| Functionality | 8 <p>HubSpot offers all of the support functionality most SMBs will need. It supports most channels, and you can also create help centres. It also has sophisticated automation and reporting functionalities.</p><p>However, it lacks some features like AI context suggestion, creation of community forums, and sophisticated chat functionality the likes of Intercom.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent is a fairly well rounded product. It offers support for almost all channels you can think of including live chat, most social media platforms and even call centre support. Additionally, it provides the ability to create basic help centres. The area where it falls short is chatbots - both rule based and AI - where it currently offers no native solution.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 3 <p>HubSpot Service Hub is a powerful tool, though it takes time to implement. This is particularly true if you're setting up complex workflows automations which connects with third-party apps.</p><p>The inbox view is cluttered, and there are no keyboard shortcuts and macros that could help speed up support agents' workflows.</p> | 3 <p>Given the breadth of functionality, LiveAgent can be unintuitive to use at times. Many core features were buried away deep in settings or hidden by poor UX. Additionally, many elements of the web app lacked tooltips and had truncated text components making it additionally difficult to figure our what button does what. It would take an average SMB employee over a day to master its use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>HubSpot's inbox is cluttered and overwhelming. Too much information is displayed without color-coding, making it hard to find key details. While page load times are acceptable at 2-3 seconds, the interface could be more intuitive and smooth.</p> | 2 <p>LiveAgent feels dated. Its live chat template customisation offerings feel like they're from two decades ago and its internal facing web app isn't well designed either. M<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">any elements of the web app lacked tooltips where one might expect them and had truncated text components making the app feel rough around the edges. </span></p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>HubSpot offers great customisability for workflows but lacks some customisation for user-facing elements.</p><p>You can create custom fields, views, objects, and customer segments. Combined with custom event tracking, this allows for highly personalised customer experiences.</p><p>However, the customisation options for the Help Centre are limited compared to some competitors.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers a number of channels for customization. It's external facing components offer a deep range of options for branding, colour and styling. Meanwhile its internal facing features also offer a lot of room for tweaking. For example, it's very easy to configure custom filtered views for your inbox, or set up deeply flexible rules that can be triggered from almost anything.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Despite offering a self-serve free trial, we get the impression that HubSpot is not optimised for a smooth self-serve onboarding process. Initial setup was clunky, taking over 10 minutes. Connecting your first channels is an obscure process. It's clear that though HubSpot Service Hub is a powerful tool, it takes time to implement when it comes to setting up integrations, getting familiar with its sales oriented interface and implementing any workflow automations you need.</span></p> | 3 <p>LiveAgent offers a self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy connection option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly standard when compared to competitors with simple scripts to add live widgets to your website and relatively basic (albeit dated) appearance customisation options. </p> |
| Customer Support | 6 <p>HubSpot's customer support is decent. Non-discounted paying customers get access to phone/video support. Discounted or non-paying customers have access to articles and live chat support, which is available 24/7 and generally provides good answers.</p> | 6 <p>LiveAgent offers support via a live chat widget inside its web app. We found it quick and easy to contact a real agent (<3 mins), and when tested, we find them to be helpful and direct, often resolving technical questions in one response.</p><p>Though LiveAgent also provides a help centre, we found this very confusing to use and overwhelming at times. Thankfully, support agents rarely linked to articles and instead opted to answer questions directly.</p> |
| Integratability | 8 <p>HubSpot offers hundreds of pre-built integrations with common third-party tools that SMBs use, including CRMs, email marketing tools, and project management systems. It also has an extensive marketplace for additional integrations and an API for custom integrations.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offered a strong array of integrations. It covered all the basics from popular CRM systems (Salesforce, Hubspot) to project management platforms (Jira) to automation platforms (Zapier). We were also pleased to see that they offer an API too.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>HubSpot allows users to export key data (e.g. ticket and agent volume) via self-serve. Export of most other data are also available via API.</p> | 7 <p>LiveAgent offers self-serve export functionality for both customer data and anlytics data within its web app. On top of this, they also offer an API - however, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity.</p> |
