Top 14 Intercom alternatives and competitors for 2024

Delivering a great customer experience (CX) can set you apart from competitors. Empowering agents with the necessary tools can make their jobs easier and create an environment that boosts the customer and employee experience.

Our guide to Intercom alternatives makes it easy to compare competitors so you can choose the perfect customer service software for your business.

Intercom provides software that specializes in chat and messaging. It includes solutions for marketing, product onboarding, customer support, and sales. Intercom offers a ticketing system and shared inbox that allows agents to handle customer requests. The software also comes with basic reporting, automation and AI, and some apps and integrations.

However, Intercom comes with its share of limitations. For businesses looking to upgrade their customer experience software, here are a few reasons businesses choose alternatives to Intercom:

• Intercom supports a wide variety of use cases, which means you may not receive the same level of expertise as platforms that specialize in customer service and experience.
  
• Some businesses experience challenges with scaling Intercom. That leads to additional costs from switching to a solution that meets your needs.
  
• Intercom’s reporting features aren’t as advanced as competitors, limiting essential insights you need to make business decisions.
  
• Intercom offers a limited self-service product, missing features including advanced workflows to streamline the process of keeping content updated.
  
• Intercom's conversation management can be frustrating for users, missing enhancements and support tools offered by alternatives

More in this guide:

• Best Intercom alternatives and competitors at a glance
• A deep dive into the top 14 alternatives and competitors to Intercom
• Frequently asked questions
• How to choose the best alternative to Intercom

The right features and capabilities empower agents to take their customer service game to the next level. Check out our chart that lets you compare alternatives to Intercom at a glance.

Let’s jump in with both feet and break down the details of the top 14 alternatives to Intercom.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk specializes in the customer experience. That means we know which tools and capabilities agents need to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Our customer experience solution is designed to handle use cases for companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries. From startups and small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises, we have tons of customer-proof points to prove it. Zendesk is easy to set up and use, so you can start using it from day one. It’s also highly customizable, with integrations that extend capability beyond CX, scaling with businesses of any size.

Where Zendesk excels:

1. Omnichannel support: Zendesk brings together the entire customer journey into a unified agent workspace for a fast, convenient support experience. From a single view, agents can work seamlessly across channels—like email, live chat, voice, social media, and SMS—and access important information, history, and context, right at their fingertips.
2. 360-degree customer view: Zendesk consolidates fragmented data and streamlines it across your systems and tools, providing agents with a 360-degree view of the customer. This lets agents personalize the customer experience, eliminates data silos, and boosts agent productivity.
3. Advanced knowledge base and self-service: Zendesk makes it easy for your business to provide customers with 24/7 support via a robust set of self-service options and an easy-to-maintain knowledge base. AI-powered chatbots, help centers, knowledge base articles, community forums, and FAQ sections help customers help themselves and keep agent workflows manageable through ticket deflection.
4. Agent Workspace customization: You can customize the Agent Workspace with hundreds of options in the Zendesk Marketplace, allowing you to extend functionality and capabilities to fit your business needs. This includes collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.
5. Generative AI: Zendesk offers generative AI tools that are accessible in the Agent Workspace, like Intelligence in the context panel. This AI-powered feature lives on the side panel of the agent interface and acts as an agent assistant. It detects customer sentiment (a customer’s positive, negative, or neutral feelings) and intent and guides them through customer interactions with recommended macros (prewritten responses) and suggested actions.
6. Pre-built and custom reporting: Gather deep operational insights with custom metrics, reports, and dashboards that provide real-time and historical data.
7. Case management: Zendesk delivers a streamlined case management experience with intelligent triage that automatically detects customer intent, macros that execute multiple actions, side conversations to enhance collaboration, and SLA and OLA tracking.
8. Skills-based and omnichannel routing: Efficiently route customer conversations to the right agent based on criteria like expertise, workload, priority, and experience, across multiple channels.

Check out our Zendesk vs. Intercom page for a more detailed comparison.

Features:

• Unified omnichannel workspace
• Pre-built and custom reporting and analytics
• 360-degree customer view
• Self-service and knowledge base
• Robust integration marketplace
• Live chat and messaging
• Automation
• Generative AI
• Advanced ticketing system
• Omnichannel routing
• Service level agreement (SLA) and operational level agreement (OLA) management

Pricing:

• Support Team: $19 per agent/month
• Support Professional: $55 per agent/month
• Support Enterprise: $115 per agent/month
• Suite Team: $55 per agent/month
• Suite Growth: $89 per agent/month
• Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month
• Suite Enterprise: Contact sales
• Suite Enterprise Plus: Contact sales

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

2. Customerly

Customerly’s customer experience management system offers tools that blend automation with human support. Though it doesn’t offer an omnichannel workspace, it does have a shared inbox that provides agents with information in one place.

