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Customer support is an aspect all businesses struggle with and for a platform like WordPress it is tenfold. For WordPress businesses that provide stellar support, it often starts with the tool they use because it’s usually the tool that empowers the business. Fluent Support and ThriveDesk are two prominent WordPress plugins that offer solutions for these 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 ThriveDesk. 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 and ThriveDesk, helping you make an educated decision to meet your business requirements.
Table of Contents
Fluent Support vs ThriveDesk at a Glance
Let’s start by seeing how they stack up against each other at a glance
| Feature | Fluent Support | ThriveDesk |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $77/year | $25/month |
| Key features | Unlimited tickets Unlimited users Unlimited agents SLAs Macros Live chat | Unlimited tickets Extensive eCommerce integrations Email, Chat, and Discord support WP Portal Unlimited live chat Mobile app |
| Ease of use | Excellent | Excellent |
| WordPress rating | 4.6/5 | 4.7/5 |
| Trial period | No trial period | 14 days |
Overview of ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk emerges as the quintessential support solution for businesses seeking effective customer support. It caters to businesses of all sizes, offering a robust yet user-friendly live chat assistant with a special focus on eCommerce entrepreneurs.
Geared towards small businesses, ThriveDesk presents a plethora of features, encompassing a helpdesk software, ticket management, WP Portal, swift replies, effortless file sharing through the chat widget, emoji integration for effective communication, customer satisfaction surveys, eCommerce-oriented sales tracking reports, comprehensive knowledge base search capabilities, and robust monitoring tools and much more.
ThriveDesk’s lightweight, optimized design ensures seamless website functionality without any disruptions. The intuitive and decluttered agent interface guarantees prompt responses for maximum efficiency while maintaining your website’s seamless operation.
Furthermore, ThriveDesk offers a mobile app that empowers businesses to provide round-the-clock customer support from anywhere. They are heavily optimized to ensure that their customers can provide top-tier customer experiences.
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 ticketing 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. Additionally, Fluent Support incorporates a knowledge base feature for creating and sharing informative articles that address common customer queries. You also have access to reporting and analytics tools, enabling you to assess your support team’s performance and measure customer satisfaction.
Ticket Management
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk’s ticket management capabilities are designed to streamline and organize your customer support operations. With multiple shared inboxes, you can efficiently handle customer inquiries across various channels. The platform supports email ticketing, allowing for a seamless flow of communication. ThriveDesk’s assistive AI enhances response times and aids in prioritizing conversations.
You can easily manage conversation activities, set statuses, and access conversation history for reference. Teammate assignments and inbox access control ensure efficient distribution of tasks among your support team. Additionally, custom auto-replies, HTML signatures, and auto-bcc features offer flexibility and personalization in your customer interactions.
With attachment support and the ability to merge conversations, you can maintain comprehensive and organized customer support records. Whether you have two or unlimited shared inboxes, ThriveDesk provides the tools to deliver top-tier customer assistance.
One unique component of ThriveDesks ticket management is WP Portal, which allows you to add a help center right inside your WordPress website. You can view your entire support conversation history or even create a new ticket directly from the portal. This helps them enable their customers with lightning-fast support.
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.
Our pick: ThriveDesk. WP Portal feature of their ticket management is a game changer.
Email Marketing and Automation
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk, much like Fluent Support, focuses primarily on stellar support ticket management, with no built-in email marketing. However, ThriveDesk offers native workflow automation and robust CRM integration through plugins such as Funnelkit and the aforementioned Fluent CRM, which provides comprehensive email marketing and marketing automation capabilities.
With Fluent CRM integration, you gain the ability to create and execute targeted email campaigns, monitor their performance, and establish automated email sequences. This integration option makes ThriveDesk an appealing choice for those seeking a blend of support ticket management and robust marketing capabilities.
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.
Our pick: Fluent Support.
Live Chat
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk on the other hand offers a robust live chat solution that enhances your customer support capabilities. With features like lead identification, user and visitor information, live visitor tracking, and instant replies, it provides real-time insights and prompt responses to customer inquiries. ThriveDesk’s brandable chat widget for both web and mobile allows you to maintain a consistent brand image.
You can also seamlessly transition chats into tickets, ensuring no customer query goes unaddressed. Moreover, the integration with app and knowledge base services, along with multilingual support, empowers your team to deliver efficient and personalized assistance to customers, making it a valuable asset for your business.
Fluent Support
Fluent Support, as a customer support software, 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. To maintain a competitive edge in the customer support software market, integrating a live chat feature for immediate support is essential.
Our pick: Thrivedesk. They provide a live chat and Fluent doesn’t. Live chat is an essential feature for WordPress.
Reporting and Analytics
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk offers the bare minimum in terms of reporting and analytics stats to help you determine the performance of your support. You have access to data such as the number of tickets assigned to particular agents, their average resolution times and the customer ratings they received. They keep it strictly functional.
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.
Our pick: Both are pretty limited in comprehensive reporting and analytics features.
Pricing and Plans
ThriveDesk
| Starter | $25/month (4 seats) |
| Plus | $85/month (10 seats) |
| Enterprise | $25/seat per month (Minimum 10 seats) |
Fluent Support
| Single Site License | $77/year |
| Agency License | $149/year |
| 50 Sites License | $239/year |
Both Fluent Support and ThriveDesk offer a variety of pricing plans to choose from. However, with ThriveDesk you get more bang for your buck. Even their most basic plans come equipped with 2 mailboxes included, 1 knowledge base, live chat assistants, internal notes with @mentions, tagging, Basic automation rules and a whole lot more.
Overall, ThriveDesk just offers better value for the money than Fluent Support. It offers more features and flexibility, and it is more affordable for mid to small sized businesses.
Our pick: ThriveDesk. Better value for money.
Ease of Use
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk is a helpdesk solution that shares a commitment to user-friendliness. Its intuitive interface caters to users of all skill levels, providing a seamless experience in managing support tickets. Beyond ticket management, ThriveDesk simplifies the onboarding process cutting down required learning time for new reps. They have a clean and clutter free dashboard allowing a clear visualization of open tickets, metrics and agent activity.
As part of its user support, ThriveDesk offers comprehensive documentation and resources which are instantly searchable and shareable from their knowledge base design, making it a quick and accessible option for those new to supporting plugins. There are also features such as ticket routing and macros which make it an overall human friendly software.
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.
Our pick: ThriveDesk. Better and more user friendly design.
Integration Options
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk is a very capable support ticket management tool but It also 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:
- WordPress: Connect WordPress data to ThriveDesk and enable the use of WPPortal on your WordPress site.
- Wix: Provide live chat, email, and knowledge base support to Wix customers.
- Google Tag Manager: Add ThriveDesk Assistant to your website using Google Tag Manager.
- Joomla!: Set up a live chat on a Joomla website.
- Deep Ecommerce Integration: Integrate ThriveDesk with WooCommerce, SureCart, Easy Digital Downloads, and Freemius.
- Slack: Connect ThriveDesk with Slack for streamlined communication and collaboration.
- CRM: Access numerous services and solutions such as FunnelKit and Fluent CRM.
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.
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
ThriveDesk
Experience top-tier customer support with ThriveDesk. Their team is dