Tag: software

Top Free Shared Calendar Apps for Business | Best Shareable & Group Calendar Solutions

Business owners should consistently seek out technology that can enhance the productivity of their business and employees. While computers and smartphones offer built-in calendar functions, they may not always be the optimal choice for you or your business. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternative options available. Shared calendar apps, for instance, facilitate seamless collaboration with colleagues and simplify the process of scheduling meetings.

A calendar serves as a vital tool for small business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. An efficiently organized calendar is essential for staying on top of your commitments and knowing where you need to be and what you need to accomplish. Unless you operate in an extremely fast-paced industry, chances are you’ll have to schedule important calls days or even weeks in advance. To ensure that you remain available during critical times, you require a reliable system—relying on your memory alone won’t suffice, which is where your calendar becomes invaluable.

Effectively managing the time and tasks of your remote team is equally crucial, just as it is for any other team. You want to make your remote team feel like integral parts of your organization and demonstrate their significance in the grand scheme of things. Keeping things simple is key to motivating them, avoiding scheduling conflicts, and optimizing productivity. While we’ll touch on only a few pointers here, let’s delve into some of the top shared calendar tools that can help you organize, lead, and maintain the productivity, morale, and inspiration of your remote team.

Top Shared Calendar Apps in 2025

With all this in mind, we’re going to have a look at some of the best shared online calendar and scheduling apps available.

S.No	Calendar App	Pricing	Key Features
1	Google Calendar	Free	Cross-platform sync, event sharing, reminders, integration with Google apps
2	Calendly	Free plan available; Paid plans from $10/month	Automated meeting scheduling, timezone detection, calendar integration
3	Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar	Free with Outlook; Paid via Microsoft 365 from $6.99/month	Email and calendar integration, shared calendars, task management
4	Asana	Free plan available; Paid plans from $10.99/month	Project management, task scheduling, team collaboration tools
5	Apple’s iCloud Calendar	Free with Apple ID; Paid iCloud+ from $0.99/month	iOS/macOS integration, event sharing, family calendar sharing
6	Calendar	Free plan available; Paid plans from $8/month	AI scheduling, analytics, multiple calendar integration
7	Teamup	Free plan available; Paid plans from $8/month	Color-coded sub-calendars, no-login access for participants, centralized scheduling
8	TimeTree	Free	Shared calendars, event chat, multiple calendar views for families/groups
9	Toggl Plan	Free plan available; Paid plans from $9/month	Visual project planning, drag-and-drop scheduling, task assignments
10	Fantastical Calendar	Free plan available; Premium from $4.99/month	Natural language event creation, weather integration, multiple account sync

Google Calendar
Calendly
Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar
Asana
Apple’s iCloud Calendar
Calendar
Teamup
TimeTree
Toggl Plan
Fantastical Calendar

Google Calendar

Name	Google Calendar
Rating	4.8 out of 5
Free Trial	Completely Free
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Personal use, work, and business

By default, Google Calendar stands out as the premier shared calendar app online. It’s the go-to choice for many users, particularly if you simply need an online calendar. There are almost no reasons not to opt for it. With Google Calendar, you have the flexibility to maintain a public work calendar visible to everyone in the office, as well as a private one exclusively shared between you and your co-founder. You can personalize it to suit your preferences and needs. Additionally, Google Calendar can serve as the backend for any other calendar you wish to utilize. With services like IFTTT, you can easily sync your reminders, memos, and various other items to your Google Calendar.

One of the standout features of Google Calendar is its platform agnosticism. You can access it from any web browser, making it accessible to teams using different devices. Rest assured that everyone will be able to use it seamlessly. It is one of the best and free calendar sharing app. Moreover, Google Calendar is available for free as part of everyone’s Google Account. If you’re already subscribed to Google Apps for running your email on your domain, Google Calendar is included in the package, so you’re already paying for its benefits.

How to Use Google Calendar?

Google Calendar Pricing

Google Calendar is Free to use.

Calendly

Name	Calendly
Rating	4.7 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Meeting and Appointment Scheduling

Calendly is a sophisticated scheduling software designed to streamline the process of arranging meetings. By seamlessly integrating with your calendar, it automates the task of checking your availability, reducing the need for extensive email exchanges. Its notable features include the ability to incorporate buffer time between meetings, automatic time zone detection, compatibility with popular apps like 0, GoToMeeting, and Zapier, as well as its scalability to accommodate growing teams.

Calendly offers both a free and a paid version. With the free version, you can utilize one category for scheduling, while the paid version enables you to set up multiple categories. Additionally, the paid version allows you to personalize the URL for a more customized experience. One particularly favored feature of Calendly is its seamless synchronization with Google Calendar. You can schedule personal appointments directly in Google Calendar without the need to update your schedule on Calendly separately. Moreover, the program integrates smoothly with Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud calendars, further enhancing its versatility and compatibility.

Calendly Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Basic	Free	Free
Essential	$8/seat/month	$10/seat/month
Professional	$12/seat/month	$15/seat/month
Teams	$16/seat/month	$20/seat/month

Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar

Name	Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar
Rating	4.5 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Official Work and Business

Outlook emerges as a significant rival to Google Calendar, particularly in the business realm, owing to its widespread usage and familiarity. With Outlook, users who have an Exchange, Office 365, or Outlook account can effortlessly share their calendars with others. Additionally, it allows the creation of separate calendars for specific projects, which can be shared with colleagues. Outlook’s calendar functionality closely resembles that of Google Calendar, but it goes the extra mile in certain aspects.

One notable advantage of Outlook is its seamless integration with the email app, enabling users to conveniently view both their calendar and emails in one unified interface. Furthermore, the integration with the broader Office suite enhances productivity by enabling the sharing of attachments directly from OneDrive, accessing contacts, and viewing LinkedIn profiles.

However, the primary drawback of Outlook lies in its pricing. It is bundled as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 subscriptions, which start at $5/month/user. This can be considered a significant investment for a new calendar app, especially when there are competent free alternatives available in the market.

Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar Pricing

Microsoft Outlook Calendar is a part of the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools. Here are the available subscription options:

Plan	Yearly Price
Microsoft 365 Business Basic	$5 per user per month
Microsoft 365 Business Standard	$12.50 per user per month
Microsoft 365 Business Premium	$20 per user per month

Asana

Name	Asana
Rating	4.5 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Organizing work across teams

Asana surpasses the functionality of a typical shared calendar app by offering comprehensive project and task management capabilities. While it includes calendar features, it goes beyond that to facilitate seamless team collaboration and project organization. The Timeline feature in Asana provides a holistic view of every aspect of a project, allowing you to understand how all the pieces fit together and enabling effective change tracking. Moreover, Asana boasts a mobile app and offers integration with over 100 other tools and platforms, enhancing its versatility and adaptability.

It’s important to note that 0is not solely focused on providing a calendar function. It serves as a comprehensive enterprise resource planner, encompassing various collaboration tools alongside its shared calendar functionality, making it a robust solution for managing projects and fostering team collaboration.

Asana Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Basic	US$0	US$0
Premium	US$10.99	US$13.49
Business	US$24.99	US$30.49

Apple’s iCloud Calendar

Name	Apple’s iCloud Calendar
Rating	4.7 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Personal use and work

iCloud goes beyond being a mere storage service, as it offers a user-friendly calendar that seamlessly integrates with all Apple devices. The iCloud calendar app facilitates efficient scheduling, information sharing, and communication among team members. Additionally, you can quickly switch to the “Today” view to get a comprehensive overview of your daily tasks and projects with a single glance. The functionality of iCloud’s calendar is intuitive and closely resembles that of Google Calendar, making it a favored choice among users.

However, there is one drawback to consider with this app: Similar to other Apple products, it may experience a loss of functionality when used on non-Apple devices. Therefore, while this calendar app remains a solid choice, it is particularly well-suited for teams that exclusively utilize Apple products.

Apple’s iCloud Calendar Pricing

Apple’s iCloud Calendar is part of the iCloud service offered by Apple. The pricing for iCloud Calendar depends on the storage plan you choose. Here are the available storage options and corresponding prices:

Plan	Price
5 GB of storage	Free
50 GB of storage	$0.99 per month
200 GB of storage	$2.99 per month
2 TB of storage	$9.99 per month

Calendar

Name	Calendar
Rating	4.7 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Personal use, business and work

Calendar is a highly adaptable calendar solution designed to meet the needs of today’s fast-paced and globally dispersed teams. Leveraging the power of machine learning, Calendar offers intelligent suggestions for optimal meeting times, locations, and formats. It simplifies collaboration and connectivity for global teams by seamlessly handling availability across different time zones. Moreover, Calendar’s advanced algorithms intelligently categorize project meetings, enabling a deeper understanding of the relationships between your plans and the individuals involved. Through gentle follow-ups, Calendar ensures prompt RSVPs from all participants, streamlining the confirmation process.

Whether your organization has 50 or 50,000 employees, getting everyone on board is effortless. By connecting your company domain to Calendar, your entire organization will be automatically included in your Enterprise plan, making implementation a breeze. Calendar goes beyond basic scheduling functionality by automatically attaching meeting transcriptions to your meeting details, fostering information sharing and collaboration across the entire team. Additionally, with Calendar Analytics, you gain insights into the time invested in specific meetings or locations, allowing you to track and analyze how you allocate your time and who receives your attention and focus.

Calendar Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price
Basic	Free
Standard	$20/user/month
Pro	$24/user/month

Teamup

Name	Teamup
Rating	4.7 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web
Best For	Team collaboration and efficient scheduling

Teamup simplifies organizing, scheduling, and communication for groups through its shared calendar feature, offering both free and paid plans. It provides a live demo and a three-day trial, allowing teams to evaluate its suitability firsthand. Calendars are color-coded and can be securely shared with team members using a unique URL.

Teamup stands out as a dedicated solution for group coordination, making it an excellent choice for managing meeting rooms, coordinating deliveries and outcalls, scheduling diverse teams, and handling various team-related tasks. Notably, Teamup is trusted and utilized even by NASA.

Teamup Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Basic	$0	$0
Plus	$10/month/calendar	$12/month/calendar
pro	$25/month/calendar	$29/month/calendar
Business	$60/month/calendar	$69/month/calendar
Enterprise	$105/month/calendar	$129/month/calendar

TimeTree

Name	TimeTree
Rating	4.5 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Personal use and work

TimeTree stands out as a highly inclusive shared calendar app, catering not only to couples but also to friends, families, and small teams. It offers a convenient way to organize various aspects of your life and effortlessly stay connected with your closest circles. With TimeTree, you can conveniently manage your living room calendar, work calendar, and social calendar, all in one place. Its interactive features enable seamless sharing, note-taking, and commenting, facilitating easy communication about upcoming events. Experience the convenience of having your entire schedule at your fingertips with TimeTree.

TimeTree also offers a task management system that allows users to create and manage to-do lists, set deadlines and reminders, and track progress towards completing tasks. It is the best calendar app for a group of people for sharing tasks and other notes.

TimeTree Pricing

TimeTree is Free to use. Its premium version cost just 4.49 USD/month or (44.99 USD/annual).

Toggl Plan

Name	Toggl Plan
Rating	4.6 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Visual project planning and team collaboration

Toggl Plan (earlier called Teamweek) is a shared calendar app made to help teams work better together. It has many useful tools like team timelines, different zoom levels, project roadmaps, and a shared timeline for everyone. It’s great for both small and big teams to plan and manage their work easily.

The free plan works well if your team has up to five people and you can use it on your phone too. Paid plans allow up to 10 people and add extra features like project roadmaps and a yearly calendar view.

Toggl Plan is more than just a calendar — it helps you plan projects, manage tasks, and schedule work visually. It makes communication and teamwork easier, so everyone knows what’s going on in the project.

Toggl Plan Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price (per user/month)	Monthly Price (per user/month)
Free	$0	$0
Team	$8.33 (billed annually at $100)	$10
Business	$14.99 (billed annually at $179.88)	$19.99

Fantastical Calendar

Name	Fantastical Calendar
Rating	4.7 out of 5
Free Trial	Available
Platforms Supported	macOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Web
Best For	Users in Apple ecosystem wanting powerful calendar with natural language input

Fantastical - Best App for Shared Calendar — Fantastical – Best App for Shared Calendar

Fantastical is a smart and easy-to-use shared calendar app. It looks nice and works well on both computers and phones. It has a built-in agenda view that helps you keep track of daily tasks. When someone finishes a task, everyone on the team can see it right away.

Fantastical fits easily with other apps and works smoothly on different devices. It has helpful features like a today widget, handoff support (so you can switch devices easily), and an event tool that lets you create events using other apps.

You can use the basic version for free, and there’s also an enterprise version with extra features for a monthly fee.

Fantastical Pricing

Plan	Yearly Price (per user/month)	Monthly Price (per user/month)
Free	$0	$0
Premium	$4.99	$4.99
Family	$7.99	$9.99
Business	$9.99	$9.99

Conclusion

Finding the right shared calendar app is crucial for businesses and teams looking to enhance productivity, streamline communication, and effectively manage schedules. Throughout this blog, we have explored some of the best shared calendar apps available, each offering unique features and benefits.

Ultimately, the best shared calendar app will depend on the unique requirements and preferences of your team or organization. Consider factors such as integration capabilities, customization options, collaboration features, and pricing when making your decision. Whichever shared calendar app you choose, leveraging its functionalities will undoubtedly help you streamline operations, enhance productivity, and foster effective teamwork.

FAQs

What are some free shared calendar app for business?

Some of the best shared calendar app includes:

Google Calendar
Calendly
Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar
Asana
Apple’s iCloud Calendar
Calendar
Teamup

Yes, two people can share the same calendar, allowing them to collaborate, schedule events, and stay synchronized in real-time.

What features should I look for in a calendar app?

When choosing a calendar app, consider features such as task management, reminders, schedule view options, integration with other apps and services, and customization options.

Can I customize the appearance of my calendar?

Yes, many calendar apps offer customization options, including color coding, schedule view options, and background themes.

Are shared calendar apps compatible with different devices?

Yes, most shared calendar apps are designed to be compatible with various devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Can shared calendar apps handle time zone differences?

Yes, several shared calendar apps are designed to handle time zone differences effectively. They can automatically adjust event times based on the time zone of each participant, making it easier to schedule meetings and collaborate with colleagues in different regions.

Can shared calendar apps be used for personal as well as professional purposes?

Yes, shared calendar apps can be used for both personal and professional purposes.

Which are the free shared calendar app for iPhone and android?

Here’s a list of free shared calendar apps for iPhone and Android:

Google Calendar
TimeTree
Microsoft Outlook Calendar
Teamup Calendar

August 11, 2025

Top 12 Best Help Desk Software You Should Use

The success of any organization relies heavily on customer satisfaction. To enhance customer engagement and satisfaction, it is crucial to promptly respond to and support any customer queries. This is where the help desk comes into play—a suite of software tools designed to provide information and assistance to customers regarding their concerns, complaints, or inquiries about products or services. The help desk serves as a centralized platform, integrating queries from various customer-facing support channels such as live chat, email integration, web contact forms, phone, mobile, and social media.

By employing help desk or support desk software, the time taken by support agents to resolve customer issues is significantly reduced. Instead of sifting through endless emails, voicemails, messages, texts, and posts, the software organizes tickets from different platforms into one easy-to-use system. This organized approach allows support agents to provide above-and-beyond customer service efficiently and effectively.

In this blog post, we will delve into the world of help desk software and explore the top contenders for the title of “Best Help Desk Software.” Whether you are a small business owner looking to provide stellar support or a large enterprise seeking to optimize your customer service infrastructure, this guide will serve as your compass in navigating through the multitude of options available.

How to Choose SaaS Help Desk Software?

It can be difficult to choose the best help desk software for your company when there is a plethora of options available. To help you make your choice, here are some features to consider when making your decision:

Ease of Ticketing: Most importantly, you’ll want to determine whether the process of creating, routing, adjusting and closing tickets is on par with what your business needs and expects. You should be able to create a ticket for a customer and route that ticket to the appropriate team or individual who can best address it. You should also be able to make modifications to the ticket as you gain more information on the customer’s situation. And, once the problem has been fully resolved, you should be able to close the ticket and save it in your records as a resource for future inquiries.
Variety of Channels: You could adopt a separate help desk for each support channel you use, but that would be incredibly inefficient, confusing, and wasteful of funds. Rather, you’ll want to find one software that can support all of your communication channels, including email, social media, SMS messaging, and VoIP.
Self-Service Portal: Some questions are so fundamental that customers waste time contacting your support team for an answer. This is where it’s helpful to have a self-service portal that gives users get quick answers to simple questions. And, a self-service portal doesn’t just help your customers. It can also be used as an internal help desk, offering agents step-by-step guides to complex inquiries that can be easily copied and sent to customers. Rather than spending time rewriting the same troubleshooting steps, your reps will have a canned response ready to go for almost every service request.
App Integrations: Help desk software that can integrate with other apps like scheduling, project management, and internal messaging, is significantly valuable to your organization. Information that’s gained through the help desk should be stored and available on every app that you use. Additionally, all data gained externally should be uploaded to your help desk so that your information is stored in one location.

Best Help Desk SaaS Platforms

Help desk software lets you manage customer queries, faster. Support is always a key to business success, and choosing the right helpdesk solution can turn frustration into happy customers. It leads to better customer satisfaction. It also helps your support team to handle issues, queries, and feedback promptly. Let’s explore the following available support desk solutions.

Freshdesk
Zendesk
Intercom
SpiceWorks
HappyFox
LiveAgent
Zoho Desk
JIRA Service Management
Kustomer
Gorgias
Hiver
Help Scout

Freshdesk

Website	www.freshworks.com/freshdesk
Rating	4.5/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Small businesses and Online enterprises

FreshDesk is a customer support solution to boost the productivity of your support team. Make your customer happy and satisfied by leveraging the benefits of Freshdesk. Some questions are repetitive and time-consuming, provide FAQs and a knowledge base to customers and empower them to solve their queries.
Bots are assigned to manage the repetitive task and provide the appropriate articles from a knowledge base. Some queries may need discussion with the team. collaborate effectively with the team on any ticket and provide the accurate answer within the specified time.

Its intelligent ticket assignment system assigns the ticket to the agent based on their skill and workload. Also, whenever you make any reply to an open ticket, the software notifies the customer with an email.

Features of FreshDesk

Categorize and prioritize the tickets to the right agent and make the workflow smooth.
Track all the messages from different channels and manage them in one interface.
Agent collision detection to ensure every employee works on the unique ticket.
Its thank you detector prevents reopening the ticket when a customer says thank you.
Assign different customized statuses to the ticket based on their progress.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Free	Rs 0	Rs 0
Growth	Rs999/agent/month	Rs1199/agent/month
Pro	Rs3599/agent/month	Rs4299/agent/month
Enterprise	Rs5699/agent/month	Rs6899/agent/month

Click here to get Freshdesk

Zendesk

Website	www.zendesk.com
Rating	4.4/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	All types of businesses and Customer Experience Management

The customer support solution by Zendesk is dedicated to enhancing the experience of both the customer and the support team. Seamless connectivity of multiple channels of communication empowers customers to raise their queries and get help on any communication channel they are comfortable with.

