Hubspot versus Intercom

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the free tools of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder, in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of them paid.

Free plans, with limited functionality for most tools, are available for all Hubs for an unlimited number of agents. The paid plans for the Service Hub start at $18 per month for 2 agents to use the included paid tools and features.

Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries.

Intercom has some of the world’s largest tech companies among its clients. Intercom’s conversational support funnel is set up to efficiently filter support requests. Support tickets trickle through from proactive support to self-serve support via their knowledge base, to actual human support. Inbox automation can be set up to quickly prioritize tickets. Team efficiency and customer experience metrics are an integrated part of the platform.

Intercom has several pricing schemes, depending on your needs and the size of your company. Free trials are available. They require a credit card and for you to cancel your subscription in time which is a considerable downside.

A plethora of apps in multiple categories can be integrated in their messenger through their app store.

Customers of Intercom include Amazon, Facebook, Shopify and Udemy.