Fluent Support vs Awesome Support Comparison: Decoding the Differences

Customer support tools for WordPress are a dime a dozen nowadays. It’s very easy to get lost in the glitzy UIs and flashy feature lists of most customer support software. It is important to look past all that and put a software through a true litmus test to find whether it is worth using for WordPress business. That’s exactly what we’re here to do! Fluent Support and Awesome Support are two prominent WordPress plugins that offer solutions for key business aspects.

Choosing the right tool can be challenging, given the multitude of options available. To assist you in making an informed choice, we’ve prepared a comprehensive comparison of Fluent Support and Awesome Support. Both plugins have distinct features and functionalities.

This blog post will provide an in-depth analysis of both plugins, covering features, pricing, ease of use, integration options, and more. By the end, you’ll have the insights to select the best fit for your business.

Join us as we explore the strengths and weaknesses of Fluent Support vs Awesome Support, helping you make an educated decision to meet your business requirements.

Fluent Support vs Awesome Support at a Glance

Let’s start by seeing how they stack up against each other at a glance

Overview of Fluent Support

Fluent Support operates as your personal customer service aide seamlessly integrated into your WordPress environment. Its purpose is to enhance and optimize the way you manage customer inquiries, offering a comprehensive solution suitable for businesses of various sizes.

A standout characteristic of Fluent Support is its ticket management system, streamlining the creation, allocation, and monitoring of support tickets. Bid farewell to the confusion of scattered emails and messages – Fluent Support consolidates everything efficiently.

Moreover, Fluent Support provides customizable forms that allow you to gather specific customer information when they seek assistance, reducing unnecessary back-and-forth communication and expediting the support process for improved efficiency.

Fluent Support includes a customer portal feature with a knowledge base, but the knowledge base part is an integration (BetterDocs) rather than a native feature, allowing you to create and share informative articles to address common customer questions on a unified interface. You also have access to reporting and analytics tools, enabling you to assess your support team’s performance and measure customer satisfaction.

Overview of Awesome Support

Awesome Support stands out as a versatile WordPress helpdesk and support ticketing plugin, catering to the diverse needs of businesses. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, it offers a comprehensive platform for efficiently managing customer support inquiries. 

Its standout feature is a top-tier ticket management system that simplifies creating, assigning, and tracking support tickets, centralizing all inquiries for organized management.

Custom forms in Awesome Support facilitate collecting specific information from customers, reducing back-and-forth communication for more efficient support. For those opting for a self-help approach, the plugin provides knowledge base functionality to create and share informative articles. 

Robust reporting and analytics tools empower businesses to monitor support team performance, gauge customer satisfaction, and make data-driven decisions for enhanced service quality. Awesome Support is an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to elevate their customer support experiences.

Ticket Management

Fluent Support

Fluent Support takes the complexity out of ticket management through its user-centric design, putting businesses in the driver’s seat when it comes to handling customer inquiries. This easy-to-use platform simplifies the process of creating, categorizing, and tailoring tickets, transforming customer support into a seamless and efficient operation.

For heightened efficiency, Fluent Support offers advanced filters and a robust search function, allowing for quick and effective ticket sorting. This streamlines response times and ensures your support agents can effortlessly manage their tasks. Additionally, the system provides a snapshot of your support desk’s status, offering clear visibility into ongoing and resolved inquiries.

Fluent Support doesn’t stop there; it introduces customizable ticket tags, giving you the freedom to label tickets according to your specific organizational preferences. This adaptable approach to ticket management allows you to align support operations with your unique style, enhancing control and simplifying the overall support process.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support empowers effective customer support operations through robust ticket management capabilities. The master ticket list serves as a centralized hub for tracking and managing support inquiries, offering comprehensive storage for extensive information, including hundreds of replies. Customizable sorting, filtering, and column options enable precise workflow tailoring.