It also features a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tool that stores customer data collected via methods like email and chat surveys. The live chat app lets agents and customers communicate in real time. It offers automatic routing with prewritten responses and triggers, but for reporting and self-service options, you’ll need to turn to integrations to flesh it out.

Features:

• Live chat
• Shared inboxes
• Chat triggers
• Custom surveys
• Video chat

Pricing:

• Essential: $7 per month
• Startup: $39 per month
• Support Enterprise: $115 per agent/month
• Pro: $82 per month
• Enterprise: $249 per month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

3. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a part of HubSpot’s CRM platform. It’s a customer service software that offers tools to provide multichannel support through a shared inbox. Customers can complete certain tasks independently with HubSpot’s self-service options, like viewing open ticket statuses, updating personal information in the customer portal, or finding product tutorials in the help center.

Though HubSpot Service Hub includes features like a reporting dashboard, contact management, live chat, team email, and conversation routing, it has limitations. The support ticket and related email thread need to be closed independently, creating a disjointed experience. Some users also report difficulty keeping track of cases, with conversation threads becoming mixed in the system.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Ticketing
• Live chat
• Customer portal
• Reporting and analytics

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (limited features)
• Starter: $45 per month
• Professional: $450 per month
• Enterprise: $1,200 per month

  *Plans are billed annually

Free trial:

4. HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch’s help desk software for customer support creates a space for teams to manage email and chat support. Its shared inbox lets teams provide multichannel support via the customer’s preferred channels in a single interface. It also features automated email follow-ups to customers when chat messages remain unanswered to ensure requests continue moving forward.

HelpCrunch features customer profiles that allow businesses to collect and save relevant customer data. This includes customer location, website visits, preferences, and interaction notes. Its agent actions allow teams to tag, assign, and merge conversations to help keep requests organized.

Features:

• Conversation rating
• Shared inbox
• Basic automation
• Live chat customer support
• Reporting and analytics

Pricing:

• Basic: $12 per team member/month
• Pro: $20 per team member/month
• Unlimited: $495 per month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

5. Zoho Desk

Zoho offers a suite of tools across many use cases, including its customer service software, Zoho Desk. Its standard plan offers multichannel support for up to five channels and basic ticket management. Businesses also get access to a help center, social media for a single brand, and instant messaging through WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, and LINE.

Zoho Desk’s customer support can be a frustrating experience. The platform’s speed and quality may not meet expectations, leading to switching costs. Additionally, Zoho falls short of a frictionless agent experience, with different agent interfaces for chat, phone, and ticketing. According to one user, it has “too many apps and products” that need to be consolidated and simplified.

Features:

• Self-service resources
• Reporting and analytics
• Mobile app
• Ticketing system
• Ticket routing

Pricing:

• Standard: $14 per user/month
• Professional: $23 per user/month
• Enterprise: $40 per user/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

6. Kayako

Kayako offers a help desk solution with a shared inbox that helps teams manage customer requests. Kayako offers a unified workspace, SingleView, that consolidates customer requests, data, order history, self-service activity, and email conversations. Users can customize Kayako’s shared inbox interface to match agent preferences.

Kayako features a live chat app for your website and a mobile app, allowing real-time support. The software also features self-service options, including a customer portal and branded help center with self-help articles, videos, FAQs, and community forums.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Help center and knowledge base
• Customizable email templates
• SLA reporting
• Agent collision prevention

Pricing:

• Kayako Cloud: Contact Kayako
• Classic On-Prem: Contact Kayako

Free trial:

7. Olark

Olark’s customer service software features real-time live chat and continuous messaging. It’s customizable, allowing you to tailor the look and feel of your chat windows and create custom greetings. Olark can identify website browsing activity and provide real-time updates so you can send proactive messaging if needed.

Olark allows businesses to configure routing and automations to streamline support. You can add business rules to route customers to the right agent or round-robin routing for the first available agent. You can also configure the chat window to be displayed or hidden or automatically begin chats upon visitor arrival.

Features:

• Automated messages
• Live chat analytics
• Searchable transcripts
• Custom chatbot forms
• Proactive chat

Pricing:

• Standard plan: $29 per seat/month
• Pro: Contact Olark

Free trial:

8. Drift

Drift offers live chat software that allows real-time, personalized conversations between agents and customers. Drift also has automated support through AI-powered chatbots and knowledge base integrations. These self-service options help deflect tickets to make ticket queues more manageable.

Drift allows for handoffs between chatbots and human agents in relevant situations. Customers can skip the self-service options and get routed to a live agent through customizable routing rules, templates, and response timers. Agents can also start a voice or video chat with customers from the chat window.

