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Best Chat Software for B2B Sales and Marketing: A Comparative

Illustrator: Jana Pérez
best chat software

Spot On Vision, a Dutch company with over a decade of expertise in helping B2B companies develop meaningful conversations with their customers, put together a detailed comparative overview of best chat software for sales and marketing. To help you make the right decision, we are bringing you the translation of the original analysis comparing Landbot, Drift, Intercom, and LiveChat.

Are you a B2B organization looking for the best B2B chat software to empower your conversational marketing? We have listed and compared a number of key players. Below you can find the comparison of the main functionalities, prices, and G2 ratings for Drift, Intercom, LiveChat, and Landbot.io.

Drift: Connect Your Sales Teams With Your Future Customers NOW

drift-chat-software comparison

Drift is a conversational marketing platform, for both live chat and intelligent, automated chatbots. It offers many useful marketing and sales features currently used by 55,000 companies.

Drift’s main features include:

  • Live chat for real-time communication with customers;
  • Chatbots for automated conversations;
  • Appointments bookings directly in a chat window;
  • Conversation routing for transferring conversations to the right employee;
  • Conversational content for continuing the conversation when a customer interacts with a PDF of, for example, an e-book;
  • Account-based marketing for recognizing target accounts when they visit your website so that you can start an appropriate conversation;
  • Drift Video for recording and sharing sales and demo videos;

What Makes Drift Unique?

What makes Drift unique is its focus on B2B marketing and sales departments. It enables you to convert more website visitors, shorten the sales funnel, and so, get more sales from your marketing and sales activities.

Drift is an excellent option for sales-oriented organizations. For instance, you can integrate the calendars of your sales employees with the chats to automatically schedule appointments and forward conversations directly to them.

You can also use the account-based-marketing functionality, which allows you to recognize target companies when they visit your website. This enables you to roll out the red carpet for key accounts, by kicking off with an appropriate automated conversation. In addition, the ABM functionality automatically sends a notification to the account manager when a target account visits your website. This way, this employee is able to immediately take over the conversation from the bot and turn it into a live chat.

Is Drift Best Chat Software for Your Business?

Given its marketing and sales team-oriented features and the unique account-based marketing functionalities, Drift is best suited for large sales-oriented companies and enterprises.

Intercom: Deliver Great Experiences, No Matter What

intercom-chat-software

Intercom supports three main goals: lead generation, customer engagement, and customer support. The packages that you can purchase from Intercom contain different combinations of these three pillars. Today, more than 33,000 companies use Intercom.

The main features of this chat software include:

  • Business Messenger for real-time communication with leads and customers on your website or in the app;
  • Conversation routing for transferring conversations to the right employee;
  • Team Inbox to manage the different conversations you have on your website, in the app or on social media;
  • Outbound Messages for sending drip campaigns or manually sending communications via chat, e-mail, or push notifications.

Where Drift really focuses on marketing and sales, Intercom is originally more of a customer support tooling, which has expanded its portfolio with marketing and sales functionalities.

What Makes Intercom Unique?

Intercom is one of the best messenger tools on the market for customer support. By using Intercom, you can drastically reduce the workload of support teams. Think of automating routine tasks and forwarding support requests to the right employee. You can also use the chat functionality to convert website visitors and shorten the sales funnel. A truly unique feature of Intercom is Product Tours, which allows you to help customers learn all about your product with interactive tours.

Is Intercom Best Chat Software for Your Business?

Just like Drift, the functionalities that Intercom offers are the most interesting for large and enterprise businesses. Are you looking for a total solution for both marketing, sales, and customer support? Then Intercom is an interesting option.

LiveChat – Connect With Customers

livechat-connect customers

LiveChat is a premium live chat and help desk software specially designed and built to deliver excellent customer service. Today, Live chat is used by over 27,000 companies.

The main features of LiveChat software are:

  • Live chat software for real-time communication with customers;
  • Automated chat greetings for engaging website visitors;
  • Conversation routing for transferring conversations to the right employee;
  • Ticketing system for managing support requests;
  • Agent groups for assigning support requests to the appropriate teams.

What Makes LiveChat Unique?

A feature that sets LiveChat apart from its competition is the ticketing system coupled with the chat functionality. Offline messages go directly to this channel and can then be handled by support teams with different statuses (open, pending, resolved).

In addition, LiveChat makes it possible to see what a customer is typing before they send a message in real-time

Is LiveChat Best Chat Software for Your Business?

LiveChat is suited for both medium and large companies looking for a premium customer support solution. Its largest clients include PayPal, IKEA, and Adobe.

Landbot.io: The Most Intuitive No Code Chatbot Builder

Landbot-chatbot builder and manger

Landbot positions itself as a no-code chatbot builder. It enables companies to convert website visitors into leads, qualify them, and export any collected data to the various marketing tools already used by the business. Today, over 50,000 companies use Landbot to power their communications.

The main features of Landbot chat software include:

  • Conversational web pages for providing a unique user experience, converting website visitors, and personalizing the customer journey in real-time;
  • Live chat solution for real-time communication with customers;
  • Chatbots for automated conversations;
  • B2B setup for integrating web bots with your WhatsApp channels and Facebook Messenger;
  • Conversation routing for transferring conversations to the right employee.

What Makes Landbot Unique?

In addition to developing automated chat conversations for your website, Landbot also allows you to create bots for your WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger channels. What also makes Landbot unique is that you can build an entire conversational website with the tool and do so without coding. This functionality really stands out, compared to the other suppliers.

Is Landbot Best Chat Software for Your Business?

Just like Drift, Intercom, and LiveChat, Landbot is also suitable for companies for large businesses. However, the subscription plan prices are a lot friendlier which makes Landbot an interesting solution also for smaller companies or companies with a limited budget, who would like to embrace conversational marketing.

Comparison Table: The Key Functionalities and Integrations

best chat software feature comparison

All solutions give you the possibility to integrate via a tool like Zapier to different marketing and sales solutions if there is no native integration present/available. It’s possible that not all the data is transferable with other systems which would be possible via a built-in or API integration. Take this into consideration.

Comparison Table: Pricing and Plans

best chat software pricing

G2 Ratings

best chat sofware G2 rating drift, intercom, livechat, landbot

In a Nutshell…

Despite being the news player among the reviewed chat software solutions, Landbot is more than holding its ground not just regarding the variety of features but also thanks to the pricing which makes it accessible to a variety of businesses.

While our strongest suit includes:

  • Channel manager that makes it easier to manage bots across a variety of channels

We are continually working on an array of features and improvements largely based on customer feedback. For instance, summer 2020 will bring new integrations such as Zoom, Calendly, and Airtable as well as improvements to the user interface including a renovated built-in metrics section and a central integration manager dashboard to help you keep a general overview of integrations across all bots and channels in one place!