🌐Chatwoot - Compared to Zendesk, Intercom, Drift and other SaaS customer support tools.
💬 What is Chatwoot?
Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels that can help businesses to provide exceptional customer support through an omnichannel inbox. The codebase for the product is completely open-source and is available under the MIT license.
Since Chatwoot is one of the many Customer Support Options let us see how it measures up to some of its competitors.
🕹️ Zendesk vs Chatwoot
Zendesk although being one of the Customer Support Tools has a lot of missing features that Chatwoot makes up for. Let's look at some of those factors.
Reasonable & Simple Pricing:
- Zendesk has a complicated Pricing structure consisting of service & sales in which the starting tier has a cost of 49$ & 19$ respectively, with a lack of personal or community tiers. Chatwoot is made keeping the people & developer in mind & so the pricing is very simple & structured with a Service & Self-Hosted option. The reason that Chatwoot has reasonable pricing is that both the pricing options have a Hacker / Community Edition tier which costs 0$.
- Yes, you read that right 0$ for the Hacker edition which has very generous benefits like Unlimited conversations & up to 10k page views/month. Even the premium tiers have reasonable pricing compared to Zendesk with a whopping 99$ / 215$! But Chatwoot doesn't exceed even 39$ even with the Business edition. (Excluding Custom Tiers)
Open-Source:
- Addressing The Elephant in the Room, Chatwoot is Open-Source while Zendesk is not, keeping the factor of transparency between client & product at a maximum via Chatwoot.
- Since Chatwoot is Open-Source people can have a self-hosted infrastructure, any developer can contribute to the product, the working of the product is not hidden & is 100% public. All the Benefits that follow with a product being Open-Source apply to Chatwoot as well, hence the product is preferred over Zendesk even by many developers around the world.
Versatility & Adaptability:
- In the case of Zendesk, the product and customer support may not be available in your preferred language, and some product features may not be available in the country you live in.
- Whereas in the case of Chatwoot it has Multilingual Support for over 10+ languages & no such geolocation-based restrictions because every feature can be accessed through the codebase on GitHub!
📞Intercom vs Chatwoot
Now let's talk about Intercom another Customer Support Service that a lot of companies are already associated with but are slowly leaving & looking for alternatives like Chatwoot. Let's know why?
Fixed/Never-Wavering Pricing Structure:
- Chatwoot offers a pricing structure that is fixed & has never undergone frequent & extreme changes. On the other hand, when we take a look at Intercom's Pricing structure, it almost seems like they have a reputation for price-gouging, they've de facto 2x-3x'ed their pricing for their marketing automation product (called Messages) multiple times over the past 24-36 months.
- Also more recently the pricing structure has been completely removed & pricing is revealed only on booking a demo for a particular tier, which is why companies already associated with Intercom are out looking for cheaper & better alternatives.
Services & It's Complexity:
- For a company that is just starting out looking for customer support solutions would most definitely step away from Intercom as an option primarily because of their pricing & then because of the overwhelming amount of options provided as services: Conversational Marketing, Conversational Customer engagement, Conversational Support.
- All the different tiers have different features but not one tier has it all which may lead to a lot of confusion, which is why a standard pricing plan with increasing features as the tiers upgrade is required & Chatwoot does exactly that which is why it is preferred.
Quality of Documentation:
- While Intercom has a lot of materials including Articles, Blogs, Developer Groups which are quite overwhelming & confusing too, but their Documentation is poor and unclear. The Steps on how to begin with Intercom are also very fuzzy.
- On the Flip-Side we have Chatwoot which is an Open-Source Product, & for any successful Open-source product, the Documentation & The Readme file on GitHub is its heart. So Chatwoot has hit it right on the mark with crystal clear documentation, & elaborate steps on how to get started. The Documentation by Chatwoot is clearly divided into Self-Hosted, Product, API, & Contributing Guidelines.
📑 LiveChat vs Chatwoot
A Tertiary popular option for Customer Support but with a lot of holes in its pricing plan & its structure for the starting tiers. Let's explore & see why is that.
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