Intercom vs HubSpot: Which Is The Better Customer Support Solution?

Customer service is vital for your company, as highlighted by Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer Report, where 78% of consumers consider customer service when choosing to do business with a firm. Your reputation for excellent customer service can significantly influence potential clients.

The choice of customer support solutions is also crucial. To help with this decision, a comparison of popular platforms like HubSpot vs Intercom is provided, focusing on factors to consider in building a devoted customer base.

HubSpot vs Intercom: At a glance

Although today's ecosystem offers various customer service platforms, HubSpot vs Intercom are the two of the most popular, especially if you want to develop genuine relationships with your clients.

Let’s examine the following aspects to determine which platform is ideal for your company

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that supports inbound marketing, streamlining lead generation, deal closure, and data synchronization across teams and devices. HubSpot Service Hub allows centralized management and monitoring of customer service interactions, integrating various channels and data into a single CRM platform. It simplifies client interactions, problem tracking, ticket handling, and responses. It also enables task assignment, support issue monitoring, and workflow oversight for your staff.

HubSpot features

When it comes to using a customer support platform, it’s important to carefully consider what features it has. HubSpot Service Hub offers the following ones:

Dedicated customer portal: HubSpot Service Hub's one unique feature is the Customer Portal, which lets customers check ticket status and review past resolutions. It's customizable without coding and integrates with your knowledge base for a seamless user experience.
Ticketing system: HubSpot's ticketing system lets you log, organize, and track customer concerns from one dashboard. It offers insights like ticket volume and agent response time to guide your support team effectively and manage client demand. It also provides essential information about products, service issues, and customer history for personalized service
Customer survey feedback: HubSpot makes sharing survey findings easy via email or web links. It offers pre-made surveys like NPS, CES, and CSAT to measure client satisfaction and loyalty. Integration with the CRM system ensures survey availability to multiple teams.

HubSpot pros

When looking at HubSpot vs Intercom, there are a few ways HubSpot stands out:

Offers streamlined support: HubSpot Service Hub simplifies customer service operations with a single platform for ticket tracking, client inquiries, and process automation. This enables consistent, excellent customer service, improves efficiency, and ensures quick responses for organizations.
Unified overview: HubSpot Service Hub and HubSpot CRM are integrated, enabling seamless collaboration between service and sales teams. This integration provides a unified view of customer interactions and history, facilitating personalized service and maintaining a consistent customer experience.
Enhanced customer service: Businesses can empower customers with instant access to information through their customer portal, knowledge base, and self-service tools. This enhances customer satisfaction by enabling them to resolve common issues and find answers to their questions independently.

HubSpot cons

Comparing Intercom vs HubSpot, there are some cons worth mentioning when it comes to HubSpot:

Difficult to navigate: New users may need some time to familiarize themselves with the platform's features and functionalities.
Doesn’t offer cobrowsing options: HubSpot offers various integrations but does not support compatibility with cobrowsing solutions like Fullview, which can provide real-time guidance to customers.

HubSpot pricing

HubSpot offers a free plan with features like contact management, ticketing, live chat, team email, and ticket-closed reports. Users can upgrade from the free plan to access additional features. HubSpot has the following paid options:

Starter: $18 / month (USD)
Professional: $450 / month (USD)
Enterprise: $1,200 / month (USD)

HubSpot user reviews

On G2, HubSpot Service Hub has received a rating of 4.4 stars out of 5 based on 2,129 reviews. Users appreciate its ability to streamline customer support and its connectivity with other Hubs for a unified customer view. However, some users found it less than user-friendly and intuitive for first-time users.

HubSpot use cases

In sectors including manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, and more, HubSpot Service Hub is renowned for providing enterprise-level software solutions that expand with your company.
HubSpot Service Hub may be ideal if you're prepared to take customer care seriously or if you're already using some of HubSpot's other Hubs and want to maximize your potential.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a real-time customer service platform that enhances user communication for customer support. It offers tools like chat history, product walkthroughs, and file transfers to improve service quality. Plus, it helps track and follow up on missed messages, ensuring no communication is overlooked. This saves customers time by letting them quickly discuss their issues with the sales team.