The platform extends ticket management with powerful email functions. Users can effortlessly open tickets via email, and bidirectional correspondence is supported for users and agents. Flexible email notifications cover all ticket events, and options allow or deny reopening closed tickets via email. Rules and custom commands enhance email handling efficiency, preventing duplicates and facilitating ticket locking when needed. Other features include defining old tickets, searching by ID or title, and implementing custom colors and tags.

However, it’s worth noting that some key ticket management features, including bulk actions, merging, favorite lists, custom filters, and more, are exclusive to premium packages. This makes Awesome Support more suitable for established businesses rather than those in their initial stages.

Our pick: Fluent Support. Key features are not hidden behind paywalls and add-on transactions as it is for Awesome Support. 

Email Marketing and Automation

Fluent Support

Fluent Support offers a dedicated tool for email automation known as Fluent CRM. While it doesn’t come bundled with their support software, Fluent CRM delivers robust email marketing and marketing automation features. 

You can create and send targeted email campaigns, monitor their performance, and establish automated email sequences. This integration, provided by Fluent Support, makes it an appealing choice for merging support ticket management with marketing capabilities.

It also provides some native workflow automation as well. 

Awesome Support

Awesome Support lacks native email marketing or automation features, relying on Zapier integration to enable users to integrate various web applications and automate workflows seamlessly.

To compensate for the absence of these features, Awesome Support provides additional tools to elevate your email marketing efforts. These tools include a versatile landing page builder, integrations for email automation, personalized email features, and comprehensive email analytics. Together, these tools empower users to augment their email marketing strategies and enrich customer engagement.

Our pick: Fluent Support. 

Live chat

Fluent Support

As a customer support software, Fluent Support lacks a live chat feature, which is a significant drawback for businesses seeking real-time engagement with their customers. Live chat has become an essential tool for instant customer support and issue resolution. 

Its absence in Fluent Support’s offerings can result in missed opportunities for prompt and efficient communication with customers. This limitation may lead to customers’ frustration due to delayed responses, impacting their satisfaction and overall customer experience. Integrating a live chat feature for immediate support is essential to maintain a competitive edge in the customer support software market.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support doesn’t feature a traditional live chat; instead, it utilizes Smart Chat, powered by Google’s Dialogflow AI engine. This versatile tool responds to Facebook Messenger messages, chat widget queries, and even email tickets. However, it falls somewhere between human-to-human and human-to-conversational AI interactions. 

While Smart Chat searches data stores to return links rather than well-formed answers, it lacks the warmth of human interaction and the comprehensive organization of human-to-AI engagement. This middle ground limits its capability to serve as a full live chat replacement for businesses.

Our pick: Awesome Support. They don’t really provide a “Live chat”, rather a smart chat but something is better than nothing we suppose. We’re just picking the lesser evil at this point. 

Reporting and Analytics

Fluent Support

Fluent Support excels in this realm by offering extensive reporting and analytics capabilities that provide in-depth insights into your team’s performance and overall business operations. It goes beyond basic statistics, delivering comprehensive data that enhances your understanding of your team’s dynamics. These reports include personal insights, agent performance metrics, individual agent summaries, hourly activity analysis, product-specific statistics, and comprehensive business performance reports.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support offers a suite of reporting and analytics features to enhance your understanding of customer support. The free core version allows you to view ticket counts by status in the main ticket list. However, advanced reporting, including 12 admin dashboard widgets and six core configurable reports, is reserved for the premium version.

The premium widgets enable you to chart open tickets by various categories, providing a customized view of your support landscape. Additionally, six advanced reports cover productivity, resolution, delay, distribution, and trend analysis. While these features offer valuable insights, their exclusivity to the premium version may pose budget constraints for smaller businesses, emphasizing the need to carefully consider the balance between benefits and costs.

Our pick: Awesome Support has greater reporting and analytical capabilities but you might have to pay more. 

Pricing and Plans

Fluent Support

Awesome Support

Both Fluent Support and Awesome Support offer a variety of pricing plans to choose from. 