Easy to create a dedicated help center with relevant FAQ questions and a community forum. This help center will significantly reduce the workload on an employee by answering the most asked questions. It helps to reduce the response time so that your customer doesn’t have to wait.

Features of ZenDesk

One workspace to manage queries from any communication channel.
Bots are available to answer basic queries and provide appropriate solutions from the knowledge base.
Make the conversation run fast by assigning the tickets to agents based on their workload and availability.
Automated questions to gather information about the query and push it to the appropriate agent.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Suite Team	$49/agent/month	$59/agent/month
Suite Growth	$79/agent/month	$99/agent/month
Suite Professional	$99/agent/month	$125/agent/month
Suite Enterprise	Custom Price	Custom Price

Intercom

Website	www.intercom.com
Rating	4.5/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Making internet business personal

Intercom is a comprehensive Customer Service solution that offers a smooth customer experience through automation and human support, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and cost reduction.

Intercom provides a customizable design that allows you to align your brand and business needs. It also helps engage customers in-context and encourages action throughout their journey in the Intercom Messenger. The ticketing system enables handling complex customer requests through asynchronous tickets designed for cross-functional collaboration.

Features of Intercom:

The system can quickly generate responses, summarize conversations for other agents, and produce new help articles.
Colleagues can collaborate easily to solve complex problems and customers can track progress in real time.
View all support conversations in a centralized location.
Collaborate effectively with colleagues in real time.
Increase productivity by utilizing live dashboards, reporting, work management tools, and other optimization techniques.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Price
Starter	$74 / month
Pro	Custom Price
Premium	Custom Price

SpiceWorks

Website	www.spiceworks.com
Rating	4.4/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Free customer support software

Spiceworks provides a cloud-based helpdesk solution that efficiently manages IT tickets and tasks. Because your help desk is stored in the cloud, there is no need to be concerned about server procurement, backups, or maintenance.

Using Spiceworks, agents are able to efficiently track IT incidents, respond to tickets, make private comments, and promptly close them. It is possible to create custom fields to track additional information that is relevant to your business. A customizable user portal has been created for employees and customers to track the progress of their tickets.

Spiceworks also offers inventory management functionality, allowing your team to access information about current orders. This helps the staff inform customers if their order will be shipped late.

Features of Spiceworks:

Tickets are assigned to agents automatically and progress is tracked.
Collaborate with your team members by sharing support tickets and resolving issues more efficiently.
You can generate reports and easily view team performance metrics.
Monitor new tickets and determine the time it takes for your initial response.
Customers have the opportunity to share questions and ideas with others on the Spiceworks community forum.

Pricing Plans

Spiceworks is available free of cost for all users.

HappyFox

Website	www.happyfox.com
Rating	4.6/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Mid sized Companies

HappyFox provides a centralized system for managing customer queries and issues from various channels, such as email, live chat, social media, and more. It incorporates a ticketing system that organizes customer requests, allowing support agents to efficiently track, prioritize, and resolve issues.

Happyfox is loaded with amazing ticketing features that make the task of resolving the ticket much easier. Prioritize the unresponded tickets in the list and ensure timely replies to make customers happy. SLA (service level agreement) is easy to create for your agents to ensure a timely reply and other objectives by setting targets.

SLA will help to maintain a consistent workflow with targets such as time to first response, time to reach, changing status, and many more conditions. The robust dashboard of Happyfox gives a quick insight into agent activity reports, performance reports, and inflow reports.

Features of Happyfox

Classification of tickets into predefined categories.
Solve the customer ticket through collaboration with a team.
pre-fill the required and essential information in the ticket with the ticket templates.
SLA works during office hours only.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Mighty	$29/agent/month	$39/agent/month
Fantastic	$49/agent/month	$59/agent/month
Enterprise	$69/agent/month	$79/agent/month
Enterprise Plus	$89/agent/month	$99/agent/month

LiveAgent

Website	www.liveagent.com
Rating	4.7/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Customer Interaction

LiveAgent is a robust and versatile help desk software that empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support across multiple channels. It is a comprehensive customer service platform that integrates various communication channels into one centralized system, allowing organizations to effectively manage and respond to customer queries.

It empowers your support agent with its never-ending features. Omnichannel ticketing, SLA management, and custom fields are just a small portion of the features provided by this software.

It is Fully-focused software that caters to the needs of businesses in terms of providing the best support to its customers. The interface is easy to use and most of the things are customizable.

Features of LiveAgent

Enjoy flexibility with a cloud-based call centre feature.
200+ other tool integration and 130+ ticketing features.
Agent ranking feature to monitor the efficiency of agents, customers can easily rate the service provided by the agent.
Audit log that keeps a record of every activity undertaken by the agent.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Small Business	$9/agent/month	$15/agent/month
Medium Business	$29/agent/month	$35/agent/month
Large Business	$49/agent/month	$59/agent/month
Free	$0/agent/month	$0/agent/month

Try LiveAgent For Free

Zoho Desk

Website	www.zoho.com/desk
Rating	4.5/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Growing Companies

Zoho Desk is a customer service software that delivers its services to help your support team and manage the queries of customers in a much more efficient way. The insightful dashboard of Zoho Desk gives proper insight into ticket traffic and customers’ happiness rating. By monitoring and analyzing the charts on the dashboard, you can easily predict the performance of your support team.

With Zoho Desk, users can easily make custom changes to various aspects of the system. They have the ability to rename tabs, create new departments, customize email templates, define business hours, and establish help folders, all of which contribute to a personalized and efficient support environment.

Features of Zoho Desk

Automatic assignment of support tickets to the right person in the right department to fast forward the process of solving a customer’s problem.
Smooth integration with the other Zoho software.
Workflow automation in ticketing whenever any new ticket meets certain conditions.
Manage all your brands in a company with separate help articles and FAQs, and integrate everything using one software in one interface.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Standard	Rs 800/user/month	Rs 1300/user/month
Professional	Rs 1400/user/month	Rs 2100/user/month
Enterprise	Rs 2400/user/month	Rs 3200/user/month

Try Zoho Desk Now

JIRA Service Management

Website	www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management
Rating	4.5/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Atlassian customer and flexible ITSM

Jira Service Management, formerly recognized as Jira Service Desk, is an IT service management solution that leverages the renowned Jira platform. The Jira Service Management was introduced in 2013 by Atlassian that delivers its customer support services to businesses. In the year 2020 Jira service management was launched and merged Jira service desk into it. Now Jira Service Management has features of a service desk along with the additional capabilities of ITSM.

Ticketing, SLA, knowledge base, and help widgets are the common features, on top of that it provides more IT business-centric support. It is focused on delivering the best software for IT service management.

Features of Jira Service Desk

Empower the business team, Dev, and IT ops to deliver a smooth customer service experience.
Categorize the queries based on their department.
Focused support solution.
Dedicated templates to streamline legal, HR, Facilities, and General service management.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Free	$0	$0
Standard	$600/agent/year	$21/agent/month
Premium	$1,400/agent/year	$47/agent/month
Enterprise	Custom Price	Custom Price

Kustomer

Website	www.kustomer.com
Rating	4.5/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web
Best For	Omnichannel messaging and small companies

Kustomer is a customer service software solution that offers varieties of features in this domain. Connect with customers and solve their problems on any channel. The task of managing customer interaction is much easier with a timeline view. All the previous interaction is placed in chronological order to deliver the best customer experience.

AI chatbot is available to reduce the workload from support staff and knowledge base to answer the FAQs. Have a quick insight into the performance of your team and individual agents with the robust dashboard of Jira.

Features of Kustomer

Direct integration with social media such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter for instant replies to messages and comments.
Actionable data insights like order details, status, and more to serve the customer quickly.
Natural language processing detects the customer’s intent and suggests shortcuts to agents.
AI to automate repetitive manual work.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Price
Enterprise	$89 per month / per user
Ultimate	$139 per month / per user

Gorgias

Website	www.gorgias.com
Rating	4.7/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Ecommerce business

Gorgias is e-commerce-focused support software that helps to solve e-commerce-related problems. Communicate with the customer and solve their query by having all your customer data in front of your screen. Manage the orders, refunds, subscriptions, and many things without switching to different tabs.

As an e-commerce-centric software, it fetches your e-commerce data from your e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, or big commerce and integrates it with the helpdesk. Alignment of all the previous conversations from different channels at the same interface will help you to know the customer’s perspective more efficiently.

Features of Gorgias

80+ integration options are available to increase the software capabilities.
Each ticket is categorized properly based on the channel it comes from, Like email, live chat, social media, SMS, or voice.
Automatic response to common questions like order tracking, refund status, and cancellation.
Gauge customer satisfaction with feedback and rating.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Starter	Only available for monthly subscription	$10/month
Basic	$50/month	$60/month
Pro	$300/month	$360/month
Advanced	$750/month	$900/month
Enterprise	Custom Price	Custom Price

Try Gorgias Now

Hiver

Website	Hiverhq.com
Rating	4.7/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Google Workspace

Hiver is the first Gmail-based helpdesk that makes it unique from any helpdesk software. It brings simplicity to your business and promotes human-to-human conversation by eliminating chatbots. Focused on providing the user with the best problem-solving experience, it leverages the power of Gmail and its features.

Since live chat is used widely by customers to ask questions, Hiver has integrated it into Gmail to maintain a seamless workflow. Agents do not need to switch between tools to solve problems. Team collaboration is made easier with features like transcript sharing. It helps other agents know the chat history and context of the problem.

Features of Hiver

Top-notch email management without logging in separately.
Monitor the workload on agents in real time and redistribute it in a single click.
Empower your agents to solve the query of customers anywhere, anytime through the Hiver iOS and Android app.
Get help from any specific agents utilizing the feature @mention.
Harvey bot prevents the conversation from reopening by identifying a response like “Thank you”.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Lite	Rs800/user/month	Rs1100/user/month
Pro	Rs2200/user/month	Rs2800/user/month
Elite	Rs3300/user/month	Rs4000/user/month

Help Scout

Website	www.helpscout.com
Rating	4.7/5
Free Trial	Available
Platform Supported	Web, Android, iPhone/iPad
Best For	Emails and Live Chats for Growing Companies

Help Scout helps to provide support to your customers by utilizing its intuitive interface and features. Loaded with all the primary and essential features, it also offers some additional functionalities like instant notification on the browser, custom CSS, custom domain, article suggestions, and much more.

Providing customers with the best support experience is the primary focus of any help desk software, this tool offers all the essential features to hook the customer throughout the problem-solving journey. It suggests the knowledge base articles to users based on the page URL. In simple words, it offers all the features you need to provide the best customer experience.

Features of Help Scout

iOS and Android apps to manage queries on the go.
Search and insert the knowledge base article link without leaving the chat screen.
Organize your inbox and assign different tasks to different teams in their inbox.
Chat when your team is online and provide other options when they are not.

Pricing Plans

Plan	Yearly Price	Monthly Price
Standard	$20/user/month	$25/user/month
Plus	$40/user/month	$50/user/month
Pro	$65/user/month	Annual only

Try Help Scout Now

Conclusion

Effectively managing customer support is always a challenging task. However, with the assistance of a cloud-based helpdesk solution, achieving customer satisfaction becomes more attainable. In today’s market, numerous tools are available, making it overwhelming to find the right one. Instead of being swayed solely by the features of different tools, it is essential to focus on their functionalities and determine if they align with your specific needs.

To gain insights into a tool’s performance, reading user reviews and evaluating real-life scenarios can be immensely helpful. Additionally, taking advantage of free trials offered by vendors allows you to experience the tool firsthand before making a final decision. By following this approach, you can carefully select the perfect tool that suits your requirements and embark on a successful customer support journey.

FAQs

What is support desk software?

Support desk software is a software product that customer service and IT teams use to serve employees or customers. Its core functions are to help service teams systematically manage support requests, provide self-service options, track and report performance and more.

What are the best Support Desk Softwares?

The following are the Best Support Desk Software

Freshdesk
Zendesk
HappyFox
Intercom
SpiceWorks
LiveAgent
Zoho Desk
Jira Service Desk
Kustomer
Gorgias
Hiver
Help Scout

What are the benefits of Support desk software?

You can organize support requests, collaborate with customers and teammates, automate repetitive tasks, improve overall customer experience Customize and rebrand to suit your business.

Who can you Support Desk Software?

Support Desk Software can be used by both big organisations as well as small firms. Support Desk Software helps you to manage customers in one place and Manage your customers in one place.

July 11, 2023

10 Best Call Center Software for Small Businesses 2023

Exceptional customer service is paramount for any business to thrive, and the same is true for small businesses also. It is one of the most critical components to achieving growth and success. Call center software can help you manage customer inquiries and enhance customer satisfaction. Without proper call center software, you’ll always struggle to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

Investing in call center software can help you meet these growing expectations and stand out from your competitors. Features such as automatic call routing, call recording, and real-time analytics can improve your customer service, increase efficiency, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

But with so many options available, finding the right call center software can be a daunting task. That’s why in this article, we have provided the list of the best call center software that is pocket-friendly and best suits your needs. So don’t let your small business fall behind – take advantage of the benefits of call center software today.

What Is Call Center Software?
Difference Between Call Center Software and Contact Center Software
List of Best Call Center Software
CallHippo
Aircall
Channels
Nextiva
Convoso
Zendesk talk
RingCentral
Freshdesk
Net2Phone
Cloudtalk

What Is Call Center Software?

Call center software is a type of software that is designed to help businesses manage their incoming and outgoing customer phone calls efficiently. Call center software typically includes a range of features that enable agents to handle customer inquiries, complaints, and support requests quickly and effectively.

The key features of call center software include automatic call distribution, which helps to route incoming calls to the right agents based on factors such as skill level or availability.

Other features such as call recording, call monitoring, and call analytics, enable supervisors to track agent performance and identify areas for improvement. It also allows callers to interact with a computerized system and be directed to the appropriate agent or department based on their needs.

Difference Between Call Center Software and Contact Center Software

Both software names can be used interchangeably to represent the software that provides customer service. But there is some minor difference between this two software. Below are a few points that differentiate call center software from contact center software.

Contact center software is omnichannel in nature, which means users can connect with the customer care representative via a different mode of communication. This can be a voice call, email, live chat, SMS, and social media messaging. While on the other hand Call center software provides interaction via voice calls only.
Call center software provides some additional features like interactive voice response, call recording, call monitoring, call analytics, and call routing. It becomes easier to transfer calls to different agents when you use call center software.
Call center software is mainly used by telemarketing companies or companies who want to promote their products or services. While contact center software is used by the service-based company to resolve customer queries and provide the proper solutions.

A survey of top preferred channels used by customers looking for customer support as of 2020 data

List of Best Call Center Software

Call center software typically includes features such as automatic call distribution, interactive voice response systems, call recording, analytics, and reporting tools. These solutions can be tailored to meet the specific needs of businesses.

CallHippo

Rating	4.3/5
Website	www.callhippo.com

CallHippo is a telephony service provider that provides you with a virtual phone system that allows you to communicate with your customers over the internet. It is trusted by leading companies such as Amazon, Wipro, Byjus, Shopify, and more. The system includes features such as call routing, call recording, voicemail, IVR, call conferencing, and more.

You can set up virtual phone numbers in various countries, which can be used to make and receive calls. It helps you to establish a local presence in different regions without having to physically operate there. CallHippo also integrates with various CRM systems and enables businesses to manage their customer interactions more efficiently.

Features of CallHippo

The platform is accessible through a web browser or mobile app, which makes it easy for teams to stay connected on the go.
AI-based call routing feature helps to route the call via the best telephony provider to give the best customer experience.
It automatically switches your number to the country-specific number to increase credibility and trust.
It provides insights into each conversation that happens with the customers.
The call queuing feature allows customers to wait until the next customer care representative receives the call.

Pros

Live chat customer support
Reasonable pricing
Easy-to-use UI
Wide range of CRM and other integration
Knowledge base articles and blogs
Robust analytics and reporting
A free trial is available

Cons

Call recording has a separate cost in the bronze plan
The per-minute charge for outgoing calls

Pricing

Plan	Pricing
Basic	Free
Bronze	$20/user/month
Silver	$30/user/month
Platinum	$50/user/month

Aircall

Rating	4.3/5
Website	www.aircall.io

Aircall is a call center software to make, receive, and manage phone calls from anywhere, using a web or mobile app. It supports multiple phone numbers, to empower small businesses to easily manage their communications across different channels. Trusted by more than 15,000+ companies, it is consistently delivering top-notch service to its users.

By using Aircall, you can enhance your customer service, improve your response times, and streamline your communications. This can help you save time and money while improving overall productivity and customer satisfaction. Additionally, it provides affordable pricing plans and excellent customer support to make it an ideal choice for small businesses looking for a reliable and cost-effective phone system solution.

Features of Aircall

Power dialer feature that boosts the speed of calling in one click.
It provides brief information about the ongoing conversation before forwarding the call to the next agent using the warm transfer feature.
Customizable voicemail greetings and the ability to send voicemail messages directly to email.
Businesses can record calls for training purposes or to ensure compliance with industry regulations.
You can set up call queues to handle high volumes of incoming calls and ensure that no call goes unanswered.

Pros

International numbers in 100+ countries
User-friendly interface
Integration with popular CRM, e-commerce, and helpdesk software
Knowledge base articles
Wide option for support
A free trial is available

Cons

Call routing to mobile is a little bit clunky
Poor customer support

Pricing

Plan	Pricing
Essential	$30/user/month
Professional	$50/user/month
Custom	Contact sales

Channels

Rating	4.5/5
Website	www.channels.app

Channels is an affordable and user-friendly call center software solution that can help small businesses streamline their customer service operations. It empowers you with the ability to track important metrics such as call volume, wait time, and call duration. You can make data-driven decisions that can help improve customer service.

With Channels, you can easily set up and customize your call center to suit your specific needs. The software integrates with popular business tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk. This makes it easy to manage customer interactions across multiple channels.

Features of Channels

It provides insights into the customer details whenever you receive any calls from customers.
You can record all incoming and outgoing calls, which can be used for quality assurance and training purposes.
It allows callers to navigate through a menu of options using their phone’s keypad which reduces call wait time.
Easy to customize the call button on the website to empower users to call with one click.
Unlimited outbound calling to US and Canada at no additional cost.

Pros

The first phone number is free
7-day free trial
Intuitive interface
Live chat support
The mobile app is available
Chrome extension is available

Cons

Limited call history storage
No ticketing system

Pricing

Plan	Per Month Pricing	Per Year Pricing
Plus	$29/month	$24/month
Advanced	$75/month	$62/month

Nextiva

Rating	4.4/5
Website	www.nextiva.com

Nextiva is a communication solution designed to streamline call management. Small businesses benefit from Nextiva Call Center Software in several ways. Firstly, it helps them handle high volumes of incoming calls efficiently, which can improve customer satisfaction and reduce wait times. The software provides valuable insights through advanced reporting.

