| Functionality | 7 <p>At it's core, Glassix offers a fairly strong omni-channel support product. It covers all the basic channels from email to social media (only modern B2B software teams who use Slack might feel left out). Additionally, it offers up a fairly comprehensive rules based chatbot builder and even the functionality to configure an AI chatbot. However, we were disappointed to see the lack of any kind of help centre functionality (either creating one for its own sake or to feed in as context for the AI chatbot).</p> | 8 <p>Pylon is "modern support platform for B2B companies". It offers a good range of features including support for email, live chat, ticket forms, Slack/ Teams and help centre. It also offers decent automation, AI and reporting functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks support for many channels (e.g. phone, socials) or custom objects.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 2 <p>We found Glassix to be very unintuitive to use. Its web app is poorly laid out, with many components and lines of text being chopped off arbitrarily - making some parts near unusable at times if it weren't for tooltips. This is a shame as its onboarding process was simple and clear. On average it would take an SMB employee a couple days to master its use.</p> | 8 <p>Pylon has a relatively quick learning curve - an average employee should take 1-2 hours to familiarize themselves with the key workflows, with the bulk of that time spent on getting up to speed with how Slack/ Teams integration works.</p> |
| Look and feel | 2 <p>When tested, we find Glassix to be dated, clunky and unintuitive. All too often, we came across arbtrarily truncated lines of text and core components. It's customer facing live chat widget feels years behind many modern competitors (even Glassix's own in app support widget had logos which didn't fit and white borders where colour fills were not applied correctly).</p><p>Similarly, its internal facing analytics dashboard, though comprehensive, is extremely overwhelming and painful on the eyes.</p> | 6 <p>We find Pylon's interface to be clean and modern. However, some pages can be slow to load e.g. opening a ticket takes ~2 seconds, and the analytics dashboard can take >5 seconds to load.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Glassix offers a deep set of customization options. When it comes to its customer facing live chat widget, you're able to customize everything from the basics (colour and logos) to deeper design elements (fonts and sounds).</p><p>Additionally, we appreciate the ability to create custom analytics reports which highlight the metrics you care about most on a timely basis.</p><p>When tested, Glassix's chatbot builder also offered a reasonable amount of depth and facets for creating an experience that feels unique to your business.</p> | 8 <p>Pylon offers good customization options including custom views, custom fields, and custom reporting (including the view of customer context within Account Management). A unique feature here is that users can create swimlane diagrams for Kanban views. However, it lacks more advanced customization features like creating custom data objects and tracking custom events. </p> |
| Ease of Setup | 3 <p>Though Glassix does offer a self-serve free trial through their website, it's clear that the platform is not optimized for this. We found their onboarding process to be clunky and confusing (taking >15 mins to complete and integrate initial channels). Additionally, when it comes to long term customization, their odd integrations system wherein enterprise customers <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">can access some integrations built by external partners means that a full setup can take over a week.</span></p> | 5 <p>Frustratingly, Pylon does not offer a self-serve free trial on its website. Instead you'll need to trudge through a sales demo to access the platform. However, calls are generally short and often deals are often closed in just one call if you're looking to purchase right away. Once you're in, initial setup is very slick, taking less than 10 minutes. Additionally, given its Slack centricity, connecting core channels is a one-click process.</p> |
| Customer Support | 1 <p>Glassix offers customer support via a live chat widget within its web app. When tested, we found it difficult to get in touch with a real agent, occasionally taking over an hour to get a response. However, even once connected, we found agents to be particularly unhelpful - more focused on upselling than answering questions and often communicating poorly and even cutting off conversations when they didn't have an answer.</p><p>Additionally, Glassix's provided help centre is extremely complex (mixing developer documentation with agent guides is not user friendly). It also failed to answer most questions we had and was filled with bugs/typos itself.</p> | 9 <p>Pylon offers support via in-app live chat and Slack/ Teams. We've found the team helpful, and quick to respond. Pylon is also known for being very responsive to product feedback.</p> |
| Integratability | 2 <p>Whilst we were pleased to see that Glassix offers an API, we were disappointed to see that it offers very little in terms of Glassix built integrations. Beyond its standard omni-channel offering, Glassix does not provide integrations with any standard sources of context you might expect such as CRMs or e-commerce/payments platforms. Instead they offer a bizarre system where customers on their enterprise tier can access some integrations built by external partners. Additionally, the lack of integration with an automation platform like Zapier makes it difficult for non-technical individuals to build out custom automations themselves.</p> | 7 <p>Pylon currently offers only 10 integrations, though they cover key areas like project management (JIRA, Linear, Asana) and CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive). The recent addition of webhook support improves its integration capabilities. However, it still lacks integrations in categories like data enrichment, surveys, and marketing tools. It does offer an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 3 <p>Glassix does offer the ability to export some data to excel self-serve, however it's limited to certain report types and doesn't cover the full range of data stored in the platform. That being said, you are able to export data via webhook and API too.</p> | 5 <p>Pylon's data export capabilities appear to be limited. While users can export reports to CSV, it doesn't seem possible to self-export tickets.</p> |
