Looking for reliable customer support software?

The right tools can help you reclaim time, enhance customer support, and improve efficiency and productivity.

Actually, according to a study by Zendesk, more than half of consumers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience, underscoring the need to prioritize customer experience.

Intercom is a leading customer communication platform and offers a wide range of top-tier features such as AI capabilities to redefine your customer support operations.

However, it can be relatively costly for startups in 2024, with its plans starting at $39, not to mention that it may not be the ideal solution for you depending on your industry. But what many are missing is the fact that Intercom charges you 99 cents per successful resolution of their AI chatbot Fin, this is one of the highest rates in the industry!

If this is the case for you, Intercom alternatives offer just as great features from help desk services to integration capabilities that help streamline agent productivity and enhance customer support.

If you are looking for a LiveChat alternative for your retail and ecommerce store, then you’ll like my previous review of the best LiveChat alternatives for building a great sales & support team for your retail business in 2024.

In this article, we will discuss the best Intercom alternatives to help you make both your support team and customers happy.

Quick Summary

1. Glassix - Best alternative for small businesses and startups

2. Zendesk - Best alternative for ticket management

3. Help Scout - Best alternative for collaborations

4. Front - Best easy-to-use shared inbox solution

5. HubSpot - Best alternative for marketing and sales teams

3 Reasons Why you Should Consider an Intercom Alternative 

a) Plans are priced high

A small business with a tight budget may find Intercom to be costly, with its plan starting at $39 per month for every seat and packages for larger enterprises starting at even higher price points than that. 

The starting plan, of course, has limited features, providing only a few essential tools, a ticketing system, and a shared inbox to elevate customer service and simplify operations. 

b) Unreliable customer support

In my experience and that of other users who have tried using Intercom, it is very challenging to get support from them which can break the customer experience and affect your business.

You may find yourself waiting days between replies which defeats the purpose of the software considering it is a live chat platform. I also found their knowledge base to be lacking in key information, impeding self-service.

c) Steep learning curve

Intercom is not the most user-friendly software out there. It is without a doubt it offers robust features and tools to help refine your customer support operations. 

However, your staff may find its richness to be complex, making it hard for your team to navigate the software easily and creating a steep learning curve. It may take your team a few days before being conversant with Intercom’s interface. 

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1. Glassix

Glassix is the best intercom alternative for small businesses and startups.

Our software tops the list of the best Intercom alternatives in 2024 for its comprehensive architecture, boasting a help desk, customer support platform, AI chatbot flow builder, and shared inbox— all in one platform.

The most notable features include a rich knowledge base that empowers self-service and our conversational AI coupled with the latest GPT_4 engine by Open AI and a feature-rich omnichannel communication suite. 

These features enable you to meet your customers wherever they are and delegate communication to chatbots, freeing up your agents’ workload and allowing them to focus on delivering stellar customer experience.

Additionally, Glassix provides an AI-powered unified inbox that consolidates all your communications into a single view. From here, your team can efficiently collaborate and enhance productivity thanks to integration capabilities, conversation routing, and media sharing.

Key features:

• Its shared inbox consolidates all communication channels and the tools you need into one place enabling your agents to respond to customers instantly.
• Our chatbots are powered by conversational AI coupled with GPT-4 that helps your staff tackle repetitive and basic queries as they tackle complex issues.
• Glassix provides an efficient visual chatbot builder that empowers anyone from your team to build chatbots without code, thanks to the provided templates.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 30-day free trial, no credit card required!
• Starting plan: $49 per user/month
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Verdict:

Our comprehensive and feature rich platform makes Glassix a worthy competitor, providing a unified inbox, AI-powered customer support tools, and help desk services that can help enhance productivity. Our pricing plans are very transparent, making Glassix ideal for small teams with a high volume of customer requests.

But, hey! Let’s not forget about the cherry on top, Glassix actually let you scale your small biz or startup by not charging you for every successful ticket and or chatbot conversation resolution, making it an ideal alternative to Intercom!

‍2. Zendesk

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Looking for an enterprise-level solution?

Then you should consider Zendesk for its rich ticketing and customer support tools that can handle the needs of large enterprises.

Because it offers a suite of products with a focus on sales and customer support, this software is a great Intercom alternative.

Zendesk secures its place on this list for its ticketing tools that give you a complete view of your customer queries enabling you to handle all incoming requests efficiently and enhance customer satisfaction.

Forget about conversations falling between the cracks. Whether your customers reach out to you through Email or Facebook, Zendesk will automatically create a ticket and notify them that help is on the way.