You can analyze call data and make informed decisions to improve customer service. One of the main advantages of Nextiva Call Center is its flexibility. It allows small businesses to scale up or down their call center operations as needed. It is user-friendly and requires no specialized training or IT support to get started.

Features of Nextiva

Screen pop-up is enriched with valuable customer insights based on past interactions when anyone calls you.
It holds callers in a queue until the next available agent is ready to take their call.
IVR feature that guides callers to the information or service they need, without the need for human intervention.
Smart call routing feature that routes incoming calls to the most appropriate agent or department based on predefined rules.
The platform is easily accessible via web and mobile devices to manage call center operations.

Pros

Automatic call distribution
Built-in CRM
Robust call analytics
Customer Satisfaction survey
Easy-to-use interface
Smart call routing

Cons

Limited to inbound calling

Pricing

Plan	Per Month Pricing	Annual Pricing
Business Communication Essential	$30.95/user/month	$27.71/user/month
Business Communication Professional	$35.95/user/month	$25.46/user/month
Business Communication Enterprise	$45.95/user/month	$32.96/user/month

Convoso

Rating	4.6/5
Website	www.convoso.com

Convoso is designed to help small businesses improve their sales and marketing operations. It offers a range of features such as predictive dialing, automated lead distribution, call recording, and real-time analytics. It helps businesses streamline their outbound calling efforts and increase productivity.

When you use this tool, you can efficiently manage your outbound call campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, and improve call quality by recording and analyzing customer interactions. The software also provides real-time reporting and analytics to help businesses track performance and make data-driven decisions.

Features of Convoso

Preview dialer feature that allows agents to view a preview of customer information before reaching out.
It helps to streamline the inbound calling workflow by transferring calls to the best-suited agents with the feature of a predictive dialer.
The voice broadcasting feature allows you to promote your new product or service to your leads efficiently.
You can create automated responses that allow the virtual agent to interact with customers without the need for a live agent.
You can monitor live calls and provide feedback to agents through a whisper feature that only the agent can hear.

Pros

Live chat support
Automated call distribution
Customizable dashboard
Powerful reporting
Easy-to-use interface
Demo is available

Cons

Pricing is not disclosed

Pricing

Contact Sales

Zendesk talk

Rating	4.3/5
Website	www.zendesk.com

Zendesk Talk is a valuable tool for small businesses looking to improve their customer service and support over the phone. Its user-friendly interface, robust features, and integration capabilities make it an excellent choice for businesses.

The main benefit of Zendesk Talk for small businesses is that it enables them to provide personalized and efficient support to their customers. The software comes with features like call routing and automatic call distribution, which ensure that calls are directed to the right agent with the appropriate skills and knowledge. This helps small businesses save time and resources, as they can avoid transferring calls or putting customers on hold for extended periods.

Features of Zendesk talk

It allows adding a call button on the website and app so that customers can contact you without any effort.
It seamlessly integrates with other Zendesk products.
You can set a maximum waiting time for your callers and allow them to request a callback.
Real-time analytics to measure the success and performance of your team.
You can monitor calls in real-time and record conversations with customers.
Calls are automatically directed to the right agent with the appropriate skills and knowledge to handle the customer’s issue.

Pros

90+ telephony providers
Live chat support
Simple and intuitive interface
Customer Satisfaction Survey
A free trial is available
Smart integration with other Zendesk products

Cons

The call transfer process is cumbersome
Slow update

Pricing

Plan	Per Month Pricing	Per Year Pricing
Suite Team	$59/agent/month	$49/agent/month
Suite Growth	$99/agent/month	$79/agent/month
Suite Professional	$125/agent/month	$99/agent/month
Suite Enterprise	$199/agent/month	$150/agent/month

RingCentral

Rating	3.9/5
Website	www.ringcentral.com

RingCentral software is a way small businesses can streamline their communication processes. It enhances customer service and increases productivity. With its flexible and scalable solution, RingCentral is a cost-effective and reliable choice for small businesses looking to improve their inbound and outbound calling capabilities.

The all-in-one plan of RingCentral includes messaging, video, and phone also known as RingCentral MVP. It also provides a separate plan only for the phone facility but pricing is not disclosed.

However, RingCentral’s outbound calling feature enables small businesses to make calls to customers or prospects using their business phone number, even when they are working remotely. This ensures that calls are made from a professional phone line, which helps to build trust and credibility with customers.

Features of RingCentral

Give insights into your call activity, such as call volume and call duration, to help you optimize your communication strategy.
It helps to route calls to the appropriate team member or department based on the rules you set up.
You can record inbound and outbound calls for training purposes or to keep a record of important conversations.
IVR feature to reduce the workload on your employee by answering repetitive queries via recorded voice.
It allows you to send and receive text messages from your business phone number.

Pros

Easy to set up
Device-independent
Built-in analytics
Multilingual IVR
Live chat support
A free trial is available

Cons

Price is not disclosed for phone only plan
Some users reported call drops sometimes
Poor customer service

Pricing

Plan	Per Month Pricing	Per Year Pricing
Essential	$32.99/user/month	$19.99/user/month
Standard	$40.99/user/month	$27.99/user/month
Premium	$47.99/user/month	$34.99/user/month
Ultimate	$62.99/user/month	$49.99/user/month

Freshdesk

Rating	4.0/5
Website	www.freshdesk.com

Freshdesk is a customer support software that includes a call center feature to help businesses manage their incoming and outgoing calls. With Freshdesk, small businesses can set up a virtual phone system. It allows them to route calls to different departments or agents. You can also record calls for quality assurance, and create custom IVR menus to provide callers with self-service options.

Freshdesk’s pricing plans are affordable for small businesses which makes it a cost-effective solution for managing customer support operations. Freshdesk is loaded with all the features which basic call software provides, plus some additional useful features.

Features of Freshdesk

Call masking feature that hides your existing phone number with a different phone number.
Multi-level IVR that allows customers for self-service and helps to route the call to the right agents and department.
It helps you to connect with your customer on the go using the robust mobile app.
Customers will know their position in the queue while contacting the representative.
Call block feature blocks spam calls based on their location.
It can effectively distribute the call queue load to provide satisfaction to customers.

Pros

Numbers available for 90+ countries
Live chat support
Seamless integration with other Freshworks products
Live call monitoring
Service level monitoring
Warm transfer feature

Cons

Call flows are not too customizable

Pricing

Plan	Per Month Pricing	Per Year Pricing
Free	Rs0/user/month	Rs0/user/month
Growth	Rs1199/user/month	Rs999/user/month
Pro	Rs3399/user/month	Rs2799/user/month
Enterprise	Rs5999/user/month	Rs4999/user/month

Net2Phone

Rating	4.6/5
Website	www.net2phone.com

The Net2phone uses VoIP technology, which means that calls are transmitted over the internet rather than traditional phone lines. This can significantly reduce long-distance and international calling costs. It is easy to set up and doesn’t require any hardware or software installation.

The system can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. This makes it an ideal solution for small businesses that don’t have the resources or expertise to manage their own call center. Net2phone also offers advanced features such as speech recognition and artificial intelligence, which can help businesses improve their customer service.

Features of Net2Phone

Provides seamless integration with other tools such as Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and more.
The auto attendant feature routes the call automatically to the right agents and departments.
You can easily create a welcome menu to greet your customers and provide a great experience.
It blocks spam calls to save your agents time and effort.
Gamification feature that helps to motivate the agents by providing badges and recognition based on their performance.

Pros

Chrome extension is available
Unlimited international calling in 40+ countries
A free trial is available
Advanced reporting and analytics
The mobile app is available
API integration

Cons

Poor setup and training process
Steep learning curve

Pricing

Plan	Pricing
Office	$24.99/user/month
Office Pro	$26.99/user/month
Office Power	$29.99/user/month

Cloudtalk

Rating	4.3/5
Website	www.cloudtalk.io

CloudTalk is a flexible and scalable solution for the calling needs of businesses. It allows you to make and receive calls from anywhere, using any device connected to the internet. You can easily handle high volumes of calls by placing them in a queue and notifying users when it’s their turn to take the call.‌‌

You can configure the platform to meet your specific calling requirements, such as setting up call forwarding, voicemail, and call recording. As a business, you can easily add or remove users as needed, without having to worry about managing hardware or software installations. All this makes Cloudtalk an ideal solution for businesses with fluctuating call volumes or those that are growing quickly.

Features of Cloudtalk

Provides local numbers in more than 160 countries for international calling.
The toll-free number benefits your customers to call you at no cost or nominal cost.
3-way calling feature to allow any third person to join a call when required.
Automated outbound caller id that hides your agent’s private number and provides a country-specific local number.
Group ring feature that rings the phone of all agents so that no calls get answered.

Pros

The mobile app is available
Call monitoring
Live chat support
A free trial is available
Workflow automation
Unlimited history logging

Cons

Free inbound calling is not available when you choose certain high-cost country numbers.

Pricing

Plan	Pricing
Starter	$25/user/month
Essential	$30/user/month
Expert	$50/user/month
Custom	Contact Sales

Conclusion

As companies continue to prioritize customer experience, the demand for efficient call center software is only expected to grow. Call center software providers are continually innovating and improving their offerings. This makes it easier for businesses to implement and benefit from the latest advancements in technology.

In short, call center software has become an indispensable tool for modern businesses looking to enhance their customer service and drive growth. So choose the right tool from the above-mentioned tools and give thrust to your business.

FAQs

What is the best call center software?

Some of the best call center software are Cloudtalk, CallHippo, Aircall, Channels, Nextiva, Convoso, Zendesk Talk, RingCentral, Freshdesk, and Net2Phone.

What CRM tools are used in a call center?

CRM tools in call centers stand for the tools used by call centers to enhance their customer experience in order to increase their efficiency. Some of the common CRM tools used are Salesmate, Pipedrive, Freshworks, etc.

What is the difference between a call center and CRM?

Call center software helps companies to enable the service of sending, managing, and tracking messages/calls to their customers. On the other hand, CRM helps businesses to keep a digital record of their customer interaction. Call center software is used in managing the flow of business and CRM helps in improving customer relations.

March 24, 2023

10 Best AI-Powered Chatbot Tools For 2023

Chatbots are a useful and convenient tool for businesses and organizations to communicate with their customers or users. They allow for efficient and immediate responses to inquiries and can even handle tasks and transactions automatically. Chatbots have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their ability to provide quick and efficient customer service, assist with tasks, and improve overall user experience.

Smart companies are integrating intelligent and interactive chatbots into their inbound marketing strategies. The artificial intelligence of interactive chatbots is revolutionizing the customer service experience. With interactive chatbots, companies can give quick responses to their customers. By adding a chatbot to your website or on Facebook, you can provide information to customers whenever they need it.

Chatbot marketing can be daunting, but with the help of chatbot platform tools, building and deploying a chatbot on your website and messaging applications are now quick and simple. In this blog, we will introduce some of the top AI chatbot tools available and discuss their key features, pricing, and limitations. Whether you’re a small business owner looking to improve customer service or a huge enterprise seeking to supercharge your marketing, there is a tool on this list for you.

What is a Chatbot?
How do Chatbot works?
10 Most Popular AI Chatbot Saas Tools

Chatfuel
Chatbot
IntelliTicks
Zendesk Chat
Botsify
ManyChat
Tawk.to
Freshchat
Intercom
Tidio

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are, essentially, intelligent programs that are capable of having conversations with humans. They can help to steer your online prospects through the sales funnel with ease, right from initial discussions to final conversions. You can find these interactive chatbots in apps, online messaging platforms, and on websites.

Chatbots are created using a series of if-then statements programmed into a chatbot builder. It is not necessary to be a coding expert to build even the most complex chatbots.

How do Chatbot works?

Chatbots work by using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to understand and respond to user input. They are programmed with a set of rules and responses that allow them to understand and respond to specific keywords or phrases.

When a user interacts with a chatbot, the bot will first analyze the user’s input to determine the intent behind the message. It will then match the intent with a predefined set of rules and responses, and provide a suitable response to the user. Whenever you customize a chatbot, there is a proper flow you build which is much similar to A/B testing.

The chatbot also uses machine learning to learn from user interactions and improve its understanding of language over time. It also accesses external data sources to provide more accurate responses to users.

10 Most Popular AI Chatbot Saas Tools

Here is a list of the most popular AI chatbot programs for your website and other platforms:

Chatfuel

Rating	4.3/5
Best for	Chatbot Platform for Messenger
Pricing Model	Per Feature
Free	Free Trial and Free Version

Chatfuel was founded in 2015 to make bot-building easy for anyone. Today, it is the leading platform for building bots on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and websites. In fact, it is one of the most popular chatbot software brands around the globe. Chatfuel enables businesses to boost sales, craft personalized marketing campaigns, and automate customer support. Chatfuel’s clients range from small and medium businesses to the world’s most recognizable brands. Some of its largest customers include Adidas, TechCrunch, T-Mobile, LEGO, Golden State Warriors, and many others.

Features:

It is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which allows you to automatically provide the answers to the most commonly asked questions by your customers.
You can hand over the conversation to a human agent in case your online bot isn’t able to answer the question appropriately.
It ensures that you never miss a chat with your customers and you can continue to provide them with the support they need.
In case you don’t have the time to create your online chatbot using Chatfuel’s software solution, their agency can help you create it too.

Pros:

Free templates
Free plan is available
Video tutorials are available
Integration with zapier, calendly, and stripe
Captures feedback
Analytics
Customizable chat widget

Cons:

Mobile app is not available
Poor documentation

Pricing:

This popular intelligent AI chatbot platform has a Trial Plan which is FREE for companies that are just starting. If you’re looking for advanced features, then their paid plans i.e. Entrepreneur, Startup, Small Business plan might be more suitable for you. Look at the pricing details of each plan below:

Plan	Pricing
Trial	Free
Entrepreneur	$14.99 per month
Startup	$24.99 per month
Small Business	$59.99 per month

Chatbot

Rating	4.7/5
Best for	All-in-one Chatbot Platform
Pricing Model	Flat Rate
Free	Free Trial

ChatBot helps you to create stunning chatbots with a drag-and-drop interface or apply a template and customize it as needed. You can design smooth conversational experiences to build better relationships with your customers and grow your business. With easy one-click integration, ChatBot can be used on various platforms and channels such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, LiveChat, WordPress, and more. This is also a useful tool for sending automated replies that will motivate people to talk and engage.

Features:

Delight your customers with intuitive menus, clickable elements, images, GIFs, and much more.
Segment users, validate answers, and organize data behind the scenes.
Customize the look and feel to match your brand style and website design.
Flexibly connect with third-party apps using webhooks and a fully open API.
Connect with more people across channels and platforms. Integrate with apps you use and love.
Keep chats natural with AI context management – chatbots will stay on topic and go with the flow of the conversation.

ChatBot Demo

Pros:

14-day free trial
Ready-to-use templates
Visual editor
Wide range of integration
Huge learning resources
Customizable chat widget
Reports and analytics

Cons:

Free plan is not available
Mobile app is available

Pricing:

ChatBot provides you with four pricing options – Starter, Team, Business, and Enterprise. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Pricing
Starter	$52/month billed annually or $65 month-to-month
Team	$142/month billed annually or $169 month-to-month
Business	$424/month billed annually or $499 month-to-month
Enterprise	Custom plans

IntelliTicks

Rating	4.6/5
Best for	AI-Powered Live Chat platform
Pricing Model	Per User
Free	Free Trial and Free Plan

Intelliticks is a powerful chatbot that offers businesses unparalleled insights into customer behavior. It has the ability to provide personalized recommendations to customers based on their individual preferences. It offers a wide range of analytics tools that allow businesses to track customer engagement over time. This includes detailed reports on customer behavior, as well as real-time analytics that provide a snapshot of customer engagement at any given moment.

Features:

Talk to your website visitors 24×7 even when your agents are sleeping.
Monitor automated chats and overtake if needed or if it is a HOT lead.
Let AI answer repeated queries from prospects.
Lead Prioritization by identifying who is a hot, warm, or cold lead in the live traffic.
Peek into the lead’s mind.
Easy to understand lead insights.
Integrate with your CRM – Get all your Leads & Conversation data directly in your favorite tools.
Analyze & Optimize – Get a detailed report on what converts visitors to leads.

Pros:

Free plan is available
Community support
Free trial plan on paid plan
Pre-built templates
Easy integration with CRM and zapier
Documentation and help center
Mobile app is available

Cons:

Limited customization
Multi-language support is not available

Pricing:

IntelliTicks has one Free Forever plan and three pricing options with advanced features including– Starter, Standard, and Plus. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Pricing
Free	$0 free forever
Starter	$20 per month, billed yearly or $25 per month, billed monthly
Standard	$80 per month, billed yearly or $99 per month, billed monthly
Plus	$240 per month, billed yearly or $299 per month, billed monthly

Zendesk Chat

Rating	4.2/5
Best For	Simple and Easy-to-Use Live Chat Software
Pricing Model	Per User
Free	Free Trial

Zendesk Chat is a live chat platform that lets businesses provide real-time customer support across web, mobile, and messaging channels. Zendesk Chat includes live chat, conversation history, quantitative visitor tracking, analytics, and real-time data analysis. Reduce customer wait times by using skills-based routing to bring the right agent to the customer and allow chatbots to tackle common questions immediately. Use proactive triggers to rescue lost customers and increase conversions on your website. Automatically create tickets from each chat interaction by enabling chat with its help desk solution today.

Zendesk Chat can be integrated into any content management system, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Wix, and more. Zendesk Chat allows you to generate tickets automatically from every conversation.

Features:

Anticipate customer questions and offer help when—and where—they need it most with chat support.
Send targeted and behavior-based messages to customers.
Use pre-chat forms to ask visitors for their contact information before starting a chat, or offline forms to ensure customers can contact you even while you’re away.
Use chat ratings to gather feedback and continue to improve your performance.
Share any file with your customer—a screenshot, a product guide, even an animated GIF—and solve problems faster.
Integrate AI-powered bots into Chat using API.

Introduction to Zendesk Chat (for beginners)

Pros:

Free trial is available
Flow builder
Widget customization
Mobile app is available
Huge integration option
Advanced analytics and reporting
Community forum
Learning resources

Cons:

Same color code for all chats
Quite expensive

Pricing:

Zendesk chat offers a Free plan and three pricing plans including – Team, Professional, and Enterprise. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Annual Subscription	Monthly Subscription
Lite	$0	$0
Team	$14 per agent per month	$19 per agent per month
Professional	$29 per agent per month	$35 per agent per month
Enterprise	$59 per agent per month	$70 per agent per month

Botsify

Rating	4.4/5
Best For	AI-Enabled Live Chat Software
Pricing Model	Per Feature
Free	Book a Demo & Get a Free Trial

Botsify is an AI-powered live chat system for businesses, allowing them to provide excellent customer service and boost sales. It supports text, audio, video, AR, and VR on all major messaging platforms. Botsify is a popular online AI chatbot platform that helps you create intelligent chatbots for your website as well as popular messaging channels like Facebook Messenger and Slack, without having to spend your time and effort in coding. The drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to design templates for your chatbot. Apple and Shazam are among the many big companies that use Botsify to create their chatbots.

