Hubspot versus Trengo

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries and can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the Free Tools plan of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder and is included in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of which incur an additional fee.

Trengo, a Venture Capital backed scale-up from the Netherlands, has been growing at an impressive rate since their conception in 2015. They have developed an impressive customer service and engagement platform that unites all your channels and conversations on a single platform.

Trengo has a wide variety of customers, focusing on companies such as eCommerce shops, retailers, service companies, and educational organizations. Their setup enables you to efficiently scale your customer service and maintain a high-quality customer experience.

Trengo has found a clever way to include an omnichannel platform, with their automated flow- and chatbots, to man customer support channels for their customers. Their shared inbox makes it easy to assign incoming messages to colleagues or teams. They even thought of an automated fallback system so no incoming messages are left behind. Messages will always be routed to a designated agent if they are not assigned within a specified period. 

Trengo offers 3 plans, ranging from $20 to to $45 per seat per month. All plans has a minimum of 5 seats.

The lowest price is $20 per seat per month for the Grow plan, effectively starting their plans at $100 per month with 5 seats. This plan includes live chat and a team inbox for 5 communication channels (ex. WhatsApp).

The Scale plan starts at $33 per seat per month and can be easily scaled up to 100 users. This plan includes nearly all features, 50 channels, team chat, chatbots, customer satisfaction surveys, and statistics.

Add-ons are available for additional functionalities. For some add-ons you pay a fixed price per month like screen sharing and Observer. For other adds-ons the costs are based on the number of conversations like the flowbot, WhatsApp Business, and phone and SMS (prices depending on the country).