Fluent Support offers a broad range of features, including advanced reporting, custom ticket forms, agent collaboration, SLAs, macros, audit logs, and security measures. Notably, Fluent Support offers a unique 50 Sites License plan, providing an advantage for businesses managing multiple websites. This makes Fluent Support a more comprehensive option for businesses with diverse online properties.

While Awesome Support’s pricing seems transparent with multiple tiers, there’s a hidden drawback. Additional add-ons come at extra costs, potentially increasing expenses and complicating the user experience. This approach may make the initial pricing tier insufficient, requiring businesses to manage multiple add-ons individually, introducing complexity and potential compatibility issues.

For smaller businesses with limited budgets, a help desk that can be an Awesome Support or Fluent Support alternative is ThriveDesk. They offer straightforward pricing plans designed to meet the diverse needs of businesses, with only 2 options to choose from; it makes it easier for business owners to make a decision regarding pricing. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise. 

Our pick: Fluent Support. Better price point and more transparent and inclusive pricing.

Ease of Use

Fluent Support

Fluent Support is  designed with user-friendliness in mind. It offers an intuitive interface that makes handling support tickets, email marketing, and marketing automation accessible to users of all skill levels. Setting up email campaigns and automated sequences is streamlined to enhance user productivity.

The Fluent Support team also offers robust documentation and support resources. If you’re new to CRM and support plugins, these resources can help you get started quickly and make the most of the tool.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support provides an intuitive and uncluttered interface tailored for both customers and support agents. The streamlined design, featuring clean sections and a straightforward list view, ensures efficient ticket management. Powerful search capabilities empower agents to locate specific tickets effortlessly.

Collaboration features, including ticket assignment and internal notes, facilitate seamless teamwork. Whether catering to customers or supporting agents, Awesome Support prioritizes a user-friendly experience, making it a feature-rich and easily navigable help desk solution.

Our pick: Awesome Support. More robust set of features that allow for a lot of freedom and customization. 

Integration Options

Fluent Support

Fluent Support is designed to be more than just a support ticket management tool. It includes features for email marketing and marketing automation, which means it integrates with email marketing platforms and third-party services to provide a seamless experience. 

Here are some of the integrations that they offer:

• WooCommerce & EDD: Let customers open support tickets against orders and select store products for queries. View customer orders and purchase history from a ticket view.
• Membership Plugins: Integration with Restrict Content Pro, Paid Membership Pro, and Wishlist Member. View member’s membership information from a ticket view.
• Learning Management Systems (LMS): Integration with LearnDash, LifterLMS, and TutorLMS. View student details when supporting.
• BuddyPress / BuddyBoss: Get a detailed overview of community members from the ticket overview.
• Smart Automation: Leverage the power of workflows and saved replies for automated responses, internal notes, priority setting, and agent assignment on customer queries. Implement manual workflows for task automation on selected filtered tickets, making it easier to automate multiple tickets with a single click.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support provides most of their integration options through Zapier. Other than that, it doesn’t really have too many integration options. 

Here are some of the integrations that they offer:

• WooCommerce (paid add on): Let customers open support tickets against orders and select store products for queries. View customer orders and purchase history from a ticket view. 
• Easy Digital Downloads: This integration allows synchronization of EDD products with the Awesome Support product list. Users can access EDD customer profiles directly from each ticket, enhancing support efficiency. The Premium EDD integration introduces the option to require a license key or a specific EDD product before allowing ticket submission. Moreover, it provides insights by displaying the lifetime value of a customer within each ticket.
• Envato: This integration offers a layer of security by requiring an Envato license key before permitting ticket submission, ensuring only authorized users seek support through your system.
• CRM Integrations: Jetpack CRM, view support ticket details metabox directly inside their customer panel.
• Google’s Dialogflow Artificial Intelligence engine: Used on their Smart Chat system.
• Facebook Messenger: Integrate with Facebook Messenger.
• Gravity Forms Integration: Create multiple ticket forms using Gravity Forms.