Features:

Has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop UI.
Powered by AI and machine learning.
It allows you to seamlessly transfer the conversation from a bot to a human agent in situations where the bot might not be suitably equipped to help the customer.
Introduces conversation forms using which you can collect information about your leads through chatbot conversations.
Botsify offers multiple plugins to help you integrate it with your RSS Feed, Google Sheets, Shopify store, or Google search.

Pros:

100+ integration option
Multi-language support
14-day free trial is available
Chatbot builder
Lead Generation Conversational Forms
Omnichannel platform

Cons:

Free plan is not available
Poor support

Pricing:

Botsify offers three pricing plans including – “Do it yourself” plan, the “Done for you” plan, and the “Custom” plan. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Annual Plan Price	Monthly Plan Price
Do it yourself	$490 (Billed Annually & save 2 months)	$49 per month
Done for you	$1490 (Billed Annually & save 2 months)	$149 per month
Custom	Custom Price	Custom Price

ManyChat

Rating	4.8/5
Best For	Chat Marketing
Pricing Model	Flat Rate
Free	Free Version

ManyChat is a robust communication tool that helps businesses to automate conversations with customers.

It is a valuable tool for customer service, sales, and marketing. With its automation capabilities, targeted messaging, lead capture, e-commerce integration, and tracking features, it can be used for a variety of purposes. Its omnichannel nature will help to connect this tool with popular social media sites and e-commerce platforms.

Features:

Respond to buyers instantly on their phones, show them the products that fit them best, and get them to buy—all inside of Facebook Messenger or on your website.
Guide product selection and complete sales transactions, all within Messenger.
Connect with Shopify and recover lost sales.
Leverage social media conversations and customer responses to promote products and send coupons.
Use the E-commerce dashboard, which automatically pulls metrics from Shopify, to understand what converts best, and track earnings, average revenue, purchases per buyer, and unique buyers.
Intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Pros:

Free plan is available
Integration with Hubspot, MailChimp, Shopify, and more
Easy to use
Video tutorials are available
Flow builder
Provide free training

Cons:

Lack of better documentation
Poor customer support

Pricing:

ManyChat offers two plans – Free and Pro Plan. Look at the pricing details of the Pro plan below.

Plan	Pricing
Free	$0 per month
Pro	$15 per month

Tawk.to

Rating	4.6/5
Best For	Free Live Chat Tool
Free	Completely Free

Tawk.to is a free live chat app that lets you monitor and chat with visitors on your website or from a free customizable page. More than 250000 companies use this chatbot tool to provide real-time support and service to their customers. Tawk.to is the most popular chat tool in the world and holds an impressive 98% customer satisfaction rating. Keep in contact with customers through live chat, track incidents with a built-in ticketing system, and put together an easy-to-use help center – all at no cost. Never lose another lead or sale again, with Tawk.to you can monitor and chat with your website visitors when they need it most.

How to install and get started with Live Chat App Tawk.to

Features:

Real-Time Monitoring
Native Mobile Apps
Automated Triggers
Customizable Widgets
Ticketing Built-in
Remove Branding
Canned Shortcuts
100+ Integrations

Pros:

Knowledge base is available
45+ language supported
Detailed analytic and reporting
Easy to set up
Free forever
Mobile app is available
User-friendly interface

Cons:

Notifications are inconsistent

Pricing:

The Tawk.to app is completely free.

Freshchat

Rating	4.4/5
Best For	AI-Powered Live Chat Software
Pricing Model	Flat Rate
Free	Free Trial and Free Version

Freshchat is the customer engagement tool offered by one of the most popular helpdesk service providers. Bringing together artificial and human intelligence across messaging channels, this is a powerful chatbot that is already used by more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. Businesses are leveraging the power of this chatbot to streamline their workflow and provide satisfactory customer experience. It empowers businesses to easily access customer information and provide personalized support, regardless of the channel or device being used.

Features offered by Freshchat

Chatbot is easy to build without any prior knowledge of coding.
Customers can resolve their issues on their own by leveraging the chatbot AI.
Pre-built templates are available to fast-forward the process of powerful bot creation.
You can customize the appearance and behavior of the chat widgets to match your brand and website.
Mobile-first approach makes it easy for businesses to connect with customers on the go.
It seamlessly integrates with a wide range of business tools, such as CRM systems, help desks, and e-commerce platforms.
Detailed analytics on customer engagement, such as conversation history, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Pros:

21-day free trial
Mobile app is available to chat with customers anywhere, anytime
User-friendly interface
Excellent customer support
Multilingual support in 54 languages
Easy integration
Email and push notifications

Cons:

Extra features at additional cost
Slow response time

Pricing:

Freshchat offers one Free plan and three pricing plans including – the “Growth” plan, the “Pro” plan, and the “Enterprise” plan. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Annual Plan Price	Monthly Plan Price
Growth	₹999/agent/month, billed annually	₹1199/agent/month, billed monthly
Pro	₹2799/agent/month, billed annually	₹3399/agent/month, billed monthly
Enterprise	₹4999/agent/month, billed annually	₹5999/agent/month, billed monthly

Intercom

Rating	4.5/5
Best For	Custom Chatbot for for Quick Responses
Pricing Model	Per Feature
Free	Free Trial

Intercom is a customer communication platform that allows businesses to connect with their customers through various channels, including email, live chat, and social media. It is developed and maintained by Intercom Inc, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2011. More than 25,000 businesses are using this tool to manage and support customers. Hostinger, one of the most reputed hosting providers uses this tool to serve its customers.

Features offered by Intercom

Businesses can create personalized, automated messages that are triggered by specific events or customer behaviors.
Its live chat and messaging feature allow businesses to connect with customers in real-time.
Lead generation tools help businesses to capture lead information from their website, such as name and email address, and automatically add them to their contact list.
It helps to gather valuable insights about their customers’ experiences and preferences.
It seamlessly integrates with a wide range of popular tools, such as Salesforce, Slack, and Mailchimp. This allows businesses to streamline their workflow.
Easy to customize the bot that asks the right questions at the right place.
Help Center articles that help the customers with repetitive questions and significantly reduce the workload from your employee.

Pros:

Free trial for small businesses
Interactive interface
Mobile app is available
Wide range of integration options
Huge Learning resources are available
Account-based marketing
Good customer support

Cons:

Price is not disclosed for the business plan
Initial setup is complex

Pricing:

Intercom offers custom pricing plans, you can contact the vendor for details.

Tidio

Rating	4.8/5
Best For	Easiest To Use in Chatbots software
Pricing Model	Flat Rate
Free	Free Trial and Free Version

Tidio is a powerful communication tool that offers you a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution for connecting with your customers and audience. It seamlessly integrates with a wide range of popular platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, and Magento. You can easily connect with your customers and audience via live chat, email, or messenger, without leaving the platform. It provides you with detailed insights into your customer behavior and preferences. These insights will help you to improve your marketing and sales strategies.

Features offered by Tidio

Chat widget that allows businesses to connect with their customers and audience in real-time.
Automated responses to common customer queries that reduce response time and improve efficiency.
Easy to customize the appearance of the live chat widget to match the brand identity.
chatbot builder to create custom chatbots to assist customers with their queries.
You can create and send email campaigns to your target audience directly from the Tidio platform.
It supports multiple languages which makes it an ideal choice for businesses with a global audience.
Advanced AI that recommends the products to users based on their interaction.
Smart ticketing system to solve the customer’s query quickly.

Pros:

Easy installation
Free plan is available
Customer Satisfaction Management
Robust analytics
Easy customization
Blog post to learn
Mobile app is available

Cons:

Limited integration feature
100 unique visitors are limited in the free plan

Pricing:

Tidio offers one Free plan and three pricing plans including – the “Communicator” plan, the “Chatbots” plan, and the “Tidio+” plan. Look at the pricing details of each plan below.

Plan	Annual Plan Price	Monthly Plan Price
Communicator	15.83 USD per month	19 USD per month
Chatbots	32.50 USD per month	39 USD per month
Tidio+	240.83 USD per month	289 USD per month

Conclusion

Interactive chatbots can help you engage with your customers in a better and more personalized way. You can broadcast your offers and other marketing messages easily. They can also help you provide quick and efficient customer service. The best part is you can deploy interactive chatbots on websites, apps, as well as other social media platforms.

The software solutions mentioned above are some of the top AI chatbot platforms in the business. So, choose the one you like the best to build your own interactive chatbot.

FAQs

What is Chatbot?

A chatbot is computer software used to automatically generate messages to the queries of customers in a messaging app. As customers want 24/7/365 service, so it is an advanced way of communicating with humans via machine.

What are some popular Chatbots in 2023?

Some of the popular Chatbots tools in 2023 are as follows:-

Chatfuel
Chatbot
IntelliTicks
Zendesk Chat
Botsify
ManyChat
Tawk.to

Which are the best free Chatbot tools?

The best free chatbot tools are as follows:-

Chatfuel
ManyChat
Botsify
MobileMonkey
Flow XO
Pandorabots
Aivo
DialogFlow

Is Chatbot an AI tool?

Yes, chatbots are often powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and are able to mimic human conversation and perform tasks automatically.

What are the benefits of Chatbots for Customers?

The benefits of Chatbots for Customers are as follows:-

Chatbot provides 24/7/365 service.
The customer receives an instant reply to their queries.
Customers can take a screenshot of the message whenever they want in order to claim if they won’t avail of the service.
Users have the flexibility to choose the language in which they want to initiate the conversation.

What are the benefits of Chatbots for Companies?

The benefits of Chatbots for companies are as follows:-

Chatbots boost sales because of their instant and 24/7/365 service.
A chatbot is considered a way to reach out to new customers because of its active presence.
It helps the companies in saving the cost that is required to maintain customer service. Though the installation of a chatbot requires an investment cost, it is less compared to a customer service salary.
Chatbot increases operational efficiency as it reacts faster to the customers’ inquiries on behalf of the company.

Can chatbot tools handle multiple languages?

Many chatbot tools offer support for multiple languages, including Dialogflow, Botpress, and Pandorabots. However, it’s important to check the specific language capabilities of the tool you’re considering to make sure it meets your needs.

Can chatbot tools integrate with other tools and services?

Many chatbot tools offer integrations with other tools and services, such as CRM systems, marketing platforms, and payment processors. It’s worth checking the available integrations of the chatbot tool you’re considering to see if it meets your needs.

January 24, 2023

Best Webinar Software Platforms for Marketers in 2023
It is nearly impossible to communicate ideas and have important discussions face-to-face always, owing to one’s busy schedule. Advanced communication technology can help this situation smartly. Webinar means conducting an online seminar, meetings, and conferences online, using the internet facility. Webinar software can be defined as video conferencing software that helps host or broadcast training, workshop, meeting, lectures, etc. on the web.

The best webinar software makes recording, sharing, and engaging your prospects. Plus, it should have super high-quality video and audio quality, allow multiple presenters, and even have email marketing capabilities to ensure everyone shows up for your webinar. Most webinar software also comes with features like built-in surveys, polls, live chat, automated webinar sequences, live streaming, and more. These automated webinar sequences are excellent for hosting evergreen content like online courses, podcast interviews, or employee onboarding videos.

Best Webinar Software Tools in 2023

This list of the 12 best webinar software tools will help you figure out which tool is best for your business marketing needs.

Zoom
Webex
GoToWebinar
EverWebinar
MyOwnConference
ClickMeeting
WebinarJam
Livestorm
Demio
GetResponse
DaCast

Zoom

Launched in 2011

Rating 4.5/5

Mobile App Yes

Starting Price Free

Zoom – video conferencing platform

Zoom comes with a range of cloud video conferencing capabilities, including HD voice and video functionality, dual streams for dual screens, the ability to join as a view-only attendee, as well as by Zoom Rooms and telephone dial-in. It also has accessibility features, which allow employees with physical disabilities to schedule, attend, and participate in Zoom meetings and webinars.

The group collaboration feature of Zoom allows simultaneous screen sharing, group messaging, whiteboarding, annotation, and co-annotation, iOS mirroring on iPhone or iPad, and the ability to share documents, photos, and videos. Zoom includes unlimited VOIP with toll-free options in more than 60 countries available. You can also integrate any third-party teleconferencing service. Zoom lets you create a personal meeting ID and URL name to share with participants when you schedule your meetings. The security features enable you to give role-based control and include SSL encryption plus HTTPS access.

Zoom works across all platforms and will record the entire event, including questions asked by viewers. It also offers screen sharing and annotations and allows you to broadcast to Facebook Live or YouTube. It is also one of the only major webinar platforms that offer a free plan. If your webinar is under forty minutes and your attendees are under 100, you can use its basic features for free.

Pros and Cons of Zoom webinar software are listed below:

Pros:
- Interactive features like screen sharing, hand-raising, virtual background options, and live chat.
- Easy to use.
- Marketing tools to nurture contacts.
- Ability to back up meetings in the cloud.
- Allows meetings with a large number of participants.
Cons:
- The free version of Zoom has a relatively low limit of 40 minutes.
- Zoom has faced security and privacy concerns in the past.
Pricing Plans of Zoom:

Free 100 participants (40-minute limit)

Pro $14.99/month

Business $19.99/month

Webinar $79/month

Event $99/month

A free personal meeting plan is available with some restrictions. Paid plans start at $14.99/month, with Business and Enterprise plans starting from $19.99/month available as well. Also, Zoom charges per host. If you go with the basic paid plan at $14.99 per month but use two hosts, you’ll pay $14.99 x 2 or $29.98 per month.

Zoom pricing

Top 10 Best Video Conferencing Apps for Businesses

Are you looking for best video conferencing tools? The listed apps are the best video conferencing apps suited for every kind of business.

StartupTalkyNiku Mandal

Top 10 Best Video Conferencing Tools for Businesses

Webex

Launched in 2000

Rating 4.2/5

Mobile App Yes

Starting Price Free

Webex – webinar platform

Webex is more than a webinar platform, combining a wider range of features for holding online meetings, events, training sessions, interactive presentations and team collaboration. This sets it apart from the tools we’ve looked at so far, although the pricing is very similar. So you get a lot of features for your money compared to GoToWebinar and a completely different set of features to EverWebinar.

It provides some impressive features, such as a host room along with HD video and audio services that can be accessed on multiple devices. It allows its users a high degree of customization so that the host environment can be tailor-made to suit business requirements. Through Webex webinars, you can hold meetings throughout your organization, offer online and offline training sessions, and provide remote support. The key USPs of Webex include mobility, user-friendliness, and compatibility with all devices and browsers.

Setting Up a Webinar via Cisco Webex Events

Pros and Cons of Webex webinar tool are listed below:

Pros:
- Offers a free plan for up to 100 attendees.
- Built-in Q&A sessions, surveys, and polls for audience engagement.
- Translates live webinar to more than 100 languages.
- Live polling.
Cons:
- Must contact sales to get started.
- Real-time translation costs extra.
- Third party devices can be a problem.
Pricing Plans of Webex:

Basic Free

Business $25/month

Enterprise Custom Plan

Webex webinars pricing plan includes Free Basic plan for up to 1oo participants. Its Business plan cost for $25 per month up to 2oo participants, and Enterprise is a custom plan for up to 1oo0 participants.

Webex Pricing Plan

Best Email and Workflow Automation Tools.

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StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

GoToWebinar

Launched in 2006

Rating 4.2/5

Mobile App Yes

Starting Price Free

GoToWebinar – Best Webinar Software

GoToWebinar is by the folks at GoToMeeting, the popular meeting and screen-sharing application/service. GoToWebinar software is designed to cater to your webinar and web conferencing needs. The tool comes featured with functionalities that facilitate retain customers and also generate leads. Reminder emails and notifications help to stay well-prepared and not miss important deadlines.

You can easily measure participants’ level of engagement with this tool by using engagement metrics. Pre-recorded webinars are available with this webinar platform. The software also allows customization, so your webinar materials can be designed with your company’s logo easily. You can share at ease videos and demos while holding web conferences or during broadcasting events. It is compatible with mobile.

Some of the biggest benefits of GoToWebinar include a handy video-sharing feature, breakout rooms to split up your audience, and a few mobile apps that can be used for webinar management. As such, it offers some of the best webinar tools on the market. It also features advanced lead management and reporting tools which allow you to integrate with your existing CRM. By doing so, you can handle lead generation and event creation all in one place.

Pros and Cons of GoToWebinar software are listed below:

Pros:
- Audience engagement by conducting online seminars, polls and surveys.
- Options available for custom branding and registration pages
- Lead management and reporting tools.
- Allows for large numbers of participants.
Cons:
- Software feels a bit outdated.
- Relatively expensive compared to other web conferencing and online seminar platforms.
- Technical issues were reported by some users.
Pricing Plans of GoToWebinar:

Free 7 days

Starter $89/month

Pro $199/month

Plus $429/month

After a free 7 days trial, prices start at $89/month billed annually. GoToWebinar also offers a Pro Plan for $199/month and an Enterprise plan at $429/month.

GoToWebinar pricing

How to Remotely Manage your Workforce?

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EverWebinar

Launched in 2015

Rating 3.9/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price $199

EverWebinar – Webinar automation tool

EverWebinar is a powerful webinar automation tool that aims to help you build email marketing lists. With EverWebinar, you can schedule and automate your webinar footage to play at set intervals and the software aims to recreate the live experience for users. The goal is to increase engagement and attendance by telling users the next webinar is about to begin, even if they choose to replay it a dozen times per day.

Like evergreen content, evergreen webinars are existing webinars that are re-broadcasted over time. The idea is that some webinars contain topics and content that stays relevant and can be replayed to new attendees (and new potential customers). With EverWebinar, you have three options:
- Show the webinar live.
- Show a hybrid – a pre-recorded video with live chat enabled.
- Show a fully automated video – no work or interaction from you required.
EverWebinar is the best webinar platform for you if you want to automate screenings of your pre recorded webinars and turn them into a highly effective lead generation strategy. This is a truly unique platform.

Pros and Cons of EverWebinar webinar automation tool are listed below:

Pros:
- EverWebinar has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to schedule and host webinars.
- EverWebinar allows users to create automated webinars, which means that the webinar can be run without the need for the host to be present.
- It allows users to customize the look and feel of their webinars, including the ability to add logos, branding, and custom graphics.
- It can be integrated with other tools, such as email marketing software and CRM systems, which can help users to manage and track their webinars more effectively.
Cons:
- EverWebinar is a paid webinar software.
- EverWebinar does not offer some of the advanced features that are available in other webinar software, such as the ability to conduct polls or surveys during the webinar.
- As with any webinar software, there is a risk of technical issues occurring during the webinar, such as connectivity problems or audio/video issues.
Pricing Plans of EverWebinar:

Free Not Available

Installment Plan $199×3 yearly

Annual Plan $499/yearly

Biennial Plan $799/2 years

There are a few options in EverWebinar pricing plans. You can pay in 3 installments of $199 or pay $499 annually but most importantly, you can try it out and get a feel for it first with a 14 day trial. There is also a Biennial Plan (799$/ 2 years).

