Updated on February 13, 2025

Cover image of the article "Top Intercom Alternatives" Featuring Kommunicate, Drift, Salesforce, HubSpot, Kore.AI

Intercom is one of the largest players in customer experience, having cornered 6.71% of the market. Since the app has a massive user base and a robust product and integration ecosystem, many global enterprises use the products at scale. 

In today’s article, we’ll cover other players in the Customer Experience category with similar product portfolios and might be viable alternatives to Intercom. We’ll provide a drill-down analysis based on our experience with the products, their pricing, and the use cases. 

Here are the topics you’ll see:

  1. Intercom
  2. Kommunicate
  3. Drift
  4. Salesforce
  5. HubSpot
  6. Kore.AI
  7. Comparison

Intercom – A Personal Review

Logo of Intercom
Intercom

As we said earlier, Intercom is one of the biggest players in the Customer Experience industry. This scale comes from their robust ecosystem of integrations and their focus on ticketing and other support processes. 

They’ve also released Fin, a fine-tuned AI chatbot for customer service experience. In our experience with Intercom, it’s a feature-rich powerhouse for lifecycle marketing and customer support. However, their pricing plans are inflexible, and they’re reluctant to make any changes to the product based on support requests. 

Pros

1. Depth of Product – Intercom has been around the block for quite some time and has developed a lot of features. The feature list includes A/B testing, outbound marketing, personalization features, and detailed customer segmentation. 

2. Huge Integration Ecosystem – Intercom has a wide base for integrations that lets you connect almost everything in your tech stack to its apps.

3. Scalability – Because of the depth of features and the integration ecosystem, the Intercom applications can be applied to various use cases at any scale. Businesses can also use the apps to set up automated playbooks and funnels. 

Cons

1. Lack of Customization – Intercom’s inflexibility is one of the major complaints from customer reviews on G2. The company won’t customize the product to your particular needs, and some users mention that the customer service is often unresponsive or delayed.

2. No Flexible Pricing – Another common theme across G2 reviews is the inflexible product pricing. Only year-long contracts are available, and several customers have faced high overages. 

Pricing

Intercom offers three plans:

1. Essential – Starts at $39/seat/month

2. Advanced – Starts at $99/seat/month

3. Expert – Starts at $139/seat/month

We’ve displayed the pricing written on Intercom’s page; however, in many customers’ experience, this price can be higher due to overages and other charges. 

Best Intercom Alternatives in 2025

1. Kommunicate

Kommunicate Logo
Kommunicate – The Best Intercom Alternative

We rank Kommunicate as the best intercom alternative out there in the market. While we can’t be unbiased about our product, we’ll try to base this review on the customer insights we’ve got over the past few years. Kommunicate is a fairly new player in the Customer Experience industry, but it has developed a broad user base, attracting everyone from smaller startups to global enterprises. 

Our strengths are our plug-and-play integrations, the depth of our AI product, our capability to take on and deliver on feature requests, and our proactive approach to customer service. However, we only focus on customer service and don’t have a wide-ranging integration ecosystem or lifecycle marketing features. 

Pros

1. Generative AI Expertise – Since our product uses generative AI, we provide deep integrations with all leading AI providers like Open AI, Gemini, and Anthropic. We let your customers have contextual chats with us and have a no-code, easy-to-use conversation design and AI training system. 

2. Flexible on Feature Requests – As a start-up, we’re always open to onboarding feature requests. We often develop customized features for specific customer use cases. 

3. Plug-and-Play Integrations – Most of our integration ecosystem is plug-and-play and native. This means you can connect your tech stack to ours without writing a single line of code.

4. Fast Customer Support – Unlike many other players, our solution engineering and customer service teams are always ready to assist and respond quickly. We’re available throughout the day and resolve tickets rapidly. 

Smiling man holding a laptop with chatbot illustration and text promoting a value-for-money customer service tool. Includes call to action 'Book a Demo' and mentions no credit card required, rated 4.6/5 on Capterra. Ideal for those seeking Intercom alternatives.