Furthermore, this software provides a conversation-driven agent workspace from where your employees can collaborate to deliver top-notch customer service.

Key features:

• Its integrations allow you to link the software to your favorite tools such as Trello and Jira ensuring efficiency and enhanced productivity.
• Zendesk Sales provides reporting and analytics tools that provide valuable insight into your customers and sales, helping you plan and strategize better.
• The conversation routing features ensure that conversations are sent to the right agent based on availability and expertise to enhance team performance and customer satisfaction.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 14 day free trial
• Starting plan: $69 per agent/month
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Verdict:

This is a perfect option for Intercom users running large businesses, thanks to its suite of products ranging from sales to support. While its starting plan is pricey, it is packed with great features such as reporting and analytics, agent workspace, and conversation routing tools.

3. Help Scout

Help Scout offers an innovative and intuative shared inbox.

Its inbox consolidates all communication platforms from emails to socials and provides all essential tools to deliver high-quality customer support. 

This means that you can respond to customer queries without leaving Help Scout regardless of the platform they are contacting you from.

Additionally, its live chat feature ensures that your customers have access to 24/7 support, relieving your staff and allowing them to focus on more complex issues.

Regarding saving time, Help Scout’s self-service tools such as articles come in handy empowering your human agents and customers to find answers to their queries independently.

It doesn't end there. You can measure key metrics such as wait times and chat duration thanks to the analytics tools, arming you with insights you need to improve your customer support operations.

Key features:

• You can seamlessly integrate this software with your existing systems such as Jira, Salesforce, and Hubspot, enhancing your team’s productivity.
• It provides customer details and context to agents whenever they need it to enable them to deliver a personalized customer experience.
• Help Scout’s analytics features provide a 360-degree view of your support operations empowering you with valuable insight to make informed decisions.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 15 day free trial
• Starting plan: $25 per user/month
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Verdict:

Help Scout offers an affordable Intercom alternative that is suitable for small businesses with a tight budget. Still, it does not compromise on enterprise-level features including analytics, and integration capabilities. It is worth noting, however, that Help Scout has limited customization features compared to Glassix.

4. Front

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Front is a user-friendly help desk platform.

Unlike Intercom, which has a steep learning curve, Front is extremely easy to use and will not take your team a lot of time to figure out where everything is. This is without compromising on comprehensiveness.

The collaboration tools empower your team to work together to deliver quality customer support. Some of these built-in tools include In-thread comments, auto-shared drafts, and escalation paths.

Additionally, to save you time, the knowledge base empowers customers and your agents to find the information they need. 

If you've got multiple brands or different audiences, you can tailor each knowledge base to each.

Front also provides actionable insights by tracking service level agreement (SLA) effectiveness, measuring CSAT, and identifying bottlenecks.

Key features:

• No more juggling between different tabs and apps as you can integrate Front with your existing system, which allows you to manage everything from a single place, saving time and increasing productivity.
• Its live chat can help you provide instant support and relieve your agents from redundant work, enhancing the quality of your customer service.
• Front enables you to build a knowledge base to empower your support representative and customers with answers reducing your workload.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 7-day free trial
• Starting plan: $59 per seat/month
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Verdict:

Front’s collaboration tools including integrations and shared inbox enable large teams to collaborate or provide efficient customer support. While it offers a free trial, 7 days may not be enough to entirely understand how its shared inbox tools and omnichannel customer service feature can sharpen your customer support.

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5. HubSpot

HubSpot is renowned for being more focused on marketing and sales, but its service hub is also considered as a decent Intercom alternative.

HubSpot makes it into our list of the best Intercom alternatives for its marketing and sales tools that not only attract visitors to your website but also convert them to customers.

Among its wide range of products, it offers a support service platform boasting a myriad of features, such as a customer portal that reduces mundane queries and resolution time. 

You can easily create a portal to empower your customers to find answers without contacting support and to be updated on the status of their service experience.

The customer portal is backed by an effective knowledge base that you can build using help articles. These are meant to enhance self-service and reduce your staff’s work.

To further assist your agents, HubSpot provides customizable and interactive playbooks that arm your team with guides to help them close more deals and deliver superior customer support.