EverWebinar pricing

MyOwnConference

Launched in 2014

Rating 4.3/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price Free

MyOwnConference – web-based webinar software

MyOwnConference is a robust, web-based webinar software. It provides easy access to the webinar room from any popular browser without the installation of additional software. It offers a wide range of features, including Q&A, chat, screen sharing, recording, quizzes, whiteboard, and much more. This makes MyOwnConference useful for different types of events: webinars, video conferencing, business meetings, training sessions, remote work, e.t.c.

Pros and Cons of MyOwnConference web based webinar software are listed below:

Pros:
- MyOwnConference allows users to host online meetings and webinars with up to 1000 participants.
- MyOwnConference offers a range of features, including screen sharing, audio and video conferencing, and chat, which can be useful for various types of online meetings and webinars.
- Records webinars in HD.
- The interface supports sixteen different languages. This enables you to engage with a multilingual audience.
Cons:
- UI isn’t that user-friendly.
- The platform only supports a maximum of 10 different speakers. This may cause problems if you have a lot of expert presenters lined up.
Pricing Plans of MyOwnConference:

Free 20 attendees for lifetime

One Time Plan $12/day

Monthly Plan $36/month for 60 attendees

Annual Plan $348

MyOwnConference offers a free plan for 20 attendees for lifelong use. As for paid plans, it provides 3 types of tariffs: one-time, annual, and monthly. A one-time plan starts at $12/day and includes all available features. The monthly price starts at $36/month for 60 attendees. The annual plan will cost you $348 with 20% discounts.

MyOwnConference pricing

Project Management Tools for Virtual Teams

Project management [https://startuptalky.com/tag/project-management/] software assistsemployees, administrators, and teams with managing team goals and long-termprojects, as well as coordinating individual tasks. Project management softwareaccomplishes this through a range of tools to manage work…

StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

ClickMeeting

Launched in 2011

Rating 4/5

Mobile App Yes

Starting Price Free

ClickMeeting – webinar management tool

ClickMeeting is a webinar management tool for businesses who want to increase their digital reach by hosting branded webinars. All features are intuitive and straightforward to use and come in handy while dealing with international speakers and audiences. It is easy to personalize the webinar room and every associated element with just a few clicks while managing all sorts of webinars such as paid webinars, automated webinars, etc.

Webinar hosting is free from the hassle of device and operating system incompatibility. Types of content that can be hosted include Facebook and YouTube Live, Presentations, Whiteboard, Polls, Surveys, and more. With analytical capabilities, users can derive useful predictions and trends and strengthen their relationships with webinar attendees with regular engagement. With a dedicated webinar tool, it is easier to move prospects through the sales funnel, attract a larger and targeted user base, deliver knowledge-oriented sessions, and measure the progress.

How to Create and Deliver an Exciting and Impactful Webinar on ClickMeeting

Pros and Cons of ClickMeeting webinar management tool are listed below:

Pros:
- You can stream webinar live on YouTube or Facebook.
- A user-friendly interface makes it easier to use and manage.
- ClickMeeting offers a range of features, including screen sharing, audio and video conferencing, and chat, which can be useful for various types of online meetings and webinars.
- Engage your audience with live chat and Q&A sessions
- Unlimited webinar landing pages.
Cons:
- Can’t schedule recurring meetings.
- It does not have a phone support hotline.
- The storage capacity is limited to 10-hour maximum.
Pricing Plans of ClickMeeting:

Free 30 Days Trial

Live $25/month

Automated $40/month

The price is reasonable, but the number of attendees allowed is a little low. The rates start at $25 per month (billed annually) for 25 attendees, $40 (billed annually) per month for up to 50 viewers. There is also an option for custom-pricing that’s best suited for enterprise customers.

ClickMeeting Pricing

Chatbot – Perfect SaaS Business Tool

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WebinarJam

Launched in 2013

Rating 3.7/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price $39 per month

WebinarJam

WebinarJam is developed by the same team as EverWebinar but the focus is on screening live webinars this time. WebinarJam is more like a traditional online seminar platforms, designed for live events so there’s no automation or scheduling with this tool. However, it syncs perfectly with EverWebinar to provide a platform combination that caters to all of your webinar needs – more capable and cheaper than most of the competition.

It has all the table stakes features like HD video, multiple presenters, slick customer-facing interface and an easy presenter dashboard. It also has features like- live broadcast to YouTube, live chat in webinar, ability to moderate and highlight comments, private messages between moderators, popups for selling your product during your webinar, the ability to poll your audience, or share a video or whiteboard annotation mid-webinar and a super robust analytics dashboard.

Pros and Cons of WebinarJam webinar platform are listed below:

Pros:
- Enterprise plan allows for up to six presenters and 5,000 live attendees
- One-click webinar registration.
- User-friendly and quick to set up.
- Support multiple languages.
- Interactive and engaging features
Cons:
- .Customer support isn’t always friendly.
- Can’t stream directly from your website.
Pricing Plans of WebinarJam:

Starter $39/month

Basic $79/month

Professional $229/month

Enterprise $379/month

Webinarjam pricing plans starts at $39/month (when paid annually). There are also other options like Basic ($79/month), Professional ($229/month) and Enterprise ($379/month).

Webinarjam Pricing

Livestorm

Launched in 2016

Rating 4.4/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price Free

Livestorm

Livestorm is a webinar software that facilitates hosting eye-catching presentation and demonstration of products/services. With this tool you can improve your customer training process, by creating live sessions to answer queries and give tips.

This webinar software helps creating and sharing online live courses for your targeted masses. You can craft attractive landing pages without a landing page builder software, and emails without any need to opt for email automation software. Livestorm facilitates hosting webinars quickly,without any requirement to download anything. It can easily be accessed from any device, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Their webinar software also works on any browser without any restrictions for attendees.

An area where it stands out is the email logistics where you can send promotional emails, automate those emails, check email status, and add a touch of personalization. This webinar tool also takes your data security very seriously and is 100% GDPR-compliant. Livestorm is also focused on customer engagement with activities like polling, Q&A sessions, and the use of up-votes.

Pros and Cons of Livestorm webinar software tool are listed below:

Pros:
- Run live, on-demand, or fully automated webinars.
- Livestorm is easy to use and set up.
- Intuitive landing pages.
- Engage attendees with features like polling, Q&A sessions, and upvoting.
- Perfect tool when handling interviews and testing candidates.
Cons:
- As browser software, video quality can be affected by the host’s internet connection.
- It does not have a slideshows upload feature in the webinar.
- Webinar duration must be 20 minutes or less for its free plan.
Pricing Plans of Livestorm:

Free Up to 30 active contacts/month

Pro $88/month

Business Custom Plan

Enterprise Custom Plan

Livestorm offers four pricing plans Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Free plan allow Up to 30 active contacts/month, Pro plan cost $88/month, billed annually, Business and Enterprise are custom plans with unlimited active contacts and other attractive features. Get a personalized quote as per your requirements.

Livestorm pricing plans

Try Livestorm for FREE

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Business [https://startuptalky.com/tag/business/]owners should constantly be looking fortechnology to make their business and employees more productive. While computersand smart phones come with a calendar, it might not be the best option for youor your business. Thankfully, there isn’t a shortag…

StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

Demio

Launched in 2014

Rating 4.7/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price $34/month

Demio

Demio is one of the best webinar software platforms available out there. It’s super easy to record your webinar automatically in the cloud. When it comes to visual aesthetics, it delivers real-time, HD streaming, and great looking platform design. The software has powerful tracking options. Retargeting, tracking, or conversion pixels may be freely added on the registration page, thank you page, or in the webinar room.

Also, demio offers automation rules, such as sending the webinar recording to those who joined only after the 30-minute mark. With these rules, it is easy to segment the audience in real-time based on the actions that people take. Finally, demio is a very simple tool. It usually takes just several minutes to schedule the first event and even less time to setup the recurring webinars.

Pros and Cons of Demio webinar software platform are listed below:

Pros:
- Webinar pages are highly customizable.
- Includes engagement features like live chat, document handouts, and CTA pop-ups
- You don’t have to download any additional software to run webinars.
- 14-day free trial available.
Cons:
- There is no general link available instead, there’s a separate link for each attendee.
- Webinar replays don’t display annotations, chats, and polls.
- You only got to share the entire screen. Thats so painful in a webinar.
Pricing Plans of Demio:

Free 14 Days Trial

Starter $34/month

Growth $69/month

Premium $250/month

Demio provides a 14-day free trial, which allows you to test out all its features. The Starter plan starts at $34 per month for a 50-person webinar room, Growth plan of $69 for a 150-person room, and Premium Plan of $250 per month for a 500-3000 person room. These monthly rates are valid on annual subscriptions.

Demio Pricing

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StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

GetResponse

Launched in Not Available

Rating 4.2/5

Mobile App Yes

Starting Price $15/month

GetResponse

GetResponse is all-in-the-box solution incorporates not only a webinar platform, but also different marketing tools, including autoresponders, custom emails, list segmentation feature etc. With this, it is possible to have the email database and webinar tool under the same roof. As a result, the account holder may schedule webinar campaigns for the subscribers, send the reminders to them; share the event on social media.

Like the others on this list, it includes features like polling, desktop sharing, integrated whiteboard, and access to detailed reports. It is also possible to use the registration feature to collect new emails and to send automatic thank-you messages to the registrants.

Pros and Cons of GetResponse webinar platform are listed below:

Pros:
- Lots of templates to choose from, making building almost anything on the platform possible
- Nothing is left to the imagination – you can view your marketing automation workflows and funnels in a visual manner.
- Retarget visitors to your webinar page.
- Comparatively good at split test.
- Third-party tool integration.
Cons:
- No free plan for webinars.
- Complex email automation structure.
- Complete automation is not available at the basic plan.
Pricing Plans of GetResponse:

Basic $15/month

Plus $49/month

Professional $99/month

Max Custom Plan

GetResponse Basic plans starts from $15 per month. Plus plan cost for $49 per month, Professional plan cost for $99 per month and Max is a custom plan.

GetResponse Pricing Plans

Start Using GetResponse Now

DaCast

Launched in 2010

Rating 4.5/5

Mobile App No

Starting Price 14 Days Free Trial

DaCast

DaCast may be a great choice for companies and individuals who are just trying their hand in webinar conducting. While the majority of webinar platforms are subscription based, this pricing format may not be ideal for those who only hold live events from time to time.

Dacast is the live streaming platform with a unique approach to pricing. The customers may pay on an event by event basis. Prepaid bandwidth may be used when the client needs it during the following 12 months. However, there are also subscription-based plans for those who hold webinars regularly. With Dacast, it is possible to stream from your website over social networks including Facebook, or any other way.

While it lacks a few of the more advanced features of other webinar platforms, it offers a good variety of functionality across all plans, including: Quality Streaming, No Viewer Limits, Unlimited Channels, Watermarking, Play on Facebook, Playlist, Third-Party Integration, Multi-Bitrate, Secure Delivery, Analytics, Mobile Device Support, and Video Paywall.

Pros and Cons of Dacast webinar management tool are listed below:

Pros:
- Monetization features like price groups, promo codes, and subscriptions available.
- Customize your paywall.
- Free trial for 14 days available.
- Interactive video on demand.
- Private streaming.
Cons:
- Plans have a bandwidth limit. If you go over, you have to pay $0.25 per GB.
- Not many customization options.
Pricing Plans of Dacast:

Starter $39/month

Event $63/month

Scale $188/month

Custom Available

Free trial for 14 days available. Starter plan is available for small audiences for $39/month billed annually, Event plan (One time or occasional events) for $63/month billed annually, Scale plan is available for Business & organizational video for $188/month billed annually. There is one quote-based custom plan as well that allows you to cherry-pick the features you require.

DaCast pricing

Conclusion

Due to the popularity of webinars, there’s no shortage of platforms to choose from. There are some great webinar platforms on this list and a few outside bets that cater to more specialist needs. The above is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does highlight some of the biggest platforms with the best features, pros and cons and pricing details . The right webinar platform for you, depends on your specific needs, of course. However, I can fully recommend taking a closer look at the options we’ve covered today by trying out a few free trials. Do you know of some other webinar tool? Feel free to drop it in the comments section below.

FAQs

What is Webinar Software?

Webinar software can be defined as video conferencing software that helps to host or broadcast training, workshop, meeting, lectures, and other virtual events on the web.

Which are the best webinar software platforms?

Best webinar software platforms are:
- Zoom
- GoToWebinar
- EverWebinar
- MyOwnConference
- ClickMeeting
- WebinarJam
- Livestorm
- Demio
- GetResponse
- Webex
- DaCast
What is the main purpose of webinar?

The main objective of conducting a webinar is to instruct, demonstrate, or educate your targeted audience.

Are webinars live or recorded?

It can be both, either live or recorded.

Is Zoom, a good webinar software?

Zoom Video Webinar is the best virtual platform for hosting meetings, webinars, conferences, etc.

Are webinars still effective?

Yes, webinars are still effective, and they should be a part of your marketing strategy.
December 17, 2022
Best 15 Sales Intelligence Platforms & Tools to improve Sales and Leads
Sales intelligence software and tools help companies use internal and external data to increase sales and improve sales processes. Companies use the best sales intelligence tools to improve the quality and quantity of sales leads by using data to find new opportunities and provide salespeople with the information they need to take a leap. This type of software is used by marketing and sales executives to define and implement sales strategies based on their data combined with external data in their CRM software such as lists of prospects, databases of contacts, etc. In this article you’ll discover the 11 Best Sales Intelligence Platforms and why exactly your business needs a sales intelligence tool.

What are the sales intelligence tools?
Why Sales Intelligence Tools?

Best Sales Intelligence Platforms & Tools
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
2. ZoomInfo
3. Adapt
4. Apollo.io
5. Clearbit
6. Seamless.ai
7. Vainu
8. Oracle CX Sales
9. InsideView
10. Lead411
11. UpLead
12. Winmo
13. Lusha
14. Crystal
15. Hunter
What are the sales intelligence tools?

Sales intelligence tools monitor millions of data points to identify sales targets and allow the sales team to launch action. It gives salespeople the ability to connect directly with their ideal customers so they can build pipelines, shorten their sales cycle, and close more deals at scale.

It uses data collection and software to aid salespeople in lead generation, creating an ideal customer profile and data quality management. It uses both internal and external data to increase sales and improve sales processes. It focuses on both the quality and quantity of sales leads by using data to find new opportunities. The Global sales intelligence software market size is to reach US$ 3.4 billion by 2024, at a compounded annual growth rate of 11.4% and is likely to reach US$ 8.4 Billion by 2032.

Why Sales Intelligence Tools?

The use of sales intelligence tools includes:
- Prospecting for new contacts.
- Augmenting contact records with missing information.
- Adding company and industry details.
- Qualifying and prioritizing leads.
- Tracking email and website interactions.
- Compiling lead activity in lead records.
- Gathering contextual data from social media or news updates.
Best Sales Intelligence Tools

Here, we take a detailed look at 11 of the best sales intelligence tools and platforms to grow your business. These tools can help to make every step of the sales process more effective—from lead generation and scoring, to insights for better messaging and outreach. So, let’s jump right in!

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best version of LinkedIn for salespeople. Sales Navigator makes it simple to establish and grow relationships with prospects and customers by helping you by tapping into the full power of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network of 500M+ members.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Best lead Intelligence Software

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can focus on the right people and companies, stay up-to-date on what’s happening with your accounts, and connect to new prospects even if you don’t have their contact information. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an all-in-one sales intelligence tool unto itself and it leverages LinkedIn’s huge network and adds advanced search features so you can find the right leads and learn more detailed information about them. Sales Navigator also offers extra InMail credits for outreach and recommends qualified leads.

Also Read: Top 7 LinkedIn Automation Tools

ZoomInfo

Another top Sales Intelligence tool is ZoomInfo Powered by DiscoverOrg which combines the world’s most comprehensive business database with best-in-class technology to fuel your go-to-market strategy from start to finish and provide an accurate, 360-degree view of customers, prospects, and opportunities.

Zoominfo – Best lead Intelligence Software

With robust features and integrations seamlessly incorporated into your workflows, the company is on a mission to deliver MORE. More leads for sales and marketing teams. It is a sales and marketing intelligence software which helps to achieve more closed deals for sales organizations, efficiency for operations, control for leadership and more profit for everyone.

ZoomInfo offers solutions to support all of your sales needs – including territory planning, lead scoring, sales prospecting, conducting targeted outreach, and more. With this platform and products, you can increase sales productivity, and scale success quickly so that your team could hit their number each and every quarter.

ZoomInfo – Sales Intelligence Platform

Adapt

Adapt is a global B2B contact and company database provider across multiple industries. Adapt has 250,000+ users and 90 million business contacts, including industry-specific company databases and contact information such as job titles, direct dial, and email addresses. It is one of the best lead intelligence software. Adapt is a unified sales accelerating platform with the industry-leading core products Lead Builder and Prospector.

Adapt – Best lead Intelligence Software

With robust CRM integration and chrome extension, Adapt’s database enables sales representatives, marketing leaders, recruiters, and decision-makers to connect faster, engage seamlessly, and start prospecting without any delay. From finding the right connections to building qualified leads and engaging with prospects, Adapt is built for modern marketers and sales teams to hit the target faster.

Apollo.io

Apollo.io was founded in 2015 and it is an all-in-one sales intelligence platform with tools to help to prospect, engage, and drive more revenue from a database of 220 million would-be buyers. It is a leading data intelligence and sales engagement platform trusted by many customers across the globe and helps rapidly growing startups to global enterprises.

Apollo.io Clearbit – Best lead Intelligence Software

It uses advanced algorithms and unique data acquisition methods to help over 5,00,00 sales professionals to enrich and analyze prospects’ data to increase quality conversations and opportunities.

Apollo.io has raised $110 million in Series C round led by sequoia in 2022. Apollo offers Sellers and marketers to discover more customers and connections in the market and establish a modern go-to-market strategy one of the features is one can see instant email stats, like how many people opened the emails in the last hour and pull the stats instantly.

Clearbit

Clearbit automatically updates your sales records with the accurate, verified company and contact data. With best-in-class data at your fingertips, you’ll have better insights into your prospects and get more time to connect with them. Better data also means better targeting. It will set up smart lead scoring and segmented lists, so you always reach out with the right message. It also gives an alert when key contacts visit your site and target them when you’re top of mind.

Clearbit – Best lead Intelligence Software

Finding new prospects is easy, too. Just pick a few filters, and connect with any of over 200M current contacts, all with verified contact details.

Clearbit offers four main products:
- Enrichment (Enriching existing contacts)
- Prospecting (Finding new contacts)
- Reveal (Translating your website traffic into contact data)
- Forms (Autofilling your forms based on your visitors’ email addresses)
Prospecting and Enrichment can be especially useful services for sales managers. Enrichment starts at $99 (for enriching 1,000 contacts) per month whereas Prospecting, integrated with Salesforce, starts at $12,000/year.