Cons

1. Lack of Lifecycle Marketing – We focus on customer support and need marketing features, including outbound emailing, A/B testing, and other processes.

2. Small Integration Ecosystem – While we’re ready to develop custom integrations for our clients, our current integration ecosystem is smaller than other established players. However, we have already integrated the most popular products businesses and enterprises use. 

Pricing

Kommunicate has three plans:

  1. Lite – $83.33/month
  2. Advanced – $166.66/month
  3. Enterprise – Customizable pricing based on needs

We have transparent pricing with no hidden charges. Additionally, we also offer customizable plans for our enterprise clientele. 

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2. Drift

Drift Logo
Drift

Another Intercom alternative, Drift made its name by providing advanced lead qualification, sales features, and customer experience. Their conversational marketing products are used across the globe. In our experience, the personalization and advanced chatbot-based features make Drift an instant winner. However, the pricing is relatively high, and the customizability is lower. 

Pros

1. Personalization Mechanics – Drift provides advanced tools to personalize your communications with buyers and customers. This, alongside their marketing analytics products, makes conversational marketing much more accessible. 

2. Lead Qualification – The Drift suite is trained to qualify your leads by asking high-intent questions. 

3. Great Chatbot Experience – Drift’s chatbot has been recently improved to provide better real-time answers. Several customers on G2 (us included) were very impressed with the recent developments and the advanced NLP in the product. 

Cons

1. High Pricing – While Drift doesn’t provide transparent pricing on their website, several customers report that their bills can be as high as $2500/month. 

2. Low Customizability – Drift has few options for customizing the product. This makes it difficult for customers to adapt the system to their specific usage. 

Pricing

As we mentioned, Drift doesn’t provide transparent pricing on the website. According to our experience, the pricing can range from $2000/month to more, depending on the features you want to use. 

Salesforce

Salesforce Logo
Salesforce

Salesforce’s customer experience platform is very established and boasts many features. We explored the Customer 360 platform and found that the app provides many data analytics functionalities and has some of the most advanced marketing and service automation tools. 

However, the platform is complex, and the pricing tends to be high. 

Pros

1. Automation – Just like Intercom, Salesforce has many features for lifecycle marketing automation. This includes advanced A/B testing, outbound emailing, and other tools.

2. Deep Range of Features – With their recent turn to AI and the earlier acquisition of Slack and other companies in the SaaS space, Salesforce is one of the biggest customer experience platforms in terms of features. 

3. Integration Ecosystem – Salesforce supports many technology products with its native integration ecosystem. Since most SaaS companies also integrate and update their products within this ecosystem, finding an updated integration is easier.

Cons

1. Complex Product – Most enterprises hire specific consultants to set up Salesforce systems. The product is complex and needs development to be fully integrated. 

2. Pricing – With multiple players of add-ons and complicated pricing packages, the Salesforce pricing can be higher. Some users have seen bills up to $3900/user/year.

3. Support Pricing – The amount of customer support you have access to changes with the tier package you subscribe to. This often leaves mid-size and small enterprise companies with a lack of support.

Pricing

There are four tiers of pricing for Salesforce Customer 360

1. Essential – $300/user/year

2. Professional – $1200/user/year

3. Enterprise – $2100/user/year

4. Unlimited – $3900/user/year

Most of these packages also have different add-ons you might need to purchase to fulfill your needs. 

4. HubSpot

HubSpot Logo
HubSpot

Another big Intercom alterntives in the space is HubSpot, a customer experience platform with a sizable global user base. At Kommunicate, we use HubSpot as our CRM, and the product offers deep insights and automation into customers. However, several customers experience problems with large volumes of tickets and the way the platform handles conversations. 

Pros

1. Marketing Automation – HubSpot offers in-depth tools for customer lifecycle marketing and has a suite that lets you connect with customers easily. It also provides a unified inbox view that is helpful for admins and managers who want a quick overview of their conversations. 

2. Great Integrations – The integrations available with HubSpot are all-encompassing. It has a vast development ecosystem, and multiple developers regularly upgrade their app integrations. 

