The 13 Best Intercom Alternatives for Customer Support in 2023
Intercom is a popular customer communications platform, but its focus has always been on sales and marketing. After starting life as a simple chat widget, Intercom has added lots of new features to its messaging platform, but catering for customer support seems like more of an afterthought.
While live chat and chatbot automation are helpful features when it comes to providing customer service on your website, full-fledged support teams need more than that (think ticketing, reporting, knowledge base management, etc.).
It’s also pricey, with its small business plans starting at $67/month and packages for larger businesses starting at even higher price points than that — though they ask that companies get in touch with their reps for more pricing information.
Most of our Intercom alternatives have much more straightforward pricing plans that are based on the number of support agents you need seats for, allowing your business to better plan for expenses.
13 Intercom alternatives for 2023
If supporting customers and transparent pricing is your priority, here are the 13 best Intercom alternatives to check out.
Help Scout
HelpCrunch
Olark
HubSpot Services Hub
Zendesk
Freshdesk
LiveChat
Tidio
Crisp
ClickDesk
Zoho Desk
1. Help Scout
Best Intercom alternative for complete customer support.
If you’ve been an Intercom user who’s unhappy with the features surrounding customer support, Help Scout is the perfect alternative for your team.
With an easy-to-use interface and a number of support-centric features that can help with all kinds of use cases, Help Scout is an affordable option that your growing team can quickly get up and running.
Shared inbox
Help Scout’s shared inbox makes it easy to collaborate on customer support issues and ensures the customer experience is seamless from all sides.
Features include:
The ability to send private notes to team members when working with customers.
A searchable library of saved replies and templates to streamline responses.
Tags that help automate workflows or categorize conversations.
Help Scout's shared inbox also has an easily navigable user interface that makes it quick and painless for your team to jump in and start supporting customers.
Customer management
One important part of creating an amazing customer experience is remembering your customers, what they’ve bought from you, and any previous issues they’ve had.
Help Scout's customer management feature allows you to keep track of your customer data, from previous conversations and recent orders to name and contact information.
Easily find customer profiles to ensure you’re providing them with the best possible service every single time.
Knowledge base
One key aspect of good customer support is offering a self-service option, such as a knowledge base or forum.
With Help Scout, you can easily create a knowledge base on your website with documentation that lets customers search for and learn about different features and capabilities all on their own, without needing to reach out to a service agent.
Your knowledge base is easily customizable to ensure it matches your branding and overall website’s look and feel to create a cohesive experience.
In addition, you get access to reporting that lets you know how helpful your knowledge base actually is and how often customers are reaching out to support.
Live chat
Live chat is useful for so many business strategies — lead generation for email marketing, customer support, ecommerce shopping assistance, upselling customers, and improving your website’s customer engagement.
You can do all this and more with Help Scout’s live chat functionality.
Geared toward providing excellent customer service, Help Scout's live chat software can be used in a number of different ways, from leading customers to the right knowledge base article to having real-time discussions to resolve customer issues.
AI features
Make conversation handoffs easier with AI summarize, a handy AI tool that can create a bulleted summary of any conversation with just one click. On-demand summaries allow teammates to get up to speed more quickly without getting bogged down by long email threads.
AI assist is an editor tool that can help your team compose better responses. The feature can shorten or lengthen a reply, adjust its tone to be friendlier or more professional, check for spelling and grammar errors, and even translate the copy into another language.
Data migration
Lastly, for teams looking to switch to Help Scout from another tool, the platform’s data migration capabilities don’t require any IT involvement, making it easy to bring your customer data and conversation history with you to Help Scout.
Price: Starting at $20/user per month.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. HelpCrunch
Best Intercom alternative for multi-channel messaging.
HelpCrunch is another alternative to consider, especially because it offers free migration from Intercom, making onboarding a breeze.
With HelpCrunch, you get access to features like a help desk ticketing system, Facebook messenger chat integrations, email marketing, pop-ups, automated messaging, and more. Plus, its pricing plans are much more affordable than Intercom’s.
HelpCrunch also offers great multi-channel messaging, improving customer satisfaction by managing app messaging, chats, emails, social media, and more — all in one tool.
Price: Starting at $12/member per month.
3. Olark
Best alternative for standalone live chat.
If your team is looking for a robust live chat option to engage website visitors, Olark is the perfect Intercom alternative for you. Access to its live chat software gives you advanced insights, organized customer data, and offline messaging so your support team is always on (even when they’re technically off.) Olark also allows you to use AI powered bots to automate some of your messaging.
With features that allow you to store customer data and chat transcripts in your CRM, access in-depth reporting, automate conversations, and ensure your live chat is accessible, Olark can be a great option for your team.
Price: Starting at $29/seat per month.
4. HubSpot Service Hub
Best Intercom alternative for large businesses who are already HubSpot users.
HubSpot is a popular martech tool with a plethora of features for SaaS and other online businesses. HubSpot’s all-in-one suite of tools includes capabilities for landing page creation, lead generation, email marketing automation, customer support, sales prospecting, operations, and more.