Seamless.ai

Seamless.AI is an inside sales and lead generation software and lead management solution that helps businesses streamline processes related to contact search, market research, lead conversion, and data importing on a centralized platform. It allows consumers to purchase a product from the company on any channel and then retrieve the product according to the consumer’s desires.

Seamless.ai- Best lead Intelligence Software

It integrates with other platforms such as LinkedIn and allows salespersons to utilize the built-in search engine to extract business contact details based on company names, employee designations, roles, and seniority. It also helps sales, marketing, and recruiting teams to maximize revenue, increase sales, and easily acquire the market using artificial intelligence integration.

Vainu

Vainu is a sales intelligence, prospecting & account insights platform which helps you to find actionable account insights, identify timely prospecting signals & determine the most valuable sales prospects for your business from a database of over 108 million companies enriched with open data.

Vainu – Best lead Intelligence Software

Vainu helps you to save time and sell more with a better hit rate. Vainu is everything your team needs to give your customers with tailored sales experience. Vainu is powered by technology which collects, reads, and understands all company information ever written, and makes them easily consumable for the salespersons.

Vainu is built by a team of machine learning scientists, data engineers, designers, strategists, and salespeople. Vainu pricing starts at $7250 per year per user and also has a free version of Vainu.

Oracle CX Sales

Oracle CX and Oracle B2B Service help to improve visibility and collaboration between sales and service teams and turn the data into intelligence for personalized experiences. It empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences—from acquisition to retention and integrate service solutions for enhanced communication and customer service experiences.
Oracle Engagement Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provide a comprehensive set of capabilities for retailers to strengthen their merchandising core and help sales leaders for more effective decision-making.

Oracle CX sales- Best lead Intelligence Software

It improves seller productivity by automating time-consuming data entry and manual tasks. It gives salespersons a faster path to critical records so they can spend less time making CRM updates or searching for information and connecting data from back-office and CRM systems. It unifies real-time customer intelligence with data EPR and HR systems to meet and exceed the business goal.

InsideView

InsideView helps businesses to drive rapid revenue growth by empowering business leaders to discover new markets, target and engage the right buyers, and manage customer data quality. It is an AI-based B2B data and sales intelligence platform that deliver the industry’s most relevant and reliable buyer signals and combined with InsideView’s data expertise and best-in-class customer support is trusted by the world’s best-performing companies.

InsideView – Best lead Intelligence Software

InsideView is all about healthy data and efficiency to get rid of irrelevant and duplicate information to find the right people and companies that really care for your product or service. With this, unified targeting, marketing, and sales intelligence platform you can gain real-time insights into the market that allow you to make the right strategic choices. Insideview’s Go-To-Market Decision Engine helps you to discover growth opportunities for your company.

Lead411

Lead411 is a source for verified lead data that includes inbox response through verified emails and B2B Direct dial phone numbers. It allows to build of stronger relationships with b2b leads and helps to close more deals. Lead411 offers Bombora Intent Data so that one can pinpoint companies and contacts that are actively searching for services and solutions.

lead411Clearbit – Best lead Intelligence Software

Lead411 allows for finding new leads by generating data keys and provides growth through sales intelligence. It focuses on quality data by verifying emails that are not only human-verified but also verify data through ESP Activity Confirmation. It has Chrome Extension to find contact data as one searches Linkedin and company websites with Lead411.

It has data filters for simple data analysis and also has export options for nearly every scenario. It has various pricing indexes as per the requirements and pricing goes from $75 per month per user to $125 per month per user.

UpLead

UpLead is a B2B prospecting platform that provides the highest quality B2B contact & company data. Features include real-time email verification, worldwide contacts in over 200 countries, 50+ search criteria, technology tracking, account-based marketing, competitor intelligence, email pattern intelligence, social profile links, Salesforce & 12 other CRM integrations, robust API, and more.

UpLead – Best lead Intelligence Software

UpLead is a powerful B2B data provider and the best enterprise sales intelligence software that let you build targeted prospect lists. You can search for prospects by using over 50 filters, such as job title, technologies used, revenue, company’s location, and the company’s size to get the right data to boost your sales efforts.

Winmo

Winmo allows you to easily find the right person to contact by using its targeted contact search. It’s a versatile sales intelligence platform with a lead database which regularly updated and populated by its team of researchers. They do not use any bots and all of the work is done manually. Additionally, Winmo Edge provides you with sales prediction functionality that can inform you early about potential sales opportunities.

Winmo – Best lead Intelligence Software

You can also set up specific alerts and recommendations to avoid missing any hot leads. Connecting the dots between brands, agencies, and the executives who control their purse strings, Winmo paves a clearer path for engaging the right decision-makers at the right prospects. And with integrated news, recommendations and alerts, sales teams can track known opportunities, identify new leads, and execute their outreach for optimal results.

Lusha

Lusha helps business professionals to establish a fast and true connection with their leads, contacts, and candidates. B2B engagement is based on trust. Lusha helps you build that trust using simple tools that allow you to enrich and verify business profiles.

Lusha – Best lead Intelligence Software

Today, over 2,50,000 sales representatives, recruitment managers, and marketers transform the way they engage customers with their leads, contacts, and candidates by using Lusha on a daily basis.

Crystal

Would it help you to know more about the personality of the next prospect you call? Crystal provides you with exactly this kind of data. Based on social media profiles or written texts, the tool uses the DISC approach to assess the personality of a person. In that way, it not only helps you to learn more about the person but also about their connections to other people.

Crystal – Best lead Intelligence Software

Crystal shows you the best way to communicate with any prospect, customer, or coworker based on their unique personality. You can get started with Crystal for free. For unlimited psychological information and access to personality profiles, Crystal charges $29 per month.

Hunter

Hunter makes it easy for sales and marketers to reach out to other professionals with simple but powerful tools. It is basically an email-finding tool that can help you to connect with your prospect easily.

Hunter – Best lead Intelligence Software

Hunter crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. The data is easily accessible via a simple user interface to find the right person in a company or find how to contact already identified professionals. Besides that, you can easily automate the whole outreach process with Hunter by verifying the emails you found in the app and setting up simple and powerful cold outreach campaigns.

Hunter provides a free plan for beginners which includes 25 free email lookups and 50 email verification requests. Campaigns, which is a tools for cold outreach, are completely free. If you want to go beyond that, their paid plans start at $49/mo.

HUnter.io Review – Should you really invest in it?

Hunter.io is a popular email finder. However, it’s not for everyone. Read the pros, cons and features of Hunter.io to decide whether you should buy it.

StartupTalkyLakshya Singh

Conclusion

In today’s world of information overflow, it isn’t easy to know which information is crucial and which is irrelevant. Having the right data at the right time is a challenge that every company is facing. It’s only when you’re able to understand who you should target and how you can connect with that person, that you’ll be able to drive growth. Luckily there are sales intelligence tools that give us a hand.

They help us to collect accurate marketing data more quickly, give us valuable insights into the market, and allow us to anticipate future outcomes. By using such software your sales team can ditch the research and concentrate on what they do best.

FAQs

What is sales intelligence software?

Sales intelligence software allows salespeople to conduct pointed searches for companies with a specific set of real-time data points, including both firmographics, technographic and buying signals.

What are the Best Sales Intelligence Softaware?
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- ZoomInfo
- Adapt
- Apollo.io
- Clearbit
- Seamless.ai
- Vainu
- Oracle Cx Sales
- Insideview
- Lead411
- UpLead
- Winmo
- Lusha
- Crystal
- Hunter
What is lead intelligence?

Lead intelligence is a form of data that significantly elevates your understanding of your prospects. So you can better address their points, communicate effectively with them, and win their business. When it comes to B2B sales, lead intelligence is invaluable.

What is meant by market intelligence?

Marketing intelligence is the practice of gathering data relevant to the marketing efforts of an organization, and then analyzing that data to accurately and efficiently guide the decision-making process of campaigns.

How much does sales intelligence software cost?

Sales intelligence tools are typically priced on a monthly subscription model, per user. Free versions are rare given the lift associated with this category of software. Paid plans start at $39 per month per user and increase up to $319 per month per user depending on the number of leads being considered.
November 7, 2022

Freshworks Success Story – The Journey from a Small Startup to Nasdaq

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Freshworks.

Let’s be honest about the fact that a majority of the employees despise the software application they use at work. Business software has always been noted as cumbersome, costly, difficult to implement, and challenging to use.

Days are usually spent attempting to tailor a difficult software to use for a specific purpose as decided by the company. Sometimes it becomes so difficult that the companies need to recruit full-time staff to oversee the application, which is simply another hit to their finances. All of these can now be avoided with the emergence of Freshworks, which is a one-stop cloud-based software solution for businesses.

Freshworks was founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy, and Vijay Shankar in Chennai. Freshworks agrees that every company needs better technology that is ready to use, easy to scale, affordable, and leaves a little room for configuration. All of the company’s products deliver on this pledge and are backed by world-class customer service. The best thing is that getting them to work is not very expensive.

Know more about Freshworks success story, its Founders, Business Model, Team, Logo, Startup story, Challenges, Competitors, Mission and Vision, Funding, Future Plans and more in this article.

Freshworks – Company Highlights

Startup Name	Freshworks
Former Name	Freshdesk
Headquarters	San Mateo, California, United States
Industry	Information Services, Software, Saas
Founder	Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy, Vijay Shankar
Founded	October 2010
Funding	$484 mn (May 2022)
Revenue	$114.6 mn (Q1 FY2022)
Valuation	$4.57 bn (May 2022)
Current CEO	Girish Mathrubootham
Website	freshworks.com

About Freshworks
Freshworks – Startup Story
Freshworks – Founders And Team
Freshworks – Name, Logo and Tagline
Freshworks – Vision and Mission
Freshworks – Business Model
Freshworks – Revenue and Growth
Freshworks – Funding And Investors
Freshworks – IPO
Freshworks – ESOPs
Freshworks – Investments
Freshworks – Acquisitions
Freshworks – Awards and Recognition
Freshworks – Competitors
Freshworks – Challenges Faced
Freshworks – Future Plans

About Freshworks

Freshworks is a global Saas-based software solutions provider that helps enable businesses to get the best out of their software. Originally headquartered in Chennai, India, Freshworks is currently listed on Nasdaq with its headquarters in San Mateo, California, United States.

Founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in 2010 in Chennai, the company brings in a range of product suites, including sales CRM software, recruitment tools, and customer-support helpdesk software to exceed customer and employee expectations.

With a focus on enabling all kinds of big and small companies and their increasing requirements, Freshworks builds and distributes easy-to-use SaaS software, and helps all of its customers drive clear business results. Freshdesk, Freshworks, Freshservice, Freshteam, Freshchat, Freshcaller, and other products are among the company’s offerings.

The company already boasts of enabling over 50,000 big and small companies across the globe.

Freshworks, now a California-based company, is a part of the Business Intelligence Software Industry. The company has 4000+ employees working on all of its sites and it has already witnessed an annual recurring revenue of more than $300 million in the month of February 2021.

Freshworks – Target Market Audience

Freshworks brings in cutting-edge SaaS customer engagement solutions for startups and other business professionals. It targets businesses of all sizes and all kinds and makes it easy for the operating teams to acquire customers and keep them engaged for life. The company currently operates in India and the US.

Freshworks will continue to acquire new customers and catalyze global brand awareness using a variety of Google resources. Freshworks expects to use Google Translation Services to expand globally as its product range grows.

Freshworks – Startup Story

The founder of the company was an employee of Zoho Corporation. While Girish was reading an article on Hacker News, he found Zendesk raising their prices from 60% to 300% and how the Zendesk users were unhappy about it. He found a comment, where it was written that there’s a big opening in the market for someone to come in and take all of Zendesk’s and eSupport’s customers. It was a slap on his face.

Girish knew that the opportunity was sitting right in front of him and also that he had knowledge about the transition taking place. He then thought that he should do something in the customer support market delivered as SaaS.

The next few weeks turned out to be stressful. He was very excited about this new idea but didn’t expose the fact. Mathrubootham spoke to his friend Shan Krishnasamy about the matter and they immediately agreed. They both resigned from Zoho and coupled with Vijay Shankar to bring Freshworks into existence with a team of six people as Freshdesk.

The founder trio soon set up a 700 sqft warehouse in Chennai to launch their IT helpdesk company in 2010. This new startup not only started to change the ways the customers interacted with the companies using social media but also helped the companies to address the customer complaints across diverse channels.

It was around eight years of hardwork, which led the company to scale its revenue to touch the $100 million mark. Soon after, Freshdesk was rebranded to Freshworks, the success of which followed and helped it set up its headquarters in the US, thereby bringing the company closer to a majority of its userbase.

Freshworks – Founders And Team

The founders of Freshworks are Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy and Vijay Shankar. It was founded in 2010, in Chennai.

Girish Mathrubootham

Starting his career as a Member of Technical Staff at HCL Cisco ODC, Mathrubootham served as a Senior Software Engineer at eForce and then went on to become a Lead Engineer and a Product Manager AdventNet Inc.

After staying with the company for over 4 years, Girish landed a job at Zoho Corporation, where he joined as a Director and was later promoted to the position of Vice President – Product Management. Girish Mathrubootham worked with Zoho for over 5 years before founding Freshworks in 2010.

Freshworks CEO and Founder Girish Mathrubootham has been given $233.41 million in stock awards, which will be vested over the next 7 years, which will make it one of the biggest compensation packages received by an Indian business leader in recent years. Girish Mathrubootham received a salary of $611,980 in 2021, and the additional stock award that he will receive is exclusive of his salary.

Shan Krishnasamy

Shan Krishnasamy is also the Co-Founder of Freshworks. He too used to work at Zoho Corporation as a Technical Architect, where he worked for over 9 years before co-founding Freshworks. Shan pursued his Bachelor’s degree from TPGIT and is currently serving as a Co-Founder and CTO at Freshworks.

Vijay Shankar

Vijay Shankar is the Co-founder and Director of Solutions Engineering at Freshworks. He is the principal solutions consultant of the company. Vijay had worked for the company right from the initial stages and is experienced in building multiple high-performance support teams from scratch.

Vijay started his career as a Tech Support Engineer at HCL, who then went on to work for Zoho Corporation as a Pre Sales Technical Consultant. Then, he went for Millicent Technologies and finally founded Freshworks along with the other 2 founders.

Freshdesk is currently 4K+ employees strong.

Freshworks – Name, Logo and Tagline

Freshworks Logo

Freshworks, as the name suggests refers to a “Fresh” helpdesk that creates a customer service management platform to help businesses improve the market experience by ‘refreshing business software’, which is the company’s tagline.

Freshdesk got rebranded as ‘Freshworks’ in June 2017 meanwhile evolving its products as well.

Freshworks – Vision and Mission

Freshworks’ mission statement says, “To help companies better engage and communicate with their customers and employees with refreshing business software that is easy-to-use, feature-packed, and accessible to businesses of all sizes.”

The vision of Freshworks is to become “One of the most loved companies in the world.“

Freshworks – Business Model

The Freshworks business model depends on upmarket sales and its products. The company has got a unique global inside sales model. Business software is expensive and hard to use. People waste hours to get things done. In the end, corporations hire employees to take care of the software.

To tap into this market, Freshworks decided to provide quality and ready-to-go software, which is easier to use. This is why the customers trust the Freshworks products and are also backed by impressive support.

Freshworks’ emphasis in 2010 was on creating and selling goods to small and medium-sized businesses. Due to the effective and easy solutions that the company came up with, it began to gain prominence within larger corporations throughout the years.

Freshworks started the transformation and evolution of its services by expressing its broader vision of helping companies win lifetime loyalty. The unique Indian democratic design principles of Freshworks help the company create software that is simple, scalable, inexpensive and encapsulates true craftsmanship, all the while enabling businesses to be self-reliant.

Freshworks has a wide range of products for small and medium-scale businesses, entrepreneurs, and business professionals. Freshmarketer, Freshsales, and Freshdesk are some of its core products, which have been bundled together in the form of a unified product suite for startups launched by the company on November 11, 2021. This is a part of the company’s startup initiative that was launched in 2019 and has successfully onboarded 2,500 startups so far, out of which 500 of them are paying customers of the company. Freshworks claims that its products are used by 150+ unicorns or around 20% of the unicorns globally.

Here’s a look at the products list of Freshworks:

Freshteam

This Freshworks product is a smart HR software that aims to provide businesses with an opportunity to modernize their HR department.

Freshservice

Freshservice from Freshworks helps the companies to modernize their ITSM (IT Service Management)

Freshmarketer

This product from Freshworks is designed as a marketing automation software that will let businesses personalize their messages

Freshsales

Freshsales from Freshworks is built to aid the companies in accelerating their revenues via content-driven sales

Freshdesk

Freshdesk from Freshworks brings effortless customer service solutions that turns the service agents into customer champions.

Freshchat

Freshchat is a smart chatbot service from Freshworks that helps the customer-support employees expedite calls and more. Through Freshchat the customer service executives can focus on more challenging support queries and solve them while the integrated bots answer the common questions. Freshchat further freshens up its smart chat service for enterprises by re-architecting the application to include a unified customer record, as per the reports dated July 23, 2022..

Freshworks extends Freshdesk as an omnichannel service provider.

Freshworks – Revenue and Growth

Freshwork’s remarkable growth curve is a reflection of how companies are searching for new and creative ways to engage with their customers, as well as the company’s creativity and tenacity.

In mid-February 2021, the company announced it surpassed the $300 million mark in its annual recurring revenues, thereby growing by around 40% year-over-year even in the challenging, pandemic-strick times.

By opening offices in Paris, the Netherlands, France, and Utrecht, the company expanded its corporate network. This followed the expansion of the current London office. It also hosted Refresh19 London, which was the city’s first meeting, and was attended by about 400 people.

Furthermore, the company also expanded its presence in APAC outside of Europe by collaborating with OrangeOne Corporation, a leading tech company in Japan. Freshworks currently has offices in Hyderabad, Melbourne, and many other cities across the globe. All of these show how the business is expanding on a wider scale.

Some other prominent growth highlights of the company are:

Freshworks has enabled over 50,000 small and big companies across the globe to exceed customer and employee expectations.
Freshworks’ products are used by the people and businesses of over 120 countries around the world.
Freshworks claims to be the first Indian Saas company to have been listed in Nasdaq, US.
Freshworks claims to be the first Indian Saas company to reach a billion-dollar valuation.

Freshworks CEO and Co-Founder, Girish Mathrubootham, post its IPO listing on September 22, 2021, announced that around 500 employees having shares in the company have turned into crorepatis almost overnight, following the listing.

Furthermore, around 70 of them are aged under 30 years, “People who have graduated college a few years ago and they fully deserve it for believing in us over the past ten years”, as reported by the Freshworks CEO. The company currently boasts of having around 4,300 employees globally.

