email.
    • The sales team finds it relatively easy to collect more leads to improve the conversational marketing strategy.

    Pricing

    • Basic: Free plan
    • Startup: $24/month
    • Pro: $79/month
    • Enterprise: $129/month

    Customerly vs. Intercom

    • With the help of Customerly, customer service representatives can easily assign tickets directly to teammates to perform the task and activities.
    • Unlike Intercom, Customerly supports canned responses to nurture your incoming leads with Visual Marketing Sales Funnels.

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Why is CloudTutorial the best Intercom alternative?

CloudTutorial is the knowledge-sharing platform that helps the organization and team to gain expertise in writing documentation. It is a knowledge base software that offers interactive customer support and makes it easy for the customers to find answers quickly related to their queries.

CloudTutorial comes up with eloquent features that allow you to improve customer experience, customer engagement, and create a website with a custom domain without requiring any specific code. The fully-customizable website contains an interactive way to quickly make articles and notes by categories and sub-categories. 

CloudTutorial is the best choice for companies to develop a knowledge base for their leading clients. 

Moreover, it is a customer platform where employees can quickly access and share knowledge all-in-one from one centralized location.

FAQs
CloudTutorial, Crisp.chat, and Freshchat are some of the pretty good alternatives to Intercom which you can try.
If you are looking for a tool that can let you amp your communication with customers with features like message sneak peeks and chat routing, then Intercom is the way to go. However, if you want to put more emphasis on CRM, customer support, and content editor tool, CloudTutorial is the better bet. In fact, CloudTutorial offers a free version for one team member, so you can start with it.
Intercom’s paid plan starts from $39/month. The top-tier variant is available for a whopping $999/month.
Yes. CloudTutorial offers a generous free version.
Though both Intercom and CloudTutorial are better, the latter has an edge over the former when it comes to offering a simplified experience and campaign creation.
Conclusion

Jumpstart your small businesses in 2021 with CloudTutorial and keep yourself organized and improve efficiency. We recommend you opt for CloudTutorial if you want to eliminate the use of chat widgets and solve customers’ issues with a low-cost knowledge base application. 

Here are some of its powerful features:

  • Self-service customer support
  • Analytics reports to track performance 
  • One of the best knowledge software
  • Custom contact form to meet the needs
  • Manage your entire information in one place

You can start with the free plan to see if it suits your needs!

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Go with CloudTutorial or waste 100’s of $$$ on clunky tools with features that you don’t even use