Olark vs Messagely
Olark may not be as big a player as, say, FreshChat or Drift, but it’s still pretty well-known in the live chat and customer messaging space. The company was co-founded by Ben Congleton, Roland Osborne, and Andrew Fayad in 2007, and it’s currently serving 12,000+ customers worldwide.
Since inception, Olark quickly carved out a name for itself, and the company now employs 30+ employees over three continents. The team at Olark prides itself on diversity of thought and wwsbackgrounds, and team members are committed to constantly pushing themselves to be better, more inclusive, and more human. According to estimates, Olark has facilitated over 52 million chats online, and makes about $5M in revenue yearly.
It’s important to give your customers a great experience, and support them throughout their customer journey; that much is obvious. When it comes to chatting with your customers and supporting them, should Olark be your go-to tool, or does Messagely bring more value to the table? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Olark? Factors to consider.
Chatbots
Customer messaging
Price
In this guide, we walk you through the pros and cons of Olark and Messagely across three different factors: chatbots, customer messaging, and price. After assessing both tools in these categories, you’ll have all the information you need to make a decision as to whether Messagely is a worthy Olark alternative.
Chatbots
The way we see it, chatbots are an absolute godsend to sales, marketing, and customer support teams. These bots help to automate all the tedious, manual tasks that, quite frankly, aren’t worth your effort. This frees up your time, and allows you to focus on fine-tuning campaigns and improving strategies.
Now, Olark is a pretty bare-bones live chat tool, and it doesn’t come with any sort of chatbot functionality. If you use Olark, you’ll either have to pay for a standalone chatbot tool, or miss out on the huge benefits that chatbots bring to the table.
Messagely, on the other hand, comes with chatbots which help to acquire and support customers. To capture more leads at the top of your funnel, use Messagely’s sales bots to qualify prospects and schedule meetings. To keep your existing customers happy, set up a support chatbot on your site that can answer customer enquiries, 24/7. Now that’s what they call working smart.
Customer messaging
If you’re using a live chat tool to connect with consumers browsing your website, that’s a step in the right direction. By why stop there, when you could be reaching out to your customers across multiple channels and touchpoints?
Because Olark only allows you to chat with your customers on your website, it’s highly limited in its use cases. Sure, you can prompt a website visitor to schedule a product demo or answer customer enquiries on your site, but that’s about it. Messagely, on the other hand, opens up a world of possibilities. With Messagely, you can easily reach out to your customers across multiple channels and touchpoints, including in-app, email, text messages, and more.
If you want to walk a new user through an onboarding sequence, and trigger a series of onboarding emails to them, you can use Messagely to do that. If you want to reach out to a customer that’s not actively using your app, and stop them from churning, you can use Messagely to do that, too. In a nutshell, Messagely allows you to engage new and existing users, and take care of customers throughout their entire lifecycle.
Price
Unless your company has got particularly deep pockets (or it’s backed by an investor who does), you’ll probably look at price as an important factor. At the basic level, you’re obviously looking for a tool that’s affordable, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. On top of that, it’s also important to ensure that your tool comes with transparent pricing plans, and that there aren’t any hidden costs tacked on to your contract.
When it comes to transparency, customers generally have no complaints with both Olark and Messagely. Olark has a straightforward paid plan that gets more affordable the longer you commit; you’ll pay $17 per agent per month for plans billed monthly, $15 for plans billed yearly, or $12 for plans billed once in two years. Then there’s Messagely, which has three tiers for its paid plan. Messagely users either pay $29, $49 or $79 per month based on the features they need. Additional users are charged at $15, $20, or $25 per month.
At first glance, it seems as though Olark is more affordable – but this is only the case if you’re looking solely for a live chat tool, and you’re not in the market for chatbots, customer messaging tools, knowledge bases, etc. For those who want to use Olark in conjunction with other tools, you’ll find it more cost-effective to sign up for Messagely, which comes with in-built chatbots, customer messaging, and more.
To be specific: say you pay $17 for Olark’s plan (billed per month), and an additional $50 each for your chatbot, customer messaging, and knowledge base tool. This works out to $167 per month, which is more than double the price of Messagely’s $79 per month. By using Messagely’s all-in-one platform, you’re also saving yourself the trouble of setting up your integrations, and syncing your data back and forth.
At the end of the day, Olark and Messagely are two different beasts. Olark is a bare-bones live chat tool, and it’s highly limited in its scope and use cases. Messagely, on the other hand, is an all-in-one platform that delivers a lot more functionality.
For this reason, we’d say that Messagely has proven itself to be a worthy Olark alternative, and it’s our recommended option for companies who want to optimize their operations, and scale their growth quickly.
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