Intercom features

Like Zendesk’s features, Intercom also focuses on improving client experience. Here are the features it offers:

AI chatbot and other chat capabilities: Intercom's AI chatbot, Fin, can significantly reduce support volume and enhance team productivity. It improves self-service and conversation routing by asking customers questions, helping to address visitor queries even when customer service representatives are unavailable.
Automation: Intercom lets you effortlessly automate repetitive processes, like ending customer conversations on various channels. With flexible workflows, you can create unique customer experiences by setting rules, triggers, and conditions.
Reporting capabilities: Intercom can help monitor and comprehend the effectiveness of conversations, automations, and proactive assistance, and provide AI-driven insights into what you can do to optimize.

Intercom pros

If you’re wondering how Intercom has an edge when comparing HubSpot vs Intercom, we’ve listed all the pros for you:

Easy to use: Customers can communicate with Intercom easily and naturally thanks to its conversational UI and workflows. Focusing on user-centric design, it provides a simplified front-end experience.
Strong chat features: Their live chat widget lets you customize the support options that consumers see, add apps to provide a self-serve experience, and style the widget using your brand's colors.
Offers cobrowsing: For any customer support platform, it’s useful to have a cobrowsing option to guide customers on their screens and solve issues faster. Intercom offers integrations with platforms such as Fullview for a more complete experience.

Intercom cons

Let's compare Intercom vs HubSpot to see what Intercom is behind on:

Customized pricing: Although it seems cheaper overall, Intercom has hidden prices for add-ons. So your overall cost might be more than what you were aiming for.
Bug issues: The platform frequently lags or stops working completely by freezing the page.

Intercom pricing

Unlike HubSpot, you can try Intercom's basic free plan for 14 days, after which you can upgrade to a subscription plan. These are the plans you can select from:

Essential: Meant for individuals, startups, and small organizations, costing $39 monthly per seat.
Advanced: Offers robust AI technology and automation possibilities for a monthly fee of $99 per seat.
Expert: With their reporting, security, and communication requirements, large support teams would benefit more from this. It costs $139 per seat each month.

The plan pricing might change once you consider the add-ons needed.

Intercom user reviews

With 2,883 reviews on G2, Intercom is rated 4.5 stars out of 5. Users have highlighted how easy it is to use the macros and the usefulness of its AI capabilities. However, there is some negative feedback, such as the cost of add-ons and latency while using the platform.

Intercom use cases

Intercom offers solutions that cater to a wide range of businesses, from small enterprises to mid-sized corporations, startups, and well-established operations.

HubSpot vs Intercom: The main differences

HubSpot Service Hub and Intercom have a few overlapping features. However, they do differ in some ways, such as:

HubSpot Service Hub has a forever free plan, whereas Intercom only offers a 14-day free trial.
When comparing the usability of Intercom vs HubSpot, Intercom stands out with its clean interface.
With its integration into other HubSpot services, HubSpot Service Hub offers a clearer view of customer issues, whereas Intercom lacks that granularity.
Putting HubSpot vs Intercom face to face, Intercom wins when it comes to having the option for cobrowsing with its Fullview integration, similar to Zendesk.

Which Customer Support Tool Works the Best For Your Team?

Intercom’s many integrations and interfaces make it easy to use but can cost more due to the price of add-ons. HubSpot Service Hub offers wide-ranging functionality, but it may take longer to become used to it.

If you have hundreds of users and need something more enterprise-level, Hubspot can prove to be the better option. However, unlike its competitor, Intercom, it doesn’t offer a co browse function either independently or through an integration with Fullview.

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Source last checked on: 24-Nov-2023

Intercom vs HubSpot: Which Is The Better Customer Support Solution?

HubSpot vs Intercom: At a glance