7 Absolutely Amazing Groove Alternatives Today

Are you considering using Groove but aren’t fully convinced it’s the right choice for you? Are you wondering if there are any better Groove alternatives that you could consider?

You know – Groove was born when four employees were tired of using the same support email box and seeing important information slip out of the cracks. And it worked. The company has grown significantly since, and has helped countless teams streamline support and make their customers happy.

But although Groove is great and has all the essential features, there are other Groopve alternatives on the market that might work even better.

In this guide, you’ll discover 7 absolutely amazing ones:

Support emails slipping through the cracks?

Keeping is the best helpdesk for Gmail that turns emails into support tickets that you can track, assign, and prioritize.

See How

• Keeping
• HelpScout
• Zendesk
• Intercom
• Zoho Desk
• HelpCrunch, and
• Freshdesk

Before we evaluate each of them in turn, let’s take a look at one other thing…

Why would you even need an alternative to Groove?

Groove is an excellent way to handle customer inquiries, has tons of features, and works seamlessly—so why are we here suggesting you an alternative to Groove?

There are cheaper help desk tool options available

Groove’s pricing starts at $12 per user per month and goes up to $35 per user per month—which isn’t super expensive, but it’s also not super affordable. So, just because there are cheaper options in the market, you might need to look into alternatives to Groove.

Poor customer support

One problem with Groove is that it is challenging to access customer support. Yes, they have a live chat option on their website, but it is not very helpful (trust us, we’ve used it). It only redirects you to their knowledge base.

The most affordable plan allows only one user

Groove’s starter plan allows only one user. Other options are cheaper and also will enable you to have more users. For example, we at Keeping provide you with two agents minimum of $8 per month when billed annually.

Now onto the best alternatives to Groove in 2022!

7 Alternatives to Groove

#1. Keeping

The first alternative on our list is Keeping. We don’t want to sound like tooting our own horn, but we genuinely believe Keeping is an excellent alternative for Groove HQ. Let’s make a small comparison to see why Keeping is a superb alternative to Groove.

To start off, one of the most significant advantages of using Keeping is that we convert the good-old Gmail inbox into a shared inbox. On the other hand, at Groove, a whole new shared inbox is created.

This leads to your team members having to learn the new Groove shared inbox interface—which only complicates the process of using shared mailboxes.

Since Keeping converts your Gmail inbox into a shared mailbox, setting it up takes merely 3-5 minutes—making it quicker to set up when compared to Groove! Let’s also not forget that Keeping is more affordable as opposed to Groove, but more on that later.

If you need to just handle customer emails, then Keeping might be the best Groove alternative.

Key Features

• Assign different tickets to different team members based on who is the most suitable for the problem.
• Tag tickets with labels like order processing, after-sales etc. and set priorities for urgent and non-urgent tickets.
• Collision Detection alerts prevents duplicate replies to a single ticket.
• Create and share shared knowledge bases with your team members for quicker responses.
• Private notes that allow you to have discussions with different members—without having to forward emails.
• Shopify and Zapier integrations. Shopify allows you to view order status, while Zapier further connects Keeping with other applications like Slack.
• View and analyze reports such as average response time, several open tickets etc.

Pricing

Time for the important part—the pricing. As mentioned previously, Keeping is more affordable than Groove. When billed annually, Groove’s pricing starts at $12 per user per month. Whereas, Keeping’s pricing starts at $8 per user per month. 

With Keeping’s Team plan, you get:

• A minimum of 2 agents with the option to add more at a minimal cost.
• Five mailboxes
• Two workflows
• Standard reporting
• Email customer support

#2. Help Scout

Help Scout is another great Groove alternative with almost all the features as Groove but at a lower cost. Based in the US, this company helps your customer teams provide excellent customer service experiences. The features of this tool help your customer support team in automating, organizing and collaborating for customer engagement.

It’s worth mentioning that Help Scout has been voted for Best ROI according to G2. It’s super easy to set up, and the customer support team is available for help all the time. With features such as a shared knowledge base, reporting, integrations and in-app messaging, Help Scout makes customer support success very much possible. Here are its key features:

Key Features

• Shared inboxes inclusive of all automation, collaboration and organization tools needed by your customer support team.
• Find, organize, manage and auto-update customer data—making it a great CRM option.
• Embed help articles right into your website—keeping customers in the flow.
• Integration options with top tools like Hubspot, Jira, Shopify, Salesforce, Mailchimp and WooCommerce.

Pricing

When billed annually, Help Scout’s pricing starts at $20 per user per month, making it the perfect option for growing teams. You get two mailboxes, one docs site, up to 25 users, live chat, custom reports, automated workflows and 50+ integrations.

Other available pricing plans are:

• Plus plan: $40 per user per month.
• Pro plan: $65 per user per month

What’s interesting is that Help Scout has special pricing for startups and nonprofits as well.

#3. Zendesk

Zendesk is one of the leading all in one customer service platforms. With all its features, Zendesk helps businesses in providing customer service that is quick and smooth. Zendesk has essential features which give more options to the customers to help themselves—leading to less workload on your customer support team.

You can use the Zendesk features regardless of the sort of business you run, including SMBs, retailers, HR teams, corporations, and IT teams, as it was created for a variety of users. Most of the many features offered by Zendesk can be used to raise customer satisfaction and provide favorable results for both your business and the customer.

Key Features

• Agent workspace that provides the ability to pull in customer details and tickets—all from one place.
• AI-powered bots that help you understand your customers and their needs better.
• Integrated reports from different customer service channels.
• Automation of common tasks such as notifying team members of new issues and closing tickets.
• Real time updates such as who is currently viewing tickets or responding to them.

