Alternatives to Customer.io

Customer.io Segment #Sendgrid Prior to using customer.io to automate our email campaigns, we had been using a combination of sendgrid and an engineer to manually set up campaigns in Rails. Since we had already been using segment to handle our data for other applications, integrating with customer.io took only a few minutes. Building automated email campaigns to connect and engage with our audience is a simple point and click, rules-based workflow. Importing html for emails from sendgrid to customer.io was a snap and the UX of the drag and drop editor is virtually the same as we had grown accustomed to with #sendgrid. I like that this platform has a powerful segmentation tool, which allows us to use relevant customer data such as website interaction behavior to help us craft personalized campaigns to connect with our users.

[Not currently used] We had hopes to employ this product as it has some very cool features. Customer.io

I've always been passionate about knowing more about how #UX the products that I'm building and have used a bunch of session replay tools in the past, tools like Crazy Egg Hotjar Mixpanel but i am developing affinity for FullStory. I find searching for events to be effective and fast. i live the ability to see when users are frustrated and also skip inactivity, it's pretty intuitive.

I also feel that the creating funnels could be improved (like Mixpanel ) and also give recommendations about using your data tier more efficiently.

#StackDecisionsLaunch

We needed something to send our user events to. With Segment it's super easy to get started and now we can change to whatever data destination we want. Currently Mixpanel, but now the product team can change that, without any source code change!

We are using React Native in #SmartHome to share the business logic between Android and iOS team and approach users with a unique brand experience. The drawback is that we require lots of native Android SDK and Objective-C modules, so a good part of the invested time is there. The gain for a app that relies less on native communication, sensors and OS tools should be even higher.

Also it helps us set different testing stages: we use Travis CI for the javascript (business logic), Bitrise to run build tests and @Detox for #end2end automated user tests.

We use a microservices structure on top of Zeit's @now that read from firebase. We use JWT auth to authenticate requests among services and from users, following GitHub philosophy of using the same infrastructure than its API consumers. Firebase is used mainly as a key-value store between services and as a backup database for users. We also use its authentication mechanisms.

You can be super locked-in if you also rely on it's analytics, but we use Amplitude for that, which offers us great insights. Intercom for communications with end-user and Mailjet for marketing.

I've recently switched to using Expo for initializing and developing my React Native apps. Compared to React Native CLI, it's so much easier to get set up and going. Setting up and maintaining Android Studio, Android SDK, and virtual devices used to be such a headache. Thanks to Expo, I can now test my apps directly on my Android phone, just by installing the Expo app. I still use Xcode Simulator for iOS testing, since I don't have an iPhone, but that's easy anyway. The big win for me with Expo is ease of Android testing.

The Expo SDK also provides convenient features like Facebook login, MapView, push notifications, and many others. https://docs.expo.io/versions/v31.0.0/sdk/

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

We moved from Intercom to Crisp this April because the price-value ratio of Intercom was not satisfying anymore.

We paid ~140eur for the very basic features of Intercom - Messages Essential and Inbox Essential. This is enough for a chat and API access, but that's all. The price would go up as mkdev grows.

Now there are some features we really would love to have: like a Help Center and Bots, for example. All various advanced routing of messages. Or any other features that Intercom actually has, but sells them separately.

Even though it's very hard to properly calculate the price by looking at Pricing page of Intercom, my guess is that with simple Answer bot and Help Center integration our bill for Intercom could easily double or triple.

After doing a bit of research and looking for a better price-value ration we found Crisp.

Crisp gives us the same Chat features we had from Intercom, but then it adds really cool bot builder, various marketing automation utilities, Help Center that supports multiple languages already today (feature still missing in Intercom) - https://help.mkdev.me/en/, fancy MagicBrowse and LiveAssist, direct integration with Telegram and many more. Price? 95eur for all the features and unlimited operators. And no dependency on number of active users (Crisp founders directly say that charging for active users is bullshit and I can only agree with them).

We've been using Crisp not for too long and even though it's been pretty smooth so far - from integrating with our backend systems to creating a Help Center from scratch - it might be a bit too early to do any conclusions. mkdev co-founder Leo has things to say about the UX of Crisp and I am not really satisfied with Crisp's mobile app. But this is something to get used to, or something that will be improved by Crisp over time. And some aspects of Crisp UX/UI are much nicer than Intercom - for example, custom fields on clients are on very top, so we can quickly jump to admin page of a client in mkdev.me. In Intercom we had to do two clicks and scroll a lot to find this link.

To sum it up, if you are looking for a change from Intercom, give Crisp a try. It's way cheaper and doesn't have any major downsides if you are used to Intercom.

Achieving #MarketingAutomation using AutopilotHQ

Some of the key aspects evaluated here: - Ability to integrate with Segment or Zapier - Being multi-channel (Not just Email automation) - Dozens of integrations and capabilities: SFDC, In app messages, SMS, Push Notifications, Direct Mail, Segment Events... - Allowing teams to operate outside of engineering dependencies - Segmentation against user attributes / user traits - Static or Dynamic segments - Concept of user journeys - And more

Combined with Segment and its own sets of integrations and capabilities, AutopilotHQ ended up being a very powerful tool for Product Marketing to use at SmartZip.

Couple of years later, there certainly were some overlap with the features offered by Intercom 's engagement module , but our team kept on using this tool given the greater range of functionality / capabilities.