Alternatives to Intercom

Zapier is one of our favorite tools in our stack. We automate the entire company with Zapier. When a lead fills out the form on our website, it creates an opportunity on Zendesk. We have an entire pipeline of automation that goes from our website, to Zendesk, it then creates a contract in Pandadoc and creates an invoice in Xero.

I will like to know, which chatbot can be compared with Zendesk/Zopim if there's a need to migrate?

Hotjar GitHub MailChimp Drift

When I started Checkly, I had no clear strategy on collection, managing and acting on customer feedback.

Over the last year, going from private beta to the first couple dozen customers I found my way in the jungle of customer feedback tooling and found something that worked for me and my company.

The linked post is a bit less technical than normally. The post goes into:

• Using Hotjar and how it sorta worked for me.
• Using Drift and why I was totally wrong about chat widget.
• Using GitHub as a public roadmap.

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.

Looking for the best CRM choice for an early-stage tech company selling through product-led growth to medium and big companies. Don't know if Salesforce or HubSpot are too rigid for PGL and expensive. I also had an experience of companies outgrowing Pipedrive pretty fast

Comparing HubSpot and Freshsales, not sure which to choose. Company and contact information is shareable among tech and sales teams allowing both parties to upkeep customers' contact details. Capturing leads from social media and system assigning to sales or having the option to manual assign. Sales follow up with sales activities. Once deal, technical involve to follow up regular customer visits, support ticketing, training, remind customers to renew licenses, work on projects and etc. Require a single platform to share a calendar to understand internal team activities and customer activities.

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.

When starting a new company and building a new product w/ limited engineering we chose to optimize for expertise and rapid development, landing on Rails API, w/ AngularJS on the front.

The reality is that we're building a CRUD app, so we considered going w/ vanilla Rails MVC to optimize velocity early on (it may not be sexy, but it gets the job done). Instead, we opted to split the codebase to allow for a richer front-end experience, focus on skill specificity when hiring, and give us the flexibility to be consumed by multiple clients in the future.

We also considered .NET core or Node.js for the API layer, and React on the front-end, but our experiences dealing with mature Node APIs and the rapid-fire changes that comes with state management in React-land put us off, given our level of experience with those tools.

We're using GitHub and Trello to track issues and projects, and a plethora of other tools to help the operational team, like Zapier, MailChimp, Google Drive with some basic Vue.js & HTML5 apps for smaller internal-facing web projects.

Hello, We are a medical technology company looking to integrate an in-app analytics tool. We've evaluated Mixpanel, Pendo, and Heap and are most impressed that Heap will solve our issues. We'd like to be able to determine not only clicks (con of Pendo) but also swipes and other user gestures within our app. Not sold on all three of these, can also look at other tools. We use Cordova, so hoping to find something compatible with that. Any advice?

Thanks

Can either of these (Pendo, and Amplitude) also function as a data warehouse for data we want to retain? How well can they accept data from other systems? I know they focused on session behavior. I would like to hear if anyone took their implementation further than session behavior?