Regardless what you think of their product, Drift have been extremely influential in the marketing of live chat products. Whether they defined the term ‘Conversational Marketing’ or not is debatable but what isn’t debatable is their role in it’s recent prominence.
Drift are great marketers. They have definitely raised the awareness that live chat can be used as a marketing and growth tool. As that is one of the key uses for GoSquared, we’re grateful for that!
However, Drift have are definitely focused on offering their solution to an Enterprise level of client, which has meant for smaller businesses that could benefit from Conversational Marketing, they are left with a few options. As we know the space well, we wanted to share some alternatives.
Full disclosure, being also focused a Growth and Marketing focused solution, GoSquared offers some similar functionality, so we can’t provide an entirely independent or unbiased opinion on this matter. However, we’re also well aware that depending on your business, different providers could be a better at solving your specific needs, so here are the key players:
1. GoSquared
Your go-to for: A focused Marketing alternative. Automated live chat messages User level Marketing Analytics, Web Analytics, and a support Team Inbox.
As a platform used by 100s of Marketing Teams, we thought we’d start with GoSquared, as probably the most like for like replacement.
GoSquared and Drift both offer visitor intelligence and real-time personalisation. They key difference being that GoSquared uses our real-time behaviour analytics (essentially what a visitor has done and is doing on your website) to personalise the messages you can send to a website visitor. These proactive and automated messages lead to an increase of conversion on a Marketer’s website of 20%
GoSquared also offers Marketing Analytics for each individual lead that is captured, including which marketing campaign they came through to help optimise further marketing efforts.
Of course, GoSquared also includes a Team Inbox for live-chat that can be used for both Support and Sales.
2. Intercom
Your go-to for: Enterprise, all-in-one tool.
The other, bigger Enterprise offering in the space, Intercom offer a broad range of features that include Marketing focused features, like Automated Messages. They offer chat bots, like Operator helping to solve support queries and the ability to create custom bots yourself. On top of the Marketing features, it also offers a plethora of support features like Knowledge Base and Product Tours.
Pricing info
Intercom pricing starts at £79/month but that pricing can scale significantly on numerous factors like seats, profiles and features, which tends to make it more suitable from a budget perspective to enterprise level clients.
3. Tawk.to
Your go-to for: free live chat
If you just want free live chat that will remain free regardless without the key Marketing tools, then you should consider Tawk.to. Keep in mind that you’ll need to use some of the other tools on our free and paid list to handle everything that Drift does.
Pricing info
Tawk.to’s live chat is free forever. If you want to use their live chat agents (which isn’t required), then you’ll pay $1 per hour.
4. Freshchat
Your go-to for: free live chat with segmentation and prioritization
Freshchat is a robust chat software offered by Freshworks, which also provides sales, marketing, and help desk software. Freshchat includes features that marketing, sales, and customer support teams need like response prioritization and conversation categories.
Pricing info
Freshchat is free for up to 10 team members, but like Intercom that cost can scale for bigger teams or better features (like triggered messages), you’ll need to upgrade.
5. Olark
Your go-to for: Simple chat and chat automation
If you just use Drift for chat, then Olark could be a great fit for you. It includes great, basic chat tools like file attachments and team and conversation management.
Pricing info
For $15 per agent per month, you get access to all of the core features.
If you’re thinking of an alternative to Drift, why not try a tool that can help you automate a lot of the process. @
The GoSquared platform allows you to drive powerful automation triggered by advanced real-time analytics. That allows you to automate conversations with your users, based on their real time behaviours, sending better more effective messaging – feeing up resource for your team to do what they do best.
