If you’re looking for an alternative to Intercom for live chat services that is also free of cost, go no further. We have done all your research for you to present our top 5 free alternatives to Intercom in 2020.
Trust me when I say that I have been in your shoes. I know the struggles you're facing - which is why I decided to extensively research the best Intercom alternatives.
While Intercom is a wonderful tool and does a very good job of connecting to its customers through incredibly strong marketing tools, it also costs a pretty penny. It becomes relatively expensive for entrepreneurs who are merely at the beginning of their start-ups to afford such a service.
So, I went on to find the top free alternatives to Intercom in 2020. Throughout the course of this article, you will discover that there are some beautiful alternatives that not only offer better features than Intercom but also provide services free of charge.
To those who are looking for the cheapest alternative to Intercom, our very first recommendation would be an absolutely free live messaging platform called Tawk.to.
With over 2,200,000+ users, Tawk.to enables you to monitor and chat with visitors in real-time. This software is devoid of catches, spam, or even ads. It’s completely free and always will be. No matter how many agents you need to add to your account, Tawk.to will remain totally free of cost.
While Intercom might have been the face of customer satisfaction for quite a while, it was Crisp’s stunning features that have added an enhanced sense of value for all its customers. Crisp.chat has the simplest user interface with all features you need under a single roof. It becomes a potential Intercom alternative by offering its users a free tier that provides access to most of the necessary features of live chat.
Moreover, Crisp’s LiveChat platform is greatly appreciated by SMB's and startups because of what it has to offer. With more than 100,000 customers around the world, Crisp chat comes with a shared inbox that enables internal collaboration within the organization. It also provides a better chat experience with leads and customers through multiple channels. It also offers a variety of rich media including but not limited to emojis, GIFs, link snippets as well as audio & video messages.
The new face of Freshworks, Freshchat is potentially a major Intercom competitor. To begin with, they are offering a multitude of basic functionalities practically for free, including 30-day chat history, 10 agents, and unlimited contacts.
Their basic plan “Sprout” is available completely free of cost. So, if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to Intercom, you’d know nothing can be cheaper than free, right?
Freshchat also offers a paid plan known as “Garden”, which comes at $29/month.
Some of the fundamental differences between Intercom’s and Freshchat’s pricing are:
Lead capture, user engagement, and customer support - Freshchat is developed to meticulously cater to all three aspects of your user’s journey. This tool has a clean and simple UI and is both user and agent-friendly.
Another remarkable factor that Freshchat has achieved is its value for your agent’s satisfaction along with your customer’s satisfaction. The software is designed with an objective to facilitate easy adoption and usage. As a matter of fact, Freshchat has a plethora of features that can be listed in an entirely separate blog post.
HelpCrunch is a perfect fit for SaaS, e-commerce, and other online businesses that are seeking an affordable Intercom alternative. It enables companies to close a large number of deals in real-time, reduce support costs, and grow efficiently. HelpCrunch is almost similar to Intercom. As a matter of fact, it's the simplified Intercom alternative for SMBs - and definitely a lot cheaper. You can also start a free trial for 14 days before you decide whether or not you want to use it.
Live chat: Amidst its wide range of offerings is HelpCrunch’s live chat functionality. This platform offers an entire set of tools and features in this regard. Its widget is super customizable, and you can shape it however you want it to.
Knowledge Base: Moreover, HelpCrunch provides all the primary features for developing an external knowledge base for your customers. These include detailed reports, modern text editor, and categories for structuring information.
Even this knowledge portal is customizable. You can add, remove, or change logos, colours, header, and footer to make it look like a wholesome part of your website. The knowledge portal also comes with a built-in search option with autosuggestions.
Ticketing: Another functionality that HelpCrunch has to offer is ticketing. This comes in handy for customer support teams. Ticketing will land all the chat and email requests into one dashboard. Additionally, you’ll be able to perform all kinds of help desk services with them there. You can assign statuses, leave private notes, tag your chats, etc.
HelpCrunch also collects a dozen of behavioral and personal data about your users as well as your website visitors. Thereby, you can see things like their location, recent activities, and time zone in your agent chat. This can drastically increase your live chat agents’ performance.
Auto & Customizable Chat Messages: With HelpCrunch, you can build up proactive chat messages for random and anonymous website visitors and target them based on their behavior. That way, you’ll be able to attract hesitant visitors to start a conversation with you.
That’s not all. HelpCrunch enables you to send personalized in-app messages to already existing customers - such as new feature announcements, promotional offers, company news, etc. Whatever criteria it is, you choose it with comfort and send messages to any group of users.
Email Marketing: HelpCrunch also offers a varied set of email marketing tools. This lets you send one time campaign information to your customers. At the same time, you’re able to set up an automated email sequence.
Although HelpCrunch has fewer features than Intercom, it positioned itself as the great Intercom chat alternative with its competitive pricing and amazing service. HelpCrunch also has a handful of advantages over Intercom:
Take a quick look at HelpCrunch!
Drift consists of a user interface which is ridiculously similar to that of Intercom itself. If you're out there looking for an Intercom alternative that is more sales-oriented than Intercom whilst having proper customer support functions than perhaps Drift can be your perfect choice.
Drift mostly uses chatbots to generate real-time quality leads. This live chat tool is perhaps the closest alternative to Intercom with a variety of functionalities and aesthetics that hold an uncanny resemblance to those of Intercom.
Founded in 2016, Erxes is one of the latest open source growth marketing platform. This software lets you merge all your sales, marketing and customer service tools into a single platform for higher output.
The paid version of Erxes comes at a considerable cheap rate - $20/month. Also, when you pay for a year upfront, you’ll get two months for free. Erxes also offers you a free trial for 14 days. Additionally, for a team of 10 members, Erxes will come completely free of cost.
Most entrepreneurs will definitely recommend Intercom for a live chat messenger - and undoubtedly so they might be right. Intercom comes with so many different offerings that users often have to struggle to find a suitable Intercom competitor. Courtesy to its powerful set of features, this platform has gathered 100,000 monthly active users along with 17,000+ paying customers.
But as I’ve already mentioned, this tool is quite heavy on the pocket and many developing businesses may not be that comfortable with spending an extravagant amount on live customer support.
Hence, you can manage your customer interaction by choosing any one of the alternatives we have mentioned and perhaps shift to Intercom when your business is all set and going. Our personal recommendation would be HelpCrunch because of its vast number of features and amazing UI. Let us know which one of these you find best!
