DelightChat: Powerful WhatsApp Marketing & Customer Support Software
✓  Omnichannel Inbox: WhatsApp, IG, FB, Email & Live Chat
✓  Official WhatsApp Business API,  Green Tick
✓  Send Promotional WhatsApp Broadcasts

10 Best Respond.io Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

If the Respond tool is letting you down lately, then it may be time to start checking some Respond alternatives to keep your WhatsApp strategy up and running!

Selecting the right tools is essential for executing a high-performing WhatsApp marketing strategy that will give you the best possible return on investment (ROI). 

In this post, we’ll check 10 of the best alternatives to Respond that you can use, such as DelightChat, Gallabox, Timelines AI, Trengo & Tellephant to run your WhatsApp marketing & chat.

What is Respond.io?

Respond.io is a web-based messaging platform that connects customers from any channel to multiple teams — marketing, sales, support & engineering. The company is based in Hong Kong. 

Pricing:

They have a forever-free plan that allows you to send messages to up to 100 contacts and send 4 broadcasts per month and gives all the basic features. You can choose this when evaluating if this platform works for you or not. Paid plan starts from $29 a month (Pro). If you need advanced features & analytics for multi-team workflows you can choose Business Plan that starts from $79 per month. The highest plan is 399/month for enterprise clients. 

Pros:

  • It's easy to use, & has a user-friendly interface. 
  • Customer support is fast and responsive. 
  • You can create customer profiles with all messaging, web chat, SMS, and email interactions merged into a single place. This helps save the full context of a customer, irrespective of their mode of communication every time they messaged you. 
  • Respond.io has easy automation like tagging, assigning or auto-responding to messages. 

Cons:

  • The tools is aimed at enterprise clients so pricing can be a pinch in the pocket. 
  • When prospects are added twice, it doesn't recognise them as duplicates. This can lead to loss of context and reporting issues. 
  • The number of features provided has led to complexity of the system. This can be a bit overwhelming if all you want to do is stay connected to your audience via a few channels.

DelightChat

DelightChat is an Omnichannel Helpdesk + WhatsApp Marketing Software built for SME brands that enables them to deliver out-of-the-box customer service. It’s designed with a conversation-first approach that enables you to manage your store’s support & painlessly resolve customer queries - all from a single screen. 

Pros:

  • Omnichannel inbox that helps you manage WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails & Live Chat.
  • Complete WhatsApp Marketing suite - Send WhatsApp Broadcasts to your customer lists using Official API.
  • Get Official WhatsApp API access with free Green Tick application.
  • Automated WhatsApp notifications such as Abandoned Cart, Order Confirmation, Delivery Notifications & Cash on Delivery Order Verification.
  • DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen. No need to toggle between tabs, which leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours. 

Cons:

  • For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for other ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce.

Sign up today for free!

Trengo

Trengo is a tool that provides a multi-channel inbox that collates the messages from different channels like Email, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. into one inbox. It also helps you set up chatbots that work via WhatsApp, LiveChat, Messenger & Telegram.

Pricing:

All paid plans give you unlimited conversations. The paid plan starts from $18 per agent/month & 5 communication channels. The Scale plan for $29 per agent/month gives you 50 communication channels and additional features like stats and API. For $40 per agent/month, you get unlimited communication channels and IVR menus. 

You can take a 14-day free trial. No credit card is required. 

Pros:

  • Customer support is based in Europe and hence available for people worldwide since the timezone overlaps with most of the countries. 
  • It integrates well with various third-party systems such as Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, Magento, WeChat, Instagram, ExactOnline, etc.
  • Using Trengo, you can create a knowledge base that can be accessed by customers as well as service agents. This helps in the quick resolution of queries and leads to fewer tickets. 

Cons:

  • Checking the history of closed tickets that are opened again by a customer is not intuitive and leads to a loss of context which frustrates both the customer and the service agent. 
  • It doesn't have AI capabilities to keep improving the automated chat flow based on insights it gains from past interactions with customers. 
  • Automating conversations is charged extra and not part of the plan. This can make budgeting & billing a bit complicated.

