HubSpot vs. Intercom

HubSpot’s CRM platform has been crafted in-house with software for service, sales, marketing, web, and operations teams, plus over a thousand integrations. The platform, built around the customer record, combines power with ease-of-use for a complete view of the customer journey and seamless handoffs between marketing, sales, and service teams. The result? A superior experience for customers throughout their journey.

Intercom offers customer communication solutions for a number of front-office teams. Their Conversational Support package helps bolster customer support teams, and can be connected to your businesses’ CRM. Teams using Intercom and similar solutions gain potential independence from the technology being used by marketing and sales, but lack a shared view of the customer and common interface.

HubSpot Service Hub includes customer portal and knowledge base software in its Professional and Enterprise tiers. Multilingual support and SEO tools are built right in to help your knowledge base articles rank well, and anyone can build reports and dashboards to measure the impact of each page over time. Customers will appreciate how easy it is to find help, and the added transparency of a fully customizable customer portal to track ticket statuses will put them at ease. Connected to your shared inbox, the customer portal keeps ticket conversations going between customers and reps, fostering a positive and helpful relationship.

Intercom also incorporates help center articles into Conversational Support, leaning more heavily on chat recommendations than organic search. While there is no customer portal feature, help centers are customizable and can be adjusted to your business’s needs. Similar to HubSpot, Intercom allows users to easily build and organize articles for use in a variety of channels and settings.

HubSpot is obsessed with the success of our customers, which is why we’ve taken a multifaceted approach that incorporates our in-house support team, a world-class HubSpot Academy, and extensive documentation and how-to guides in our own knowledge base. We’ve also invested in an intuitive interface that’s easy to adopt and customize.

Intercom offers basic support to all customers, as well as paid options for more demanding customers. Premier Support includes better response times and escalation options, while Premier Success and Premier Onboarding help with training and education. Intercom offers some web-based training and essential documentation, but with a more narrowly focused set of topics. 

HubSpot offers over 1,000 applications in its directory, including over 100 applications dedicated to service. The most installed customer service applications are Facebook Messenger, SurveyMonkey, and Intercom. Moreover, HubSpot also boasts a sophisticated partner network with over 6,000 solutions partners and providers and many service-specific courses within HubSpot Academy. HubSpot encourages customers to build on our platform, with APIs that enable greater customization when needed.

Because Intercom needs to integrate with other systems to provide a complete view of the customer, it boasts a large app store with many natively built applications. While the Intercom app store is smaller than HubSpot’s, Intercom does offer powerful APIs to build an integration between Intercom’s customer communications platform with any tool of your choice.

HubSpot offers customization at every scale, from individual preferences and the user interface to custom dashboards shared across your team to tailored objects used by the entire business. Service Hub offers customization without complexity, another benefit of HubSpot’s intuitive functionality and thorough documentation.

Intercom specializes in messaging customization specifically, with a wide range of options for service leaders to configure. For chat customization, both HubSpot and Intercom tools offer in-app chat, a mobile SDK, and highly customizable branding.

HubSpot Service Hub Starter pricing begins at $45 per month (including two seats). Three paid tiers (as well as free tools) ensure that your business can get started on HubSpot and continue to grow for years to come. 

Intercom’s Starter package for very small businesses, which includes some of the same tools as the company’s Conversational Support product, starts at $74/mo. Conversational Support pricing for “most businesses” is not listed publicly.

Intercom pricing current as of 18 March 2022 (source).