Pricing

Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49 per agent per month—called the Suite Team. The features included in this basic plan are ticketing system, messaging across web, social and mobile, email, voice, SMS and live chat support. You also get a single help center and up to 50 AI-powered automated answers.

Other pricing plans are:

• Suite Growth: $79 per agent per month.
• Suite Professional: $99 per agent per month.
• Suite Enterprise: $150 per agent per month.
• Custom plans start at $215 per agent per month.

#4. Intercom

Intercom is a popular all-in-one customer engagement platform built for the mid-market, small businesses, and early stage companies. In a nutshell, Intercom is for everyone. And its huge list of features clearly conveys that.

Its three primary modules include:

• a live chat module for interacting with users,
• an on-boarding module for delivering pre-written emails to prospective customers,
• an instructional module for responding to user inquiries.

Intercom provides sophisticated custom filtering capabilities that enable thorough user segmentation. You can create automated procedures for resolving complicated issues using their advanced workflow feature.

Features

• Set up your own bots with predefined answers, that too without any code.
• Automatic responses to help persuade, educate and inform users.
• Built-in reports to monitor and improve team performance.
• Over 350+ integration options including popular tools like Salesforce, Stripe, Github, and Facebook.
• Segregate customers based on their spending type, urgency or level of business.

Pricing

Intercom follows a bespoke pricing model where the prices will differ based on your business, the number of employees, as well as the use case. However, Intercom does mention a “Starter” pack pricing on their website.

Intercom pricing starts at $74 per month when billed annually. It includes only 2 seats, and up to 25 can be added at $19 per seat per month. This plan lets you reach up to 1,000 people each month.

This plan is suitable for smaller businesses, but if your needs are more than this, you’ll need to contact Intercom sales to get a custom quote.

#5. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a part of the extensive Zoho family. It is a help desk platform that helps you provide omnichannel support, develop workflows, and create knowledge bases to deliver exceptional customer service. Zoho will meet your needs, whether you require social network integrations or a tracking tool to evaluate how your team and your products perform on the market.

But what makes Zoho a great alternative to Groove? The capacity to combine all of your channels into a single shared mailbox. You can communicate with customers across various communication channels from a single dashboard, whether they contact your team by email, phone, live chat, social media, or your website. Let’s look at the Zoho desk’s key features:

Features

• Zia is an AI-powered bot that helps you with triaging support tickets, examining customer feedback, and identifying irregularities in ticket traffic.
• Ability to incorporate a knowledge base, build a user community, and a mobile app to let users use self-service for support.
• With the help of SDKs, you can build and customize your help desk as well.
• Customer interaction history data is available—leading to personalized and efficient responses.

Pricing

Zoho may be one of the only platforms on this list with a forever-free plan. In this forever-free plan, you get three free agents.

Apart from the free plan, the pricing for Zoho desk starts at $14 per agent per month. This is called their Standard package, and it includes various features like social and community channels, workflow, assignments and supervision rules, reports and dashboards, and add-on agents at $6 per agent per month.

Other pricing plans available are:

• Professional plan: $23 per agent per month.
• Enterprise plan: $40 per agent per month.

#6. Help Crunch

HelpCrunch is another affordable alternative to Groove. What’s interesting is that this tool has almost all the features that Groove does. Not only can you use shared mailboxes, but this tool also has a powerful live chat feature, a chatbot, popup builder and real-time customer data.

With this software, businesses can enable customer portals and knowledge bases that allow customers to resolve their own issues proactively. HelpCrunch gives consumers an intuitive UI that makes it simple to pick up the software quickly, along with various valuable connections.

Features

• Live chat widget that can be embedded into your website for real-time quick customer support.
• Self-service tools like a knowledge base for the reduction in ticket volume.
• Built-in reports that show you how your performance and client satisfaction have changed over time.
• Localization based on customers and advanced customizations with CSS.

Pricing

HelpCrunch has quite a unique pricing system. The basic plan starts at $12 per month with 1 team member, but you can bring it up to 5 team members with $60 per month. The price can also be changed depending on the number of emails required. The range goes from zero to 20,000 in the basic plan.

Other pricing plans available are:

• Pro plan: Starts from $20 per month with 1 team member and no emails and goes up to $164 per month with 5 team members and 50,000 emails.
• Enterprise plan: The price is custom based on your needs.

#7. Freshdesk

Freshdesk, a part of Freshworks, has developed into omnichannel customer support software with several valuable features. Help desk, ticketing, team communication, an AI-powered chatbot, and field service operations are some of its tools. Since it has all the necessary features, it makes up for a good Groove alternative. Freshdesk may be the right platform if you seek a feature-rich but user-friendly helpdesk and ticketing system software.

Key Features

• Prioritizing, classifying, and assigning tickets using a ticketing system is known as ticketing.
• Establishing team meetings, linked tickets, and collaborative customer support.
• Better scheduling, ticket service duties, and field tech groups.
• The use of time- and event-triggered rules to automate repetitive processes.
• In-built reports to gauge and boost effectiveness;
• Embed knowledge bases and community forums to enable customers to self-serve.

Pricing

FreshDesk can be used for as low as $0 with up to 10 agents. With the free plan, you get integrated ticketing across email and social, knowledge base, ticket trend report, team collaboration and 24×7 email support.

Other pricing models available are: 

• Growth for $15 per agent monthly plus automation, collision avoidance, and personalized ticket views.
• Pro for $49 per agent per month plus customer segments, round-robin routing, and knowledge base versioning.
• Enterprise with sandbox, skill-based routing, email bot, and Robo Assist for $79 per agent per month.

And that’s it…

These are the absolutely best Groove alternatives that you should consider.

All that’s left to do is to check them all out, and start evaluating which one would work better for you than Groove.

Good luck!