Key features:

• HubSpot's conversational AI helps you track agent performance by automatically capturing voice data to provide deeper insights that can be used to make data-driven decisions.
• Its shared inbox provides a platform from which your marketing, sales, and support team can respond to conversations from multiple channels.
• You can easily build a customer portal from which customers can know the status of their service experience and find answers to basic queries.
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Pricing:

• Offers a free demo
• Starting plan: $20/month
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Verdict:

HubSpot offers a suite of products that can help you increase sales and enhance customer satisfaction. You also get a limited free plan to get things rolling. However, you’ll quickly realize their prices are very prohibitive for small businesses working with limited budgets.  

6. Drift

How can Drift transform customer support?

This software bills itself as a marketing and support platform and thanks to its self-service tools, it provides a great alternative for Intercom users.

Eliminate the annoying hold music with rich knowledge base integrations and AI-powered customer service chatbots that empower customers to independently find answers to their queries. This also allows your team to focus on more complex queries. 

The chatbots are easy to create and customize with routing rules and greetings enabling you to deliver a personalized customer experience.

Whenever an issue escalates, human agents can intervene via the live chat which allows them to deliver real-time support assistance.

Additionally, with powerful analytics tools, you can measure key metrics such as resolution time, CSAT, and deflection to provide you with data you can use to improve the quality of service.

Key features:

• Drift’s chatbot helps human agents deliver round-the-clock customer support and reduces wait time, to enhance customer satisfaction.
• You can measure key metrics like deflection rate and resolution time to give you visibility into performance and actionable insight redefining customer support operations.
• It provides a conversational AI platform that automates everyday tasks and enables you to communicate with your customers in their preferred language.
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Pricing:

• Offers a free demo
• Starting plan: $2,500/month
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Verdict:

Drift has one of the best conversation AIs in 2024 guaranteed to simplify customer support operations. Other than that it boasts other great features such as live chat, analytics, and chatbots. However, Drifts only bills annually which makes the initial investment high for small businesses.

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7. Tidio

Tidio will help you reclaim your time back (At least that’s what they claim).

If conversational AI is a priority to you in 2024, then Tidio is a solid Intercom competitor to consider, designed to transform customer support thanks to its automation features and proprietary AI, Lyro.

So, how efficient is Lyro?

Tidio’s conversational AI can help you significantly reduce labor costs as it can talk to your customers, and provide assistance on any channel and in 7 different languages.

It is designed to understand context, recall previous responses, and generate human-like responses that ensure your customers are satisfied.

Moreover, it automatically turns customer conversations— emails and chats— into support tickets which are routed to the appropriate agent based on availability and expertise.

You can also automate repetitive tasks with chatbots, which can provide answers to repetitive and basic queries such as plans and order status.

Key features:

• Tidio has a powerful conversation AI tool that supports seven languages and automates everyday customer support operations such as answering customer requests.
• It measures key metrics to provide data about your agents' and chatbots' performance which can be used to enhance customer support.
• You can integrate it with popular third-party systems like Shopify and WordPress to ensure seamless operations and enhanced productivity.
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Pricing:

• Offers 7-day free trial
• Starting: 39/month
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Verdict:

Tidio is relatively affordable considering the customer service and conversation AI features it delivers. However, they are charged differently, so you will have to pay more to access both of these tools. It also offers a free plan ideal for early-stage startups with no budget for customer support software. 

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8. Drag

Drag unlocks your team's superpower.

It stands out as another great alternative to Intercom for its excellent shared inbox with complete support for Gmail, ensuring that your team hits the ground running fast.

With a focus on collaborations, you are provided with industry-leading tools that facilitate seamless teamwork eliminating confusion, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

When working with emails, you can create automation so you don't have to manually assign emails to appropriate representatives.

Additionally, Drag gives you a holistic view of everything, showing you who is working on what prevents double responses and sending back-and-forth emails between team members.

Other collaboration tools include @mentions and team chat which enable customer support agents to communicate privately and collaborate within a customer conversation.

Key features:

• You can automatically assign emails to qualified representatives, saving you time and enhancing productivity while having a clear view of who is working on what.
• Drag’s shared drafts come in handy, enabling any of your team members to write a response draft and have other colleagues check it before sending it.
• The analytics and reporting tools provide you with insights into your team's performance and workload empowering you to make data-driven decisions.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 7-day free trial
• Starting plan: $10 per user/month
  
  

Verdict:

If you heavily use Gmail for customer communications and team collaboration, then Drag is the ideal Intercom alternative offering a variety of features such as collision detection and automation. However, Drag is not a comprehensive customer support software like Glassix, lacking necessary tools such as help desk and AI.

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9. Customerly

Customerly is a great platform and a decent alternative for small businesses.

Unlike traditional chatbots, its chatbots are powered by AI assistants that are constantly learning to be able to provide accurate, and personalized assistance, while simplifying complex tasks.