Freshworks Financials

Freshworks has reported around 46% growth in its revenues, which stood at $96.6 million during the third quarter between July-September 2021 for the company. The company reported an increase in its total revenue, which was recorded at $114.6 mn, thereby exhibiting a 42% YoY growth in the first quarter (Q1) of FY2022. With this, the US-listed Indian company has successfully recorded more than $100 mn in revenue for the second consecutive occasion.

The consolidated losses of the company increased to $107.4 million, including the July-September 2021 quarter, which came on the back of a huge rise in expenses at 305% to $214.63 million. Freshworks losses were recorded at $49.1 million during the January-March 2022 quarter, which was quite an increase from the net losses of $2.4 million reported in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

Freshworks – Funding And Investors

Freshworks has raised a total of $484 million in funding over 9 rounds. The company is funded by 6 investors, Steadview Capital and Accel are the most recent investors.

Date	Transaction Name	Money Raised	Lead Investors
January 1, 2020	Secondary Market	$85 million	Steadview Capital
November 4, 2019	Series H	$150 million	Accel, CapitalG, Sequoia Capital
July 31, 2018	Series G	$100 million	Accel, Sequoia Capital India
November 1, 2016	Series F	$55 million	Sequoia Capital India
April 20, 2015	Series E	$50 million	Tiger Global Management
June 12, 2014	Series D	$31 million	Tiger Global Management
November 21, 2013	Series C	$7 million	Accel
April 26, 2012	Series B	$5 million	Tiger Global Management
December 2, 2011	Series A	$1 million	Accel

Freshworks – IPO

Freshworks was looking forward to raising up to $912 million through its IPO round, as per the regulatory filings of the company with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated September 13, 2021.

The company then decided to sell 28.5 million of its Class A common stock between $28 and $32 per share. It was also announced that if the shares of the company would successfully be sold at the higher range, then it would raise around $912 million, thus increasing the valuation of the company to around $9 billion.

Freshworks further confirmed that it would be going public and had already filed the initial public offering in the United States, where the company is presently headquartered. According to the company’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Freshworks was then looking to raise around $100 million, in an IPO round led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase. However, that was just a placeholder amount.

The company finally went public on September 22, 2021, and successfully raised over $1.03 billion in its IPO round. Soon after its IPO listing, Freshworks also listed itself on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The price of the shares surged to $36 per share from $32-34 per share or $28-32 per share, which it announced a week ago. The last share price of Freshworks was recorded at $19.25 in Feb 2022.

The IPO has increased the market cap of Freshworks to over $10 billion, which was $9 billion earlier. With a market valuation of $10 billion, Freshworks was leading the band of Indian Saas startups, even ahead of Postman valued at $5.6 billion, and Browserstack valued at $4 billion. Besides, Freshworks also became the first software startup of Indian origin to be listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Freshworks was even valued at $13.56 billion on November 2, 2021, when the intraday high peaked at $53.35 per share, where the Girish Mathrubootham-led company also overtook Zendesk, which was valued at $12.1 billion then. The Freshworks market cap is $4.57 billion, as of May 2022.

The company had earlier mentioned that it has a large addressable market of around $120 billion ahead, in its regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier in September. It has also estimated the annual potential market opportunity for its products to be $77 billion.

It might use a portion of the proceeds for acquiring complementary businesses, products, services, and technologies, said Freshworks while it was filing its IPO with SEC.

Freshworks Shareholding

Freshworks listed its shareholders in its IPO papers filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC), where the company has recorded Tiger Global as the majority stakeholder with 26% shares in Freshworks. The others that follow are Accel, Sequoia Capital, Capital G, Girish Mathrubootham, and Others.

Freshworks – ESOPs

Freshworks on November 9, 2021, announced the initiation of a share sale worth $500+ mn from its board of directors, top management, current, and former employees, third-party consultants, contractors, and more. This cashout is certainly counted among the largest cashouts in recent years.

Freshworks – Investments

Freshworks has made 3 investments to date.

Date	Organization Name	Round	Amount
Oct 3, 2019	Fyle	Series A	$4.5M
May 24, 2019	Fyle	Series A	$142.33K
Apr 20, 2018	Fyle	Series A	$1.1M

Freshworks – Acquisitions

Freshworks has acquired 13 organizations to date, and the acquisition of Flint on Jul 9, 2020, is its most recent acquisition. Here’s a glimpse of the Freshworks acquisitions:

Acquiree Name	Date	Amount	About Acquiree
Flint	Jul 9, 2020	–	Flint is the most advanced and innovative open standards-based automation platform.
AnswerIQ	Feb 26, 2020	–	AnswerIQ is an artificial intelligence service in the customer support space.
CanvasFlip	Sep 17, 2019	–	CanvasFlip is a cloud-based design collaboration and testing platform.
Natero	May 21, 2019	–	Natero harnesses your data to predict, analyze and drive customer behavior.
Zarget	Aug 29, 2017	–	Zarget is a SaaS-based conversion rate optimization company that provides comprehensive solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses.
JoeHukum	Jul 20, 2017	–	JoeHukum Is Your Virtual Personal Assistant. From Flight Booking To Food Delivery
Pipemonk (Formerly ZapStitch)	Jan 4, 2017	–	Pipemonk is a data integration platform that allows companies to synchronize and move data amongst multiple cloud apps quickly and easily
Chatimity	Oct 18, 2016	–	Chatimity is a social chat application helping people discover others based on locality and interests.
Airwoot	Apr 13, 2016	–	Airwoot is a real-time customer support provider enabling brands to provide customer support on social media.
Framebench	Feb 22, 2016	–	Changing how people interact with files on the web & mobile

Freshworks – Awards and Recognition

The most recent awards and recognition of Freshworks are:-

Year	Recognition Name
2019	Supreme Software Award for 2019
2019	Expert’s Choice for 2019
2019	Great User Experience for 2019
2020	Summer Leader 2020
2020	Spring Leader 2020
2020	Top 10 Fastest Growing Software in Q1 2020
2020	Top 10 Most Searched Software in Q1 2020
2020	Best call center software for 2020
2020	VoIP phone services for 2020

Freshworks – Competitors

The top Freshworks competitors are :

Zendesk
Salesforce
Zoho
ServiceNow
Microsoft
Cherwell
Oracle
Coheris

Freshworks – Challenges Faced

Freshworks, being a fast-growing Business-to-Business, Software-as-a-service company with thousands of B2B and B2C clients, including legacy corporations, which are fast-growing billion-dollar businesses, must ensure that its services have minimal downtime, outages, or latency.

“To do this, we need to have visibility into the infrastructure, how it is behaving at any given point of time and how our customers are using our products from an infrastructure standpoint,” says Pradeep Thangavel, Engineering Manager, at Freshworks, “Because Freshworks is integrated on to the customer’s platform, any traffic that comes to the customer’s platform is as good as traffic to the Freshworks platform.”

Further, Pradeep explains how this challenge is difficult because no other Indian B2B SaaS company functions on the same level as Freshworks’, which means the company lacks simple access to industry benchmarks or learnings in terms of aligning their infrastructure optimally for daily services.

Freshworks – Future Plans

Freshworks presently assists businesses by providing intelligent customer engagement software which improves their IT operational efficiency.

Employees at Freshworks were able to see the magic in action, which added to the excitement of the trip. All of this entails pursuing bigger deals meanwhile still expanding our existing customers.

The company has grown from a small startup producing tools for small businesses to a mid-sized business that caters to larger businesses, pushing them to rethink their marketing and sales strategy.

In 2020, a freshworks spokesperson told, “We are actively focusing on building the business, driving growth in new markets, and strengthening our position in existing markets. We will aim for an IPO if and when a public offering proves opportune for the business.”

Freshworks’ expansion has been aided by solid financials, an acquisition-led growth strategy, and the bundling of a suite of services with individual goods.

FAQs

What does Freshworks do?

Freshworks is a cloud-based company that creates sales & support solutions that help businesses improve the market experience. The company’s services facilitate connectivity and enable teams to interact and engage customers and subordinates in order to tackle technological concerns.

Is Freshworks an Indian company?

Yes, Freshworks is an Indian company founded by Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy and Vijay Shankar in Chennai, in 2010.

What is the valuation of Freshworks?

Freshworks is currently valued at $4.57 billion, as of May 2022.

When was Freshworks founded?

Freshworks was founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy and Vijay Shankar.

Who is the founder of Freshworks?

Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy and Vijay Shankar are the founders of Freshworks.

Is Freshworks a product-based company?

Yes, Freshworks is a product-based company.

July 23, 2022

Who Is a Software Architect? | How to Become a Software Architect?
A software architect is the one who is responsible for building software and rectifying the problems in existing software. He/she is the person who is responsible for fulfilling all the technical needs of a company. A person with three years of experience is considered a software architect or an engineer. MNCs prefer to hire persons with a wide range of experience in software solutions. One more interesting fact about a software architect is that it is one of the high demanding jobs that can help people in earning a lot of money.

In this article, people can find insights into joining as a software architect. Some newbies might have doubts about joining as a software architect, so anyone with the idea of joining as a software architect can stay connected till the end to know some basic details. It is one of the software industry’s most interesting and demanding job profiles. The number of software architect openings is high compared to other industries.

Who Is a Software Architect?
How to Become a Software Architect?
Who Is a Software Architect?

A software architect is a person who determines the process and technologies which has to be implemented in business models. The entire job will be related to coding and encryption, so people with a wide range of experience in software development and coding can apply for this job role without any issues. In simple words, a software architect is the one who is responsible for developing structured codes and providing appropriate solutions.

Setting up goals and fulfilling all the technological needs will be the main work of the software architect. Other than these duties, a software architect will be responsible for setting up meetings and providing relevant software solutions for client end problems. Building software isn’t an easy task, so it needs a dedicated team to create solutions and solve problems in a better way. Understanding the client’s needs and providing relevant solutions will also be the main job role of a software architect.

How to Become a Software Architect?

To become a software architect, it is a must to choose the preferred course that can help students get specialized in the field. So soon after choosing the course, it will be easy for people to study and know the basics of this job and its related openings.

Most people who prefer to become a software architect should choose Computer Science or Information Technology in Engineering to know all the basic knowledge of coding and the course.

This will allow people to have an in-depth knowledge of the coding and its related details. Coding is one of the most important points to be considered, as the entire job role depends completely on it. So without a good sense of coding knowledge, it will be tough for people to understand what and how to do the job. The following will help you to know how you can become a software architect:

Information Technology Spending on Enterprise Software Worldwide from 2017 to 2022

Complete a Bachelor’s Degree

It is a must to have a bachelor’s degree for finding the best job opening in the software field. As mentioned earlier, a person with a computer science or IT degree will be eligible to apply for a software architect posting. So to join a reputed college, a student should clear the relevant entrance exams. Concentrating on basic studies in high school and other areas is always better so that anyone can easily clear the exams and enter a reputed college to attain a degree in the software field.

Be Proficient in Software Skills

To become a software architect, it is very important for a person to have proper knowledge of programming languages like Java, C++, and web development. People who prefer to start their career as software architects should make sure to choose the preferred computer programs and tools and get used to them. So if there are possibilities, students can join a course to be proficient in that.

It will help people in attaining a better place in the market. Today recruiters mainly focus on computer programs and tools so that they can train the candidate in a better way. Without these skills, no one can shine as a software architect, so make sure to have a better idea of software skills and their related details. Also, having knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and UI/UX design is an added advantage to gaining success in this field.

Is Outsourcing Software Developers a better choice?

Outsourcing brings many advantages to SaaS development. The offshore SaaS development process is now smoother than ever with qualified product developers.

StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

Look for an Industry-Related Internship

Another important step toward becoming a software architect is to look for an internship in order to get an idea of the field beforehand. It might act as a basic level of training for a person. This will be the key to completing various tasks soon after getting placed in a company. So make sure to pay attention to internship programs and clearly know what you will be doing in your full-time job.

Earn a Master’s Degree

This step is dependent on an individual’s preference, so if you can afford a master’s degree in computer science or an equivalent field, then it is better to complete and enter a company to get placed with a better posting.

This will be an added advantage if people prefer to have a better idea of what to do with their job role soon after entering a company. Moreover, people who prefer to complete a master’s degree can be placed as team leads or other similar roles, so earning a master’s degree can be a great way to enter the industry with a better sense of knowledge in the software field.

Gain Experience in Software Solutions From a Company

Number of Software Developers Worldwide in 2018 to 2024

It is better to serve a company for a minimum period of 3 to 5 years because it will help people in attaining a wide range of experience in the job role and enhance their software skills. Working as a software engineer or developer on industry-related projects and handling various clients is also a must to become a successful software architect. It will allow people to learn more about the software industry and enhance their skills in handling various departments.

Enhance Your Resume

Updating the resume with the right software skills, experience and other relevant data will always be an advantage in many aspects. It will help people analyze the profile and provide relevant job openings. So this can save a lot of time, and hence make sure to update your resume from time to time with all the relevant details.

Conclusion

In general, people might find it difficult to have a clear idea of becoming a software architect, but soon after completing a degree and internship, it will be easy for people to get a wide range of experience in the field. This will also help in obtaining better knowledge of what will be required to do. So work hard and make sure to have some software skills to join and enjoy the benefits of becoming a software architect.

FAQs

Is software architect and software engineer the same?

A software engineer designs, code, and create the computer systems for different tasks and a software architect’s work usually does not include coding as they design and execute the development process along with the software engineers.

Do software architects write code?

Software architects do write codes but not as much as software developers. They mainly focus on software architecture-related activities.

What are the types of software architects?

Types of software architects include:
- Solution Architect
- Data Architect
- Information Architect
- Cloud Architect
- Security Architect
July 14, 2022

Microsoft – Perhaps The First College Dropout Success Story

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Microsoft.

Perhaps the very 1st college dropout success tale is Microsoft, which was established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Microsoft, a US-based multinational tech giant, was ranked No. 21 in the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest US companies by total revenue in 2020. It was the largest global technology corporation by revenue, as of 2016. Along with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, it is considered one of the Big Five corporations in the United States software industry.

In 2018, Microsoft was declared the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company. In April 2019, Microsoft has become the 3rd U.S. public company to be worth over $1 trillion, behind Amazon and Apple. As of 2020, Microsoft has the third-highest brand value in the world.

Here’s more about this software behemoth and how it came to be known as “Microsoft.”

Microsoft – Company Highlight

Startup Name	Microsoft
Formerly Called	Microsoft Consumer Products (1980–1982)
Headquarters	One Microsoft Way Redmond, Washington, U.S.
Industry	Software development, Computer hardware, Consumer electronics, Social networking service, Cloud computing, Video games, Corporate venture capital
Founders	Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Founded	April 4, 1975
Subsidiaries	LinkedIn, Skype Technologies, and GitHub
Areas Served	Worldwide
Current CEO	Satya Nadela
Website	www.microsoft.com

About Microsoft
Microsoft – Latest News
Microsoft – Industry
Microsoft – Name, Logo, And Tagline
Microsoft – Founders
Microsoft – Startup Story
Microsoft – Mission and Vision
Microsoft – Products
Microsoft – Business Model and Revenue Model
Microsoft – Funding and Investors
Microsoft – Investments
Microsoft – Acquisitions
Microsoft – Growth
Microsoft – Competitors
Microsoft – Challenges Faced
Microsoft – Future Plans

About Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation, located in Redmond, Washington, is a leading multinational tech company that produces computers, computer software, electronics, and related services.

Microsoft’s best-known software products are the Microsoft Office suite, Windows operating system, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. The company’s main hardware solutions are the Microsoft Surface line of touchscreen personal computers and Xbox video game consoles.

The company is organized into three equally sized broad segments: productivity and business processes (legacy Microsoft Office, Skype, cloud-based Office 365, Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, LinkedIn), intelligence cloud (infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offerings Azure, SQL Server, Windows Server OS), and more personal computing (Windows Client, display advertising, Bing search, Xbox, and Surface laptops, tablets, and desktops).

Microsoft – Latest News

“Digital technology is a deflationary force in an inflationary economy. Businesses – small and large – can improve productivity and the affordability of their products and services by building tech intensity,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. “The Microsoft Cloud delivers the end-to-end platforms and tools organizations need to navigate this time of transition and change.”

As of October 26, 2021, in comparison to the same period previous fiscal year, Microsoft Corporation released the following results for the quarter ending September 30, 2021:

Revenues climbed by 22% to $45.3 billion.
Operating income climbed by 27% to $20.2 billion.
Net income grew 48 percent and 24 percent, respectively, to $20.5 billion GAAP and $17.2 billion non-GAAP.
GAAP diluted profits per share were $2.71, while non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $2.27, representing a 49 percent and 25 percent rise, respectively.
GAAP results include a $3.3 billion net income tax benefit.

“We had a good start to the fiscal year,” Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, said. “Our Microsoft Cloud generated $20.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 36 per cent year over year.”

Microsoft – Industry

The information technology (IT) industry includes firms that produce software, hardware, or semiconductor equipment, as well as companies that provide internet or related services. The three main industry categories in the IT sector are technology hardware, software and services, equipment, and semiconductors and semiconductor tools.

The software solutions industry category includes organisations that provide internet/online and software services as well as IT services. Online services are companies that provide interactive services or online databases, such as social networks or search engines.

IT services are companies that provide data processing services or IT consulting to other companies. Eventually, the software includes all sorts of commercial and consumer software, such as video games as well as business and systems software.

The three industries that make up technology hardware and equipment are Technology hardware, communications equipment, storage and peripherals, and electronic equipment, instruments, and components. Communication equipment includes telephones, routers, and switchboards.

Technology hardware, peripherals, and storage include computers, cell phones, and printers. Electronic equipment, gadgets, and accessories include companies that make barcode scanners, security systems and transformers, as well as distributors and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). An OEM is a company that develops types of equipment that are used in other businesses’ finished products. Many Dell laptops, for example, have Intel processors and Windows pre-installed; Intel and Microsoft may be called Dell’s OEMs.

Semiconductors are materials that can transmit electricity in some situations but not in others, making them excellent for managing currents. Silicon is a very common semiconductor material. This industrial category comprises both semiconductor manufacturers and semiconductor peripheral equipment manufacturers.

Microsoft – Name, Logo, And Tagline

Microsoft is a combination of the words “micro-processors” and “software”.

Microsoft Logo

The Microsoft logo represents technological innovation that, with his Windows operating system, introduced the computer to the average person. Their logo serves as a constant emblem of quality in an operating system named “Windows,” which gives individuals access to the world of technology.

The new tagline for Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems for more than a decade, is “Be what’s next.”

Microsoft – Founders

On April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen established the company, Microsoft.

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III is a successful American businessman, investor, author, software developer, and philanthropist. Along with his late childhood mate Paul Allen, he co-founded Microsoft. Gates was the business’s largest individual stakeholder until May 2014, and he acted like the CEO, chairman, president, and principal software architect throughout his time there.

He was the richest person in the world every year from 1995 to 2017, except for 2010 and 2013. He is the founder and chairman of BEN, Cascade Investment, bgC3, and TerraPower, among others. Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest private foundation, he has provided huge sums of money to many humanitarian organizations and scientific research initiatives.