Our pick: Both plugins offer valuable integration options, but the extent and type of integration will depend on your specific business needs. Consider the tools and services you currently use or plan to implement, and evaluate which plugin’s integration options align better with your workflow and goals.

Customer Support and Documentation

Fluent Support

Fluent Support is dedicated to providing reliable customer support as well. They offer multiple support channels, including email and a support forum and customer portal where users can seek help and advice. The Fluent Support team is responsive and strives to assist users in resolving their questions or concerns.

In terms of documentation, Fluent Support offers a comprehensive knowledge base that covers various aspects of using the plugin. This resource can be particularly useful for users who prefer to access information independently and troubleshoot any potential issues.

However one issue is that Fluent Support promotes itself as an all-in-one helpdesk with its embedded BetterDocs knowledge base integration. But some may argue reliance on a third-party software for such core functionality undercuts its “completeness” as a standalone platform.

Awesome Support

Awesome Support excels in providing extensive customer support and documentation solutions. The platform empowers users to effortlessly create and manage FAQs, establishing a self-service support hub for customers to address common queries. Categorized FAQs with automatic topic suggestions enhance the overall user experience. Robust documentation capabilities enable users to publish and customize comprehensive guides using pre-built templates.

Agents benefit from these resources when responding to tickets, improving response times and ensuring users receive accurate information. The platform allows users to close tickets while simultaneously creating related FAQs or documentation, streamlining workflows for maximum productivity and a well-organized knowledge base.

Whether setting up multiple FAQ pages, configuring documentation templates, or personalizing responses based on search results, Awesome Support provides a comprehensive solution for efficient customer support and informative documentation. It’s important to note that while the platform offers these robust features, some of them are part of premium packages, restricting access for free version users.

Our pick: Awesome Support. Possesses greater resources and architecture when it comes to providing support. 

User Reviews and Testimonials

Fluent Support 

Fluent Support has received positive feedback for its versatility. Users appreciate its robust ticket management features, email marketing capabilities, and marketing automation, which provide a holistic solution for managing customer interactions.

Many users find Fluent Support to be a one-stop solution for customer support and marketing, which streamlines their workflow and simplifies communication with customers. It holds a modest 4.6/5 WordPress rating with user reviews such as

However, some users have mentioned that their customer support can be unresponsive for long periods, which creates problems for customers.

Awesome Support

For the most part Awesome Support received positive reviews from its customers such as

This goes to show that their customer support needs work. Customer support is not an area that software of Awesome Supports stature can afford to skim on. 

Reading user feedback and reviews is essential for understanding how each plugin performs in real-world scenarios. These insights can help you weigh the pros and cons and determine which plugin aligns best with your specific business needs.

Our Pick: Fluent Support. Overall, less complaints from their users compared to Awesome Support.

Security and Data Privacy

Fluent Support

Fluent Support prioritizes data privacy and security. They collect personal information, including order details, and automatically gather device information as users interact with the site. To safeguard personal information, Fluent Support employs encryption and digital signatures for sensitive data exchanges. 

They are transparent about data collection and usage, ensuring users understand how their information is processed and their rights to access, correct, or delete their data. Additionally, Fluent Support is actively working to implement General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles, demonstrating their commitment to staying compliant with evolving privacy regulations.

Awesome Support

Security and data privacy are paramount in Awesome Support’s design, emphasizing compliance with regulations like GDPR. Users can add GDPR-related disclosures upon registration and track consent for various items, whether mandatory or optional. The platform provides flexibility for users to request data deletion, while admins can remove consent when needed. This commitment to data privacy is demonstrated through integration with WordPress 4.9.6 privacy hooks and the ability to download ticket data.

Awesome Support boasts robust audit trail capabilities, logging all ticket and reply edits with options for summary and detailed audit levels. Users have control over who can edit tickets and replies, ensuring accountability. The platform extends document protection features, allowing the selection of roles that can delete attachments and enabling end users to manage attachments. With options to automatically delete attachments on ticket closure and user-agent overrides, Awesome Support prioritizes data protection and security for both users and administrators.