SleekFlow

SleekFlow is tailored for businesses aiming to revolutionize automated, personalized customer engagement across various messaging channels. The platform enables swift interaction with customers via social chats, live chat, or SMS, consolidating all messaging channels into one comprehensive business messaging platform.

Pros:

  • Omnichannel Messaging Platform: Streamline your customer support, marketing, and sales engagement by consolidating messaging channels into a centralized platform. Respond to customer queries in real-time without the hassle of toggling between multiple platforms.
  • Lead Routing and Workflow Management: Implement lead routing to efficiently assign queries to the appropriate department, enhancing collaboration between sales and support teams. SleekFlow allows you to add labels to conversations, facilitating quick filtering and understanding of customer issues.
  • Flow Builder: Build auto-reply chatbots, route conversations, enable marketing automation, and integrate with external software using our visual flow builder. Automate complex, multi-step tasks without any coding.
  • SleekFlow AI: Assimilate knowledge from multiple sources, such as your help center, website, and CRM system, to provide prompt service, recommend personalized products, and track orders and bookings automatically.
  • Tagging and Labelling: Enhance organization by adding multiple tags to each conversation and profile. Whether marking a profile as "VIP" or tagging a conversation as "failed payment," SleekFlow provides a versatile tagging system to categorize and prioritize customer interactions.
  • Shared Inbox and Team Collaboration: The shared inbox isn't just for communicating with customers; it also fosters collaboration among team members. Directly message colleagues, add internal notes, and collaborate on various queries within the platform.
  • Social CRM Tool: SleekFlow excels as a social customer relationship management tool. Tag profiles, create workflows, and manage the entire customer journey efficiently.
  • Mobile App: With SleekFlow you can check your messages on the go with the mobile app for both iOS or Android. This helps teams to better manage conversations or efficiently respond even if not in front of a laptop.

Cons:

  • Learning Curve: Users may experience a learning curve while adapting to the platform's comprehensive features and functionalities.
  • Limited Integrations: SleekFlow's integration options may be limited compared to some competitors, which could be a drawback for businesses requiring extensive third-party integrations.

Novochat

NovoChat is a marketing solution built for e-commerce businesses. It allows you to connect multiple messaging channels — WhatsApp Business, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and LINE — in a single app. 

It provides WhatsApp automation, broadcast messages, a multi-channel inbox, and a multi-channel website widget. It can be integrated with Shopify & EasyStore. They plan to launch segmentation features soon. 

Pricing:

There are 4 pricing plans — The Solo plan for $7/month gives you 750 messages per month. The Starter plan for $20 per month gives you 3,000 messages. The Pro plan for $60/month gives you 9000 messages per month and the Business plan for $200/month gives you 40,000 messages per month. The number of features you get also changes with each plan. 

You can get a 7-day free trial. No credit card is required. 

Pros:

  • You can Create auto-responses, set business hours, and invite multiple agents to your workspace.
  • It gives you advanced campaign and automation metrics to see the impact your messages are making on your revenue. 
  • You can personalize bulk messages by uploading a CSV. file with a custom message for each individual contact.
  • With some providers, you’ll have to register a new WhatsApp Business number. But with NovoChat, you can keep your current WhatsApp Business number. 

Cons:

  • Customer support can be tricky to access as they don't have their email or phone clearly displayed anywhere.
  • Novochat doesn't have integration with many apps except Shopify and EasySend. This can be limiting if you need to transfer data between apps or need to automate workflows.

Read on: Learn about the best NovoChat alternatives for your business.

Kapture CRM

Kapture CRM is a tool for customer service & sales teams to help them keep in touch with customers & resolve their queries. Main features include auto assigning tickets, chat history, call recording, custom permissions, and an analytic dashboard. It also provides a self-service portal & AI-based chat. 

Pricing:

Cheapest pricing plan is $35 per user/month & has limited features. The second plan is for $50 per user/month and gives you features like custom API, reports, chats, and 24/7 support. The Enterprise plan starts from $90 per user/month. 

Kapture CRM offers a 30-day free trial. No credit card is required. 

Pros:

  • There's a 24/7 support team to help you get unstuck and overcome any issues you might be facing. 
  • You can create custom reports and configure your analytics dashboard to show the metrics that matter to you. 
  • You can integrate the tool with your logistics partners to see the product status (in transit/delivered) without leaving the Kapture CRM tool.