Features:

• Proactive chat
• Customizable branding
• Chat routing
• Website visitor tracking
• Automated feedback triggers

Pricing:

• Premium: $2,500 per month
• Advanced: Contact Drift
• Enterprise: Contact Drift

Free trial:

9. tawk.to

This cloud-based live chat and messaging platform helps support teams communicate with customers via website or mobile app. As a free Intercom alternative, tawk.co provides real-time monitoring, allowing agents to view chat history and performance analytics. A few of tawk.to’s features include a native ticketing system, customizable tabs, real-time alerts and notifications, and an activity dashboard.

Businesses may configure the activity dashboard to provide insight into website visitors, page views, and chat details. Users can surface historical data and real-time metrics and compare them visually with graphs and charts. The platform also integrates with some third-party apps to help businesses increase its capabilities.

Features:

• Real-time monitoring
• Automated triggers
• Customizable widgets
• Ticketing system
• 100+ integrations

Pricing:

• Free

Free trial:

10. Freshdesk

Freshdesk, a product of Freshworks, is a customer service software that helps teams provide multichannel support. Its ticketing system offers features like agent collision detection, ticket field suggestions, and prewritten responses. It has automation options, including ticket dispatching that assigns agents to tickets based on skill, or you can configure it for round-robin distribution. You can also set automatic email notifications to alert customers and agents to ticket updates.

Despite its multichannel ticketing system, Freshdesk provides a disjointed agent experience by having different interfaces for each channel. That means agents must toggle between apps to manage tickets received via chat vs. phone. In addition to its cluttered, slow, and buggy interface, it offers limited and complicated reporting, and help center tools that make it difficult to update and edit content.

Features:

• Automation
• Collision detection
• SLA management
• Time tracking
• Integrations
• Basic reporting

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (up to 10 agents)
• Growth: $15 per agent/month
• Pro: $49 per agent/month
• Enterprise: $79 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

11. Crisp

Crisp offers multichannel software with various use cases, like sales and customer support. The platform allows users to tag, assign, and collaborate with other agents and departments from a centralized location, and provides agents with a real-time view of what visitors are typing. Agents can manage requests from channels like email, live chat, messaging, X (formerly known as Twitter), and text. Crisp includes bots, @mentions to tag agents within tickets, video and audio chat, and prewritten responses.

Crisp also has CRM software that helps agents manage and store customer data in one place. Additionally, the company offers a knowledge base for customer self-service. The knowledge base also helps agents by allowing them to send customers links to relevant content during interactions.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Ticketing system
• Chatbots
• Knowledge base
• Chat widget

Pricing:

• Basic: $0 per month (includes 2 seats)
• Pro: $25 per workspace/month
• Unlimited: $95 per workspace/month
• Enterprise: Contact Crisp

Free trial:

12. Help Scout

Help Scout’s customer service software features a shared inbox that allows multichannel support. The shared inbox offers the familiarity of using email but with automation options, collaboration tools, and a sidebar that provides customer data and activities. Help Scout includes features like self-service resources and reporting and analytics tools.

Help Scout has limitations with its integrations, not including some standard or popular apps. Compared to industry leaders, Help Scout’s offers fewer integrations in its app marketplace, with around 90 integration options. It also has limited reporting capabilities that can deliver inaccurate data.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Knowledge base
• Ticket routing and prioritization
• API and 50+ integrations
• Custom reports
• Live chat
• Rule-based automation

Pricing:

• Standard: $20 per user/month
• Plus: $40 per user/month
• Pro: $65 per user/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

13. Tidio

Tidio’s cloud-based help desk software allows customer service teams to turn customer requests into tickets in a shared multichannel inbox. The inbox allows you to manage emails, enable customer engagement with live chat and messaging, and respond to inquiries across channels from a single place. Tidio can also integrate with other websites and platforms via dedicated plugins.

Tidio offers Lyro, a conversational AI chatbot. Lyro provides AI-powered automated responses to assist customers without involving support agents. Lyro is an add-on, meaning you’ll have to subscribe to the tool for an additional monthly price.

Features:

• Proactive chat
• Prewritten responses
• Customizable branding
• Integration plugins
• Website visitor tracking

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (includes 3 seats)
• Starter: $29 per month
• Communicator: $25 per seat/month
• Chatbots: $29 per month (starting price based on 2,000 triggers per month)
• Tidio+: $394 per month

Free trial:

14. LiveAgent

LiveAgent’s help desk is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps agents handle communications via phone, live chat, social messaging, text, and email. Its help desk consists of a ticketing system that consolidates requests into a shared inbox, a live chat feature for real-time support, and call center software for inbound and outbound calls.

LiveAgent offers social media integrations so agents can respond to customer interactions across various social media platforms. The help desk also has self-service options, including a knowledge base tool that helps customers complete common tasks on their own.

Features:

• Shared inbox
• Live chat tool
• Knowledge base software
• Reporting and analytics
• Automation

Pricing:

• Small business: $9 per agent/month
• Medium business: $29 per agent/month
• Large business: $49 per agent/month
• Enterprise: $69 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

Here are a few frequently asked questions to help you find the right alternative to Intercom.