3. Data Analytics – HubSpot offers in-depth data analytics on everything from retention and CSAT to email open rates. It also tracks the number of tickets a particular agent resolves and provides a dashboard where you can track KPIs easily. 

Cons

1. Complex Product – In our experience, the product can often be complex and unintuitive. It also lacks some basic functionalities (bulk downloading attachments, creating parent-child tickets), which can be a constant annoyance. 

2. Buggy Ticket Management – Several customers report that the opening and closing of tickets have some bugs. Closed tickets are often re-opened, and keeping track of tickets becomes difficult. 

3. Long Conversation Threads – The conversation threads that HubSpot creates are often overlong. This makes it difficult for individual agents to track specific conversations and quickly becomes cumbersome at an enterprise level. 

Pricing

HubSpot’s product comes in three paid plans:

1. Starter – $20/user/month

2. Professional – $100/user/month

3. Enterprise $150/user/month

There is also a generous free plan and several add-ons that you can purchase to make your work more accessible on the platform. 

5. Kore.ai

Kore.ai Logo
Kore.ai

Another new entrant into the customer experience marketplace, Kore.ai, has been adopted by enterprises across APC and Europe and is also the reason we have featured them in the list of top Intercom alternatives. 

In our experience, the platform has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that can be plug-and-play. However, the AI chatbot training and ticket resolution processes can improve. 

Pros

1. Easy-to-Use – Like Kommunicate, Kore.ai also uses an intuitive UI interface for conversation design and other processes. The no-code setup makes building your automation on the platform intuitive and straightforward. 

2. Detailed Training Guides – Kore.ai has a great list of documentation for all its features, and the documentation is regularly updated. This gives you the freedom to explore the app without any external help.

3. Customizable Dashboard – Like HubSpot, Kore.ai also offers live, customizable dashboards to track customer data in one place. 

Cons

1. AI Training Time – Several customers on G2 have complained that the AI systems integrated with Kore.AI take a lot of time to train on documents and websites.

2. Slow Customer Resolution – Like other players on the list, Kore.ai also faces steep developmental delays regarding support tickets and their resolutions. 

Pricing

Kore provides three pricing tiers:

1. Essential – $50/month

2. Advanced – $150/month

3. Enterprise – Customized Pricing

There are several add-ons that you can use to add functionality to your enterprise tier subscription, but the pricing is extra.

Smiling man holding a laptop with chatbot illustration and text promoting a value-for-money customer service tool. Includes call to action 'Book a Demo' and mentions no credit card required, rated 4.6/5 on Capterra. Ideal for those seeking Intercom alternatives.

Comparison of Top Intercom Alternatives

We’ve listed our reviews on a table to make it easier for you to select the best Intercom alternatives out there in the market. We’ll grade the applications according to customization, integration ecosystem, depth of features, and pricing.

ApplicationCustomizableIntegrationsFeature-RichnessEase-of-UsePricing
IntercomNo Very wide but, development-heavyLots of FeaturesNot easyStarting from $39/user/month
KommunicateYesSmall but plug-and-playAI-rich featuresEasyStarting from $100/month
SalesforceNoVery wide and development-heavyLots of featuresNot easyStarting from $300/user/year
DriftYesSmallConversational Marketing FeaturesEasyRanging up to $2500/month
HubSpotNoVery Wide Lifecycle Marketing and Customer Experience featuresNot easyStarting from $20/user/month
Kore.aiYes (Slow Development)Small and Plug-and-PlayAI-Rich FeaturesEasyStarting from $50/month

Conclusion

Intercom has been the choice for many enterprises over the years. Part of it is because of the wide-ranging integrations and features it has. However, as more older players develop new features and newer players come with specific functionalities, businesses will inevitably reassess their choices. 

In this article, we reviewed several great apps that offer features similar to Intercom and can be used as replacements. 

Ready to explore better alternatives to Intercom? Sign up with Kommunicate today to experience seamless customer support powered by AI. Start improving your customer interactions now!

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