Our pick: Both take equally extensive data security measures.

ThriveDesk: A Worthy Alternative

If you’re in search of a robust helpdesk solution that streamlines customer support, ThriveDesk has you covered. Designed with businesses in mind, ThriveDesk stands out as a powerful yet user-friendly live chat assistant tailored especially for eCommerce entrepreneurs as opposed to both Awesome Support and Fluent Support, which boasts no native or true live chat feature.  

ThriveDesk caters to small businesses, providing the tools needed to manage real-time customer interactions effectively. Features like a shared inbox, quick replies, seamless file sharing through the chat widget, the convenience of emojis, customer satisfaction surveys, sales tracking reports for eCommerce, 

What elevates ThriveDesk above most helpdesk software is that it provides a tailor-made customer service portal for WordPress users called WP Portal with built-in knowledge base functionality, which you can host directly on your WordPress site.

Another thing that puts it ahead is its live chat. It’s USP being that since it’s their own custom live chat, people using ThriveDesk do not have to juggle multiple interfaces to handle support tickets. All tickets are viewable under one unified dashboard, drastically reducing support time.

Worried about system performance? Don’t be. ThriveDesk boasts a lightweight and optimized design that ensures smooth website functionality without slowing it down. Our speedy agent interface guarantees swift responses and maximum efficiency while ensuring your website operates seamlessly.

Here are some of their key features: 

• Self Service Portal (WPPortal)
• Third-party Integrations
• Performance Metrics
• Live Chat
• Workflow Management
• Alerts / Escalation
• Ticket Management
• Customer Database
• Email Management
• Extensive Knowledge Base
• Surveys & Feedback
• Pricing for ThriveDesk starts at just $25 per month.

Why ThriveDesk is your best bet?

When evaluating Helpdesk solutions for WordPress, some of the leading options are often ThriveDesk, Awesome Support, and Fluent Support. However, while all three plugins offer ticketing systems, ThriveDesk stands out 

What defines a true Helpdesk solution? Built-in elements like knowledge bases, team workflows, self-service portals and automation. Let’s look at a comparison table to get a more clearer picture:

By centralizing tickets, docs, chat, portals, and automation into a single plugin, ThriveDesk delivers an all-purpose Helpdesk for not just WordPress sites but also multiple types of businesses. Awesome Support and Fluent Support only offer subsets of these capabilities and are only the most effective in a WordPress environment.

For SaaS sites and busy support teams aiming to deliver 5-star customer service, ThriveDesk checks all the boxes as an all round high-level Helpdesk. 

Which one to pick for your business?

Fluent Support offers very support specific features, encompassing support ticket management, email marketing, live chat and marketing automation. While its feature set is versatile and suitable for businesses looking for a one-stop solution for support and marketing, it also places a high value on data privacy and security. Fluent Support is actively working to implement GDPR principles, showcasing its commitment to compliance with evolving privacy regulations.

But there are issues. Even though Fluent Support does provide a customer portal feature it still depends on third-party integrations to provide knowledge base functionality. It lacks a live chat feature and most of its integrations come as addons  

On the other hand, Awesome Support is a user-friendly help desk software that simplifies customer support. It offers an overwhelming number of features, including advanced reporting and email marketing features.It remains a valuable choice for accessible support solutions.

The problem with Awesome support is their pointlessly complex pricing structure with premium add-ons and unnecessary paywalls which hide basic features from small to mid sized businesses. It also opts for a gimmicky “Smart chat” as opposed to a simple live chat feature. They add complexity where simplicity is common sense.  

Ultimately, the decision to pick between these two software will center round the requirements of a business but if these requirements translate to strong ticketing features, well rounded and designed UI with top notch customer service to boot at affordable prices then ThriveDesk should be your go to.