Paul Allen

Paul Allen was an American businessman, researcher, investor, programmer and philanthropist. He is primarily remembered for co-founding Microsoft in 1975 with childhood buddy Bill Gates. Forbes listed Allen as the 44th richest person on the planet in 2018. Apex Learning and Stratolaunch Systems, as well as the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Cell Science, and Artificial Intelligence, were all established by Allen.

He donated more than $2 billion to a variety of organizations, including education, animal and environmental protection, the arts, healthcare, and community services. With SpaceShipOne, he sponsored the first crewed commercial spaceplane in 2004.

He has earned several awards and distinctions in a variety of fields, and in 2007 and 2008, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Microsoft – Startup Story

Before co-founding Microsoft, Paul Allen and Bill Gates were ardent computer nerds in an era when computers were scarce. Even in high school, Gates and Allen skipped classes for spending all of their days in the school’s computer room. They were finally caught hacking into the school’s computer, but rather than being deported, they were granted unlimited computer time in exchange for assisting in improving the performance of a computer system.

While still in high school, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a modest firm with the support of Paul Gilbert, and sold a computer to the city of Seattle for traffic counts.

In 1973, Gates left Seattle to attend Harvard University as a pre-law student. However, Gates’ first love, programming, never departed him, as he devoted much of his time in Harvard’s computer room polishing his skills. Allen moved to Boston shortly after, functioning as a coder and encouraging Gates to forgo Harvard so that they could work a full-time job on their concepts together.

In January 1975, Allen brought Gates an article on the Altair 8800 microprocessor from Popular Electronics magazine. MITS, the Altair’s maker, was approached by Gates, who offered his and Allen’s services to develop an Altair version of the new Coding language.

MITS decided to sell and commercialize the software under the name Altair BASIC when Allen and Gates presented their program to them after eight weeks. Gates and Allen were so enthused by the sale that they decided to start their software firm. As a result, on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico—the origin of MITS—Microsoft was created, with Bill Gates as its first CEO.

The business opened its first international office less than a year later, in August 1977. ASCII Microsoft was the name of the Japanese branch. In 1979, the firm relocated to Bellevue, Washington, and two years later, Microsoft Inc. was formed. Allen was executive vice president while Bill was chairman and president of the board of directors.

Microsoft – Mission and Vision

Microsoft’s mission statement says, “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Microsoft’s vision statement is “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.” The notion stated in this vision statement is how the organization goes above and beyond to help its clients make good changes.

Microsoft – Products

Microsoft’s products are quite numerous, and a significant portion of them are aimed at businesses and business customers. Until a few years ago, Microsoft’s products were largely desktop apps. Things have changed drastically over the years, with Microsoft creating a slew of discrete online and mobile apps for individual users.

A few of the products are:

Microsoft Windows
Bing
MS DOS
Skype
LinkedIn
Windows Phone
Microsoft Solitaire
Visual Studio
X Box 360
Microsoft Office
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Azure

Microsoft – Business Model and Revenue Model

Microsoft’s primary revenue and profits come from developing, manufacturing, licensing, supporting, and selling a wide range of hardware and software products, cloud-based services, and services that integrate with them, as well as producing appropriate digital advertising that reaches a worldwide audience, conserving and expand its field of view and foundation.

The following are the three primary segments of Microsoft Revenue Generation:

Business Processes and Productivity – It comprises income from the sale and licensing of the company’s various software products and cloud services for various devices and platforms. Office 365 Suite, Outlook.com, Exchange Email Platforms, OneDrive and SharePoint Content Management Tools, Skype Call Services, and others are examples of such goods and services.
Intelligent Cloud – Revenues from Microsoft’s server products and cloud storage services are included. Sales and licencing of Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, System Center, Microsoft Azure, and Windows Service, among other products, support Microsoft’s commercial strategy.
Personal Computing – It comprised revenue from Microsoft services and products that give developers, professionals, and end-users cross-platform functionality. Microsoft makes money from licensing Windows OS, Windows Phones, and Microsoft patents, as well as selling mobile phones and PC peripherals.

It also makes money from selling and licensing Microsoft Xbox gaming systems, as well as Xbox live subscriptions, transactions, advertising, and royalties from third-party video games. Search advertising on the Bing Search Engine and proceeds from display advertising on the MSN portal is also included in this category.

Microsoft – Funding and Investors

Date	Round	Amount	Lead Investors
Sep 1, 1981	Venture Round	$1M	Technology Venture Investors

Microsoft – Investments

Date	Organization Name	Round	Amount
Sep 29, 2021	Truveta	Corporate Round	–
Aug 17, 2021	Rubrik	Corporate Round	–
Jul 29, 2021	OYO	Series F	$5M
Jun 4, 2021	Intelight	Seed Round	CA$1.5M
Jun 3, 2021	Sibucayi	Pre-Seed Round	$1K
Jun 1, 2021	One Store	Venture Round	₩17B
May 25, 2021	Siemens Healthineers	Grant	$2.5M
Apr 14, 2021	Bukalapak	Venture Round	$234M
Mar 1, 2021	Loggi	Series F	$212M
Feb 1, 2021	Databricks	Series G	$1B

Microsoft – Acquisitions

Acquiree Name	About Acquiree	Date	Amount
Clear Software	Clear Software is an Intelligent Automation platform that protects and extends technology investments.	Oct 22, 2021	–
Ally.io	Ally.io is a strategic goal-planning and execution management software.	Oct 7, 2021	$76M
TakeLessons	TakeLessons is an ed-tech company with a robust, engaging learning platform and community for lifelong learning.	Sep 10, 2021	–
Clipchamp	Clipchamp is the video editing platform that empowers anyone to tell stories worth sharing.	Sep 7, 2021	–
Peer5	Peer5 operates the world’s largest peer-to-peer (p2p) content delivery network.	Aug 10, 2021	–
Suplari	Suplari focuses on leveraging machine learning to help enterprises change the way they manage their suppliers and costs.	Jul 28, 2021	–
CloudKnox Security	CloudKnox develops a multi-cloud permissions management platform that protects critical cloud infrastructure resources and identities.	Jul 21, 2021	–
RiskIQ	RiskIQ is a security company that provides digital threat management solutions for software vendors.	Jul 11, 2021	$500M
ReFirm Labs	ReFirm Labs is a group of IoT security experts that develops a new method for vetting and validating firmware.	Jun 2, 2021	–
Kinvolk	Kinvolk is a software development company with commercial support for Linux, Kubernetes, and consulting across the cloud-native stack.	Apr 29, 2021	–

Microsoft – Growth

As of July 2021, Microsoft reported $46.2 billion in revenue, $16.5 billion in net income, and $2.17 in profits per share for the quarter. The company’s revenues increased by 21% year over year, but its net income increased by a more robust 47 percent.

First and foremost, Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, saw a 51 percent increase in revenue in the quarter compared to the same quarter a year earlier, a number that would drop to 45 percent if currency changes were taken into account, according to the firm. According to preliminary research, the 51 percent rate is the company’s highest Azure growth since the fiscal Q3 2020 period or the first calendar quarter of last year.

Taking a look at the rest of the company’s performance, we may rank the revenue growth outcomes of its three main divisions as follows:

Intelligent Cloud has grown by 30%, thanks in part to Azure’s expansion.
Productivity and Business Processes: 21% increase, with LinkedIn (46%) and the Dynamics 365 CRM solution leading the way (49 percent growth).
More Personal computing is growing at a rate of 9%, with search leading the way (53 per cent, excluding traffic acquisition costs).

Microsoft – Competitors

The top competitors of Microsoft are Apple, Sony, Samsung, Mozilla, Logitech International, Google, IBM, Cisco, VM Ware, SAP, Salesforce, Red Hat, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

Microsoft – Challenges Faced

Mobile – The fact that Microsoft has yet to figure out how to break into the mobile market is, of course, its largest and most obvious weakness. The mobile market share of Microsoft is now at 3.5%. This is a pitiful figure when compared to Apple’s 14.8 percent and Google/Android’s 80.2 percent.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s Surface tablet has only managed to capture less than 3% of the tablet market. As a result, Windows is the only major operating system without a functional mobile component.

Ecosystem – Additional problem for Microsoft would be that their platform isn’t up to par. Of course, there is one exception: Office 365. However, its Windows Store is about a fifth the size of the App Store and Google Play, Microsoft only recently released a free online version of its Office suite, Bing remains a distant second to Google Search, and Google’s Chrome browser surpassed Internet Explorer in total market share for the first time this month, and it doesn’t have a viable iTunes competitor.

Microsoft – Future Plans

For years, Microsoft has preached about the promise of rapid IoT growth via sensors and simple devices, all while creating a cloud empire and covertly acquiring startups that will help it manage these billions of cloud-connected devices.

According to some estimates, there are now 22 billion linked gadgets, with that number expected to rise to 50 billion this year, by 2025, or 2030, depending on whose study you trust. Although there is some debate over how many devices will be linked to the internet and when they will do so, Nadella has rebuilt Windows and Azure to prepare for it.

Microsoft also faces stiff competition from companies wishing to handle the billions of internet-connected gadgets. ARM, Qualcomm, Amazon, Huawei, Qualcomm, IBM, Intel, Dell, Google, Cisco, HP, Samsung, Oracle, and others are vying for a slice of this growing market, however, there is no definite victor yet. If the software titan is to succeed, it will have to persuade competitors and form partnerships with a large number of them. And this was why in current history, Microsoft has partnered with Cortana and Amazon on Sony on the future of cloud gaming, Alexa integration, Walmart on grocery store innovation, Samsung on Android apps, and many others.

Nadella made it absolutely clear that the company is devoting a considerable amount of resources to see what the next big thing is. Simultaneously, they aren’t asserting that this is their way of implying that this one item will consume all of Android, Windows, and iOS. People have generally grasped that Windows has a billion users worldwide, Android has 2 billion, and iOS has a billion. And it’s not like either of them was responsible for the death of another.

Microsoft – FAQs

What does Microsoft do?

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company based in Redmond, Washington, that makes computer software and hardware, consumer devices, computers, and associated services.

Who founded Microsoft?

On April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen launched Microsoft.

How does Microsoft make money?

Who is the current CEO of Microsoft?

Satya Nadella is the current CEO of Microsoft.

Which companies do Microsoft compete with?

The top competitors of Microsoft are Apple, Sony, Samsung, Mozilla, Logitech International, Google, IBM, Cisco, VM Ware, SAP, Salesforce, Red Hat, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

June 1, 2022

CodeChef – Competitive Programming Community

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by CodeChef.

The educational platforms are growing like never before, with their impressive results after the Covid-19 outbreak, the mark that these startups are leaving is prominent on the startup ecosystem. Coding or computer programming is now turning into an essential skill and has been rising in demand, the like of which was never witnessed earlier.

CodeChef is one of the online coding platforms that has been quite popular and though owned by Unacademy, CodeChef still is growing in its own way. Founded in 2009, Codecheck organizes algorithms, computer programming, and programming contests for programmers. It hosts programming competitions and contests for students and software professionals.

CodeChef, headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra also helps organizations connect with developers, brand their products in the developer community, and recruit them. It’s a non-profit educational initiative of Directi, whose aim was to provide a platform for students, software professionals to practice, to build their programming skills through online contests. Apart from this CodeChef also has a ‘CodeChef for schools’ program that aims to reach students and start a culture of programming in Indian schools.

Knowing more about CodeChef, the company owned by Unacademy will not be challenging anymore with this StartupTalky article where you discover all about CodeChef, its Founders, Codechef headquarters, Codechef Owners and key people, Business and Revenue Model, Mission, Growth and Revenue, Logo and its Meaning and more.

CodeChef – Company Highlights

Startup Name	CodeChef
Type	Subsidiary of Unacademy
Headquarters	Mumbai, India
Industry	Software
Founders	Bhavin Turakhia
Founded	September, 2009
Parent Company	Directi, Unacademy (2020-)
CEO	Bhavin Turakhia
Website	www.codechef.com

CodeChef – About and How it works?
CodeChef – Logo and its meaning
CodeChef – Founder and Team
CodeChef – Mission
CodeChef – Business Model and Revenue Model
CodeChef – Competitors
CodeChef – Growth and Revenue
CodeChef – Future Plans

CodeChef – About and How it works?

CodeChef is a competitive programming community of programmers from across the globe. CodeChef was started as an educational initiative in the year 2009 by Directi, an Indian software company. The CodeChef headquarters are in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Apart from its monthly coding contests for the community, CodeChef has many initiatives for Schools, Colleges and Women in competitive programming. CodeChef is credited with hosting the India regionals of the prestigious ICPC for college students, as well as for IOI for school students in India. In 2020, CodeChef’s custodianship was changed from Directi (founded by Bhavin Turakhia) to Unacademy (Gaurav Munjal, CEO). CodeChef and its various initiatives have been managed and run by its Business Unit Head Anup Kalbalia.

It is a global programming community that fosters learning and friendly competition, built on top of the world’s largest competitive programming platform along with building a large community of problem curators. They host three featured contests every month and give away prizes and goodies to the winners as encouragement. Apart from this, the platform is open to the entire programming community to host their own contests. On average, 30+ external contests are hosted on their platform every month. They also help organisations connect with developers, brand their products in the developer community and recruit. Presently, the CodeChef community has grown to over 10,00,000+ programmers from different parts of the globe.

CodeChef – Logo and its meaning

The CodeChef logo comes very much from the name of the company. The icon can be seen wearing a chefs hat.

CodeChef’s Logo

CodeChef – Founder and Team

Bhavin Turakhia

Bhavin Turakhia is the founder of CodeChef.

Bhavin is a serial tech entrepreneur, who has a special interest in collaboration and payments. Bhavin first co-founded Resellerclub, Logicboxes, and BigRock in 1998. He eventually exited all of them in a $160 mn transaction in 2014. Turakhia then founded Radix in 2012, before founding Flock in 2014, and Zeta in 2015.

He has been the co-founder of Directi from August 1997 to December 2014. He was also the founder of Ringo.co, and still is the Founder and CEO of Ringo, Radix, Flock, and Zeta.

I have always believed that “it is our moral obligation to make an impact that’s proportionate to our potential”. During the last two decades, I have worked with an amazing team of people and continue to do so in our quest to make a difference.

In the year 2009, Directi, an Indian software products company, launched CodeChef to help programmers improve their problem-solving skills through active participation in programming contests. The goal was to help Indian programmers in honing their problem-solving skills by fostering friendly competition and community engagement.

In the year 2020, the custodianship of CodeChef was handed over to Unacademy from Directi. After the transition, CodeChef is led by Bhavin Turakhia, Gaurav Munjal, and Anup Kalbalia.

CodeChef – Mission

CodeChef’s mission is to provide a reliable, valid, and fair method of assessing the skills and knowledge needed to become better programmers and develop a community of highly skilled certified professionals who are good problem solvers.

CodeChef – Business Model and Revenue Model

The CodeChef business model operations are entirely non-commercial. They do not make any revenue at CodeChef as it is a non-profit educational initiative. All of CodeChef’s operations, technology, infrastructure, and management costs were sponsored by Directi. Over time they intended to subsidize some of these costs through strategic partnerships with other companies as well.

CodeChef – Competitors

The top 3 CodeChef competitors are:

TopCoder, Inc.
Services Sunrise Mentors Private Limited
LeetCode

Together they have raised over 16.5M between their estimated 416 employees. CodeChef’s revenue is ranked 3rd among its top 10 competitors.

CodeChef – Growth and Revenue

Bhavin Turakhia, the CodeChef owner said “All our existing programs, contests, etc. will continue to remain exactly as they are, and will only grow better in our new home. This change in custodianship will mean that we have access to greater resources, teams, technology, platforms, and capital.”

It indicates that the contests will always remain free, and we will always be a community-focused and community-driven organization.

Moreover, CodeChef is going to launch a new product, and that is a paid product. CodeChef started making revenue long before Unacademy came into the picture. They already had a certification program and corporate offerings before Unacademy took over the custodianship.

Unacademy has announced the acquisition of CodeChef, in June 2020. The acquisition is likely to help the Facebook-backed firm to launch coding skills vertical for school kids.

“Codechef is one of the best platforms in the world for programmers and their vision is aligned to what we do here at Unacademy Group,” said Gaurav Munjal, co-founder, and CEO of Unacademy while announcing the development on Twitter.

“All our existing programs, contests, etc. will continue to remain exactly as they are, and will only grow better in our new home. This change in custodianship will mean that we have access to greater resources, teams, technology, platforms, and capital,” said Anup Kalbalia, CEO of CodeChef.

The Unacademy learning program is another method of said revenue-generation. However, there have been other free initiatives that CodeChef has launched after coming under the custodianship of Unacademy. They have already added 30+ video editorials to different problems. And all of this has been possible only because the company now has larger access to resources that this collaboration with Unacademy has provided CodeChef with.

CodeChef is no longer a not-for-profit, and have thus removed that phrase from the website’s footer, and the CEO said that it will subsequently, remove it from other parts as well. Again, to reiterate the CEO also said that each and every existing feature/initiative will continue to be free, and they will support all our programs as we have always done.

CodeChef – Future Plans

CodeChef announced the Go for Gold Project in 2010. The goal of the Go for Gold Project is ambitious as the CEO said that “we want an Indian team to win the ICPC contest, one of the biggest competitive programming challenge in the world.”

He also said that the change won’t happen overnight, so their plan is to support learning and reward improvement. They’re providing ongoing scholarships, incentives, promotions, tech assistance, and training for Indian students. With a little push to get started, their mission is to change the world and give Indian students a little more exposure.

“We are committed to being completely transparent about our activities, motives, and finances. You will find details on our allocated budgets, the manner of our budget allocation, and a list of activities that we will conduct under the Go for Gold project this year” he said.

FAQs

What is CodeChef?

CodeChef is an online platform that organizes algorithms, computer programming, and programming contests for programmers. They host programming competitions and contests for students and software professionals.

Where are the CodeChef headquarters?

The CodeChef headquarters are in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Is CodeChef owned by Unacademy?

Yes, in 2020, Unacademy acquired CodeChef and the CodeChef parent company was changed from Directi (founded by Bhavin Turakhia) to Unacademy.

Is CodeChef free?

Yes, participation in the contests was fully free and so was their Youtube channel. However, it is now unclear how CodeChef is serving under the ownership of Unacademy.

What are Codechef key people?

Bhavin Turakhia is the founder of CodeChef and its previous parent Directi, who was the key people of CodeChef, along with Anup Kalbalia, who was the CEO of CodeChef. Now, the Unacademy founders and its key executive are also among the key people of CodeChef.

May 4, 2022

Free	100 participants (40-minute limit)
Pro	$14.99/month
Business	$19.99/month
Webinar	$79/month
Event	$99/month

Free	Not Available
Installment Plan	$199×3 yearly
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Free	20 attendees for lifetime
One Time Plan	$12/day
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Annual Plan	$348

Tag: software

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