This is why HubSpot makes sense as an Intercom alternative for large brands who are already familiar with or using other aspects of this tool.
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $45 per month.
5. Zendesk
Best Intercom alternative for enterprise companies.
Zendesk is well-known in the industry as a large tool with a number of business solutions, especially when it comes to service and sales.
Because it offers so many different options, this is a great Intercom alternative for large and enterprise companies who need sales and service solutions at scale.
Access a shared workspace, a shared inbox that can track SMS, calls and email, knowledge base management, automation, reporting, and more with Zendesk.
Price: Starting at $19/agent per month.
6. Freshdesk
Best Intercom alternative for call center support.
Freshdesk is a more unique Intercom alternative, as it offers the functionality to support businesses that use call centers for customer support.
This is a great solution if you’re looking to set up, expand, or manage your own call center. Easily buy a new number, manage your call center team, and access features that can help your team support its customers.
Other features that Freshdesk offers include help desk software, messaging and chatbot support, and omnichannel communication to reach customers across various platforms.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month.
7. LiveChat
Best Intercom alternative for smaller budgets.
Looking for an Intercom alternative with a lower price point? LiveChat offers features for businesses looking for help with support, sales, and marketing, making it a similar tool to Intercom — but for a fraction of the cost.
Plus, LiveChat’s support tool is slightly more robust, coming with reporting, ticketing solutions, routing rules, and more. Its live chat tool has a lot to offer as well, from automation and canned responses to chat transfers and personalization.
Price: Starting at $16/agent per month.
8. Tidio
Best Intercom alternative for quick and easy setup.
Tidio’s easy-to-use interface makes it a great tool for quick setup within your customer support and marketing teams. With its WordPress plugin or JavaScript code, Tidio boasts that teams can easily get started within five minutes.
If your team has fallen behind on its customer support goals, a quickstart tool like Tidio can be a great solution. It also offers a number of support features like multi-channel communication, lead generation and nurturing, chatbot AI, and more.
Price: Free plan available. Premium live chat plans start at $15/operator per month.
9. Crisp
Best Intercom alternative for startups and small businesses.
Crisp is a great tool for startups and small businesses due to its completely free plan and simple interface. Use its desktop or mobile app for your team and easily access a number of their features without having a premium plan.
Crisp’s top features include co-browsing, a CRM, a shared inbox, a chatbot, a ticketing system, and more. Plus, it has a number of integrations to make the process even easier for your team, like Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, and WhatsApp.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $25/month per website.
10. ClickDesk
Best Intercom alternative for voice and video support.
ClickDesk’s support features are unique in this list, as they offer voice and video support in addition to live chat. This can help support agents to help customers through complex issues that simply don’t translate well via live chat. It also provides customers with yet another way to reach your company based on their support preferences.
Another great add-on that ClickDesk offers is the ability to integrate your social media tools with live chat, helping to increase followers and engagement from your website.
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $12.99/month per agent.
11. Zoho Desk
Best Intercom alternative for sales-focused teams.
Zoho Desk is a support-focused offering from the Zoho suite of tools. Zoho CRM is a popular sales tool, making its help desk software an ideal solution for sales-centric teams who can benefit from the entire suite of tools.
Zoho’s support features include automation, AI chatbots, self-service support, and omnichannel communication. Zoho can pull in all your customer interactions across multiple channels for you to send a response to. While Zoho Desk does offer a basic free plan, the suite as a whole is ideal for larger companies with bigger budgets.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $14/agent per month.
12. LiveAgent
Best Intercom alternative for live chat automation.
LiveAgent is an Intercom alternative you might want to consider as it offers a number of support features that Intercom doesn’t. Built-in call center support, SLA management, audit logs, and success managers are all available with LiveAgent’s tool.
In addition, LiveAgent offers a number of communication channels for customer support and a variety of different integrations.
Its service also offers automated ticket distribution, workflow automation, automatic notifications, and more to create a seamless support process for your team.
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $15/agent per month.
13. Drift
Best Intercom alternative for conversational marketing.
Drift is the closest alternative to Intercom in that it also focuses heavily on sales and marketing. But because of its live chat and custom chatbot tools, we wanted to include them on this list as an alternative your business may want to consider.
Drift’s live chat tool allows businesses to set appointments, answer questions, share help center articles and videos, send pricing information, and more.
According to its website, Drift’s main goal is revenue acceleration. Its sales, marketing, and support tools all back that endeavor. With Drift, your live chat isn’t limited to support, making this your tool of choice if flexibility is something you’re looking for.
Price: Free plan available. Contact Drift for pricing for paid accounts.
Buyer’s Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool
Tailored to help you identify your customer support needs, this guide will help you find the right solution, simplify your purchase decision, and get leadership buy-in.
Get the guide
Choose your top Intercom alternative
Ready to jump off the Intercom train? These 13 Intercom alternatives provide great options for sales, marketing, and support help for your business.
Reflect on what your goals are and which features are most important to your business. Choosing the right platform is much easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then, it’s simply a case of testing different options and seeing what works for your team.
Learn more about Help Scout:
Did you know that we also have this guide available in German and French?
Michael Keenan