Besides that, the AI can take over a conversation at any stage and provide assistance to avoid customer-stuck loops and long resolution times.

Don't worry if you have customers across the globe.

Customerly’s AI offers multilingual support breaking down language barriers that make traditional chatbots ineffective.

Provided also is a live chat that enables you to be available to your customers 24/7. But it's not just that. You can customize your live chat to reflect your brand using profile pictures, icons, and brand mission.

Additionally, Customerly empowers you to create an informative internal and external knowledge base with the help of the software’s AI-powered editor, to empower both your customers and staff.

Key features:

• Customerly offers a great AI that can conversationally handle simple and complex tasks, saving you time and enhancing efficiency.
• Its shared inbox centralizes all communication and revolutionizes communication for small teams enabling them to work together to deliver great customer experiences.
• You’ll also be able to create a knowledge base that your customers can easily access through the chat widget, reducing the number of incoming requests.
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Pricing:

• Offers 14-day free trial
• Starting plan: $7/month
  
  

Verdict:

Customerly provides an affordable alternative to Intercom for small teams looking for conversational AI features and an efficient shared inbox. However, to access essential features like AI capabilities, you will have to upgrade to higher tiers which may be a little costly.

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10. LiveChat

LiveChat is one of the most established customer communication platforms.

If the name does not give it away, LiveChat offers a comprehensive chat tool that enables you to attract, communicate, and assist your customers, in order to increase sales and customer satisfaction.

Its most notable feature guaranteeing its place among the best Intercom competitors worth checking out, is the message sneak-peek, which enables you to see what your customers are typing before they send it. This gives you time to find an appropriate answer and respond quickly.

What’s more, in order to save your agent's time, you can save responses to common questions and reuse them in other chats.

LiveChat also makes it easy to organize all your support requests using tags that give your chat context.

You can also deploy chat widgets on all your websites and applications, enabling you to deliver 24/7 customer support to your clients or users.

Key features:

• Industry-leading live chat widget with customization features that enable you to tailor your widgets to match your website and brand.
• LiveChat’s message sneak-peek shows you what your customers are typing even before they send it, giving you enough time to find appropriate information and deliver quick responses.
• Know what your customers think by measuring key metrics such as agent performance and create reports to enable you to improve customer support and make informed decisions.
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Pricing:

• Offers a 14 day trial
• Starting plan: $24 per month
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Verdict:

LiveChat boasts robust features ranging from canned responses to reporting and analytics, making it a great Intercom alternative. The lower tiers do not provide adequate reporting tools which are only available in the higher ones, which can be inconvenient for small businesses.

Conclusion

It's all about quality customer support.

Finding great customer support software is without a doubt critical to providing a superior customer service experience.

In fact, a report by Salesforce found that 88% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase again, highlighting the importance of delivering quality customer experience.

Intercom is a leading customer support platform with a range of essential customer support features like automation and integration capabilities, but it is certainly not the crème de la crème in the industry nor the only player.

If it's not a suitable option for you, I hope that our list of the best Intercom alternatives will help you find the right solution for your business. 

While all the listed Intercom alternatives are great, our software stands out for its comprehensive yet easy-to-use platform designed to help businesses of all sizes revolutionize their customer support strategies.

Start a Glassix’s 30-day free trial and experience how our AI and inbox can boost your team’s productivity and transform your customer support experience today. 

3 Reasons to Consider Glassix for Your Customer Support Software Needs

a) 30-day trial period

We pride ourselves in providing top-tier tools to help you transform your customer support, and that is why our software provides an extended free trial of 30 days ideal for most businesses, unlike Intercom’s 14-day free trial.

This period gives you enough time to explore our unified inbox, collaboration tools, and AI capabilities firsthand and learn how they can redefine your customer support and boost your business.

b) Cost-effective pricing

Glassix might be costlier than Intercom but it provides clear pricing plans that support small businesses’ growth without “overuse” penalties. This is unlike its contender, Intercom which has additional charges for expanding messaging volume. 

The transparency makes Glassix ideal if you are working on a fixed budget and allows you to focus on growing your business with confidence without worrying about their costs skyrocketing.

c) Has no learning curve

The usability of any software affects the efficiency of your customer support team. That is why Glassix has a user-friendly interface ensuring easy adoption and a reduced learning curve.

While our software will only take your team a few hours to get a hang of everything, it does not compromise on comprehensiveness. We also provide a constructive support features to help get your staff acquainted with our software.