Cons:

  • It can get pretty expensive for small and medium-sized companies that don't need complicated features. 
  • The UI/UX is not very intuitive making the tool difficult to use without demos. 
  • It lacks chat templates and workflow templates that would be useful to get started.

Yellow AI

Yellow Messenger is a platform that allows you to build chatbots to respond to customer queries via human-like chatbots across voice and text communication channels. It integrates with the most popular tools like SalesForce, SAP, AEM, Zendesk, and channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Assistant, Emails, etc.

Pricing:

Yellow AI provides bespoke pricing based on multiple parameters —  Volume of the conversations, channels to be connected & integrations required. When you sign up for a 12-month chatbot contract, you can get 3 months of chatbot free.

Pros:

  • You can train the chatbots in one language and launch them in 100+ languages without translation and re-training.
  • It integrates with the most popular tools like SalesForce, SAP, AEM, Zendesk, and channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Assistant, Emails, etc.
  • The majority of the incoming messages are handled by the bot itself. Interactions that absolutely require human interactions are routed to the support team.
  • Customer segmentation can be done easily.

Cons:

  • They make it tough to migrate to other tools as they hold your WhatsApp number. 
  • Past customers have reported outages in the system very often. That can ruin your SLAs. 
  • Design can be improved for better usability and aesthetics, especially on the report, and mobile app side.

Read on: Learn about the best Yellow AI alternatives for your business.

Verloop

Verloop is an automation platform that offers customer support and engagement. It provides omnichannel support on the website, in-app, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Viber, and more. 

Main features include acquiring leads through chatbots, engaging customers with conversation AI, multilingual bots, syncing data and automated workflows, a dashboard for detailed insights, automated flows such as abandoned cart sequence, & much more. 

Pricing:

Pricing information is not available on their website & hence you'll need to contact them directly to talk about it. 

Pros:

  • It allows you to integrate your own inbuilt CRM with Verloop which helps in generating more leads. Integration with Zapier and CRMs make it easy to get the leads' info from your chats to other tools. 
  • You can design a bot to automatically greet website visitors and qualify them as a lead, and if needed design triggers for your team to take over the conversation.

Cons:

  • Adding quick response and configuring chat transfer based on the agents' regions can take some time.
  • Analytics are basic and not enough to drive key marketing insights. 
  • The user interface has a learning curve and it's not aesthetically very pleasing that can make customer support a tad bit boring. 
  • There's no mobile app to stay connected to customers on the go. 
  • Pricing is not displayed upfront.

Haptik

Haptik is an AI-based conversational platform that helps you implement chat bots on websites, mobile apps, and messaging channels. Their features cater to industries like retail and e-commerce, financial services, travel and hospitality, and telecom. It offers a voice-enabled W that works as a shopping assistant answering FAQs, helping with transactions and order tracking. 

Pricing:

Pricing is given through a custom quote based on your requirements. For that, you'll have to get in touch with their sales team or book a demo. 

Pros:

  • You can setup one-time or recurring bulk campaigns. 
  • You can add a frictionless 3-click UPI payment experience on WhatsApp using Haptik.
  • It provides a chatbot to respond to follow-up queries on WhatsApp. Product recommendations can be sent directly on WhatsApp. 
  • It offers a hybrid of translation & custom native language. You can choose from Hindi, Spanish, Tamil, Gujarati, Hinglish & many other languages. 

Cons:

  • Pricing is not available upfront. It can take time to judge whether it fits your budget or not. The pricing would likely not suit an SMB. 
  • Conversational flows can be rigid and difficult to change to suit a particular use case. 
  • To perform minor tasks like editing or adding/designing flows, copies changes you'll have to get in touch with the customer success team & can't be done on your own.

Timelines

Timelines is a shared inbox tool for Whatsapp communications. It helps multiple team members collaborate in answering customer queries through one or multiple WhatsApp numbers. It also allows you to send bulk replies. It provides Zapier, Hubspot & Pipedrive integration. 

Pricing:

Paid plans start from $10/seat. It doesn't allow you to set quick replies or export and import contacts. For these additional features, you can take the $30/seat plan. Custom quotes can be created by getting in touch with their team. 

