Front vs Messagely
Front was founded in 2013 by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin; in the startup’s early days, both co-founders worked out of Paris. In 2014, Front officially moved its headquarters to San Francisco, and launched with the backing of US seed accelerator Y Combinator. In 2016, Front raised a $10M Series A round led by Social Capital, and in 2018, it further raised $66M in a Series B led by Sequoia Capital.
Independent investors such as Stewart Butterfield (co-founder and CEO of Slack) and Jason Lemkin (founder of SaaStr) have also put money in Front. Today, Front powers more than 5,000 businesses around the world with a team of 100 employees and counting. Front is reportedly growing at 10% month on month, and the company hit its $1M revenue benchmark back in 2015.
Front is definitely a huge contender in the team communications space; it’s also endorsed by many big-time investors and venture capitalist firms. But is Front the best tool for a team that needs to collaborate more effectively to scale up its operations? Or do other tools such as Messagely bring more value to the table? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Front? Factors to consider.
Price
Scope of tool
Features
Price
When you’re evaluating and shortlisting various software or tools, you’ll definitely want to keep price in mind. After determining your budget, go ahead and look for a tool that’s affordable, and doesn’t charge exorbitantly. Here, be sure to read all the fine print and clauses carefully, so that you don’t fall prey to hidden costs that companies sometimes tack on to their plans.
Firstly, Front offers its customers four different price plans, and prices for each plan vary based on features and how often you want to be billed. For Pro plans and Max plans, you’re looking at $39 and $79 per user billed yearly. Note that if you want to be billed on a monthly basis, the price increases pretty significantly; you’re forking out $49 and $99 instead. If you’re going with the Max plan and you have 10 users, for instance, this translates into an additional $200 that you’re getting billed per month, JUST for paying monthly instead of yearly.
Next, Messagely offers three different plans which are priced at $29, $49, and $79 per user. These prices are standard, regardless of whether customers choose to pay per year or per month. If you want to add additional users on Messagely, the company charges you a reduced rate of $15 to $25 per additional user. For small startups and one-man-shows, the difference might not amount to much, but bigger teams will definitely find Messagely a more cost-effective solution.
Scope of tool
Pop quiz: is it preferable to use a tool that does just one thing, or a tool that you can use to meet several business needs? The latter, of course. At the end of the day, it’s much better to have a single platform that allows you to collaborate with your team members AND takes care of all your customer acquisition, engagement and support needs (rather than using several platforms to do the same thing).
Yes, it’s true that most team communication tools come with integrations these days, but it takes time and effort to set up these integrations, and make sure that all your data is getting synced. If you ask us, it’s a lot easier to use an all-in-one-tool to collaborate with your team and serve your customers at the same time. Using a single tool also helps you keep track of your key metrics, and identify patterns and insights more easily.
When it comes to scope, Front is primarily a team communications tool that helps you communicate with your team and follow up more effectively. It does its job well, but it’s highly limited in terms of use cases. With Messagely, however, it’s a different story.
Apart from providing you with team inboxes, Messagely also comes with all the features and functions you need to acquire, engage and retain your customers. With Messagely, you can upsell customers on free trials and convert them to paid users, re-engage users and retain them, and even support customers. Basically, we cover all your bases (sales, engagement, and support), and make it easy for you to take care of customers throughout their entire lifecycle.
Features
In terms of features, Messagely blows Front out of the water. Front is basically just a shared inbox for teams, and while it does come with several cool features, these features are only useful in the context of team communications.
How does Messagely compare? First and foremost, Messagely also comes with built-in team inboxes, complete with advanced features such as canned responses, auto-routing, tagging, permission setting and more. But Messagely isn’t just a shared inbox; it’s also a chatbot + livechat + helpdesk + knowledge base tool, all in one.
You can do so much more with Messagely, including automatically qualifying leads, scheduling meetings, and setting up onboarding campaigns to ensure that your new users reach that “Aha!” moment. Think of it this way: If Front can help you do A, Messagely can help you go from A to Z in ten seconds flat.
While Front is a pretty decent tool in the context of team communications, it pales in comparison to Messagely, which is an all-in-one platform that helps you acquire, engage and support customers.
In an era where consumers have more choice than ever, it’s crucial for companies to utilize feature-rich tools such as Messagely to do more with less. This way, they can collaborate more effectively with their teams, supercharge their interactions with their customers, and take customer satisfaction to a whole new level.
Our take? Messagely is a worthy Frontapp alternative – one that’s worth switching to.
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