You can get a 10-day free trial. No credit card is required. 

Pros:

  • It loads the chat conversation with a customer from the time before you started using Timelines. This helps preserve the context of the chat with the customer. 
  • Features like adding comments to specific messages, tagging team members, putting comments, and making delegation with a few clicks help in the quick resolution of queries. 
  • You can add alerts and reminders to individual messages if you want to get back to a message later on after gathering some more information.  

Cons:

  • The interface is not very intuitive and can be clunky. 
  • It doesn't support sending files or audio messages to clients. This can be limiting if you need to explain something without getting on the call. 
  • Existing customers have reported that connectivity issues can cause a bit of frustration.

Read on: Learn about the best TimelinesAI alternatives for your business.

Gallabox

Gallabox helps businesses generate more leads, and grow sales through WhatsApp Business APIs, chatbots, and multi-agent shared inboxes.

Pricing:

Pricing starts from $40/month for the Growth plan that gives you 5 users & is ideal for small businesses. There is a Scale plan that is $75 per month. It gives you 10 users and is ideal for businesses that require advanced conversational flow. The Pro plan costs $130, gives you 20 users, & is ideal for businesses that need advanced bot flows, & integration with multiple platforms.

Pros:

  • The main benefit of using Gallabox is that it doesn't require any coding skills to set it up and integrate with the tools you already use.
  • It automatically assigns conversations to agents. Agents can also 'claim' a live conversation and assign it to themselves.
  • Features like customer grouping, tagging, and adding notes to conversations help a business deliver a great customer experience.
  • Integrated well with Shopify and WooCommerce.

Cons:

  • Chat analytics can be better with information on more metrics.
  • There is no product catalog feature so you can't showcase your products directly in the chat and need to use a link to redirect leads to the website.

Tellephant 

Tellephant is a WhatsApp Business Solution that provides WhatsApp API, bulk messaging, templates, and simple chatbots. 

Pricing:

Paid plan starts from $29/month that offers 1000 Free Conversations & $0.010 per Conversation. At $99/month you can get 1000 Free Conversations & you will pay $0.006 per Conversation. 

It offers a 30-day free trial. No credit card is required to signup. 

Pros:

  • You can set up automated messages to recover abandon carts, inform customers about shipping details, etc.
  • Integrations are quite useful. It integrates well with Google Sheets, ZOHO, and Salesforce. On the payment side, it integrates well with RazorPay, Google Pay, and PayPal. It also integrates with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, or Magento. With the payment gateway integrations, like Razorpay, Gpay, and Paypal, you can send payment requests directly to customers in chat. 
  • It can assign tickets to agents based on the logic you choose. Agents can transfer tickets among other agents.

Cons:

  • It lacks a visual dashboard for showing analytics to give you a picture of how chatbots and WhatsApp marketing are performing. 
  • There is no feature to create canned responses that can be used for quick replies.

We hope our research helped you find the best Respond.io alternative for your business.

Read on: Learn about the best WhatsApp marketing software to help grow your business.

DelightChat: Manage WhatsApp Support + Marketing

Does it feel overwhelming to add one more channel of communication to your business? Well, you don't have to feel that way because of the tools like DelightChat that help manage all support channels & customer queries from one dashboard.

To scale your customer service using WhatsApp, give DelightChat a try. It is a customer service tool tailor-made for ecommerce brands. We also help brands grow their revenues profitably via WhatsApp Marketing!

With DelightChat, you get:

  • Shared inbox to manage WhatsApp, Instagram, FB, Email & Live Chat queries
  • Smart automations, ability to reply quickly using templates, easy team collaboration on support queries
  • Official WhatsApp Business API
  • WhatsApp Marketing features like sending broadcasts to customer lists
  • Marketing automation like abandoned cart, order notifications, upsell & cross-sell, more

Sign up today to get a personalized demo!

Streamline Customer Support & Boost Revenues with DelightChat
Easily manage all your customer interactions - WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails, & Live Chat - from one efficient omnichannel inbox.

Increase your sales with powerful WhatsApp Marketing: Promotional Broadcasts, Abandoned Cart Recovery, advanced Customer Segments and more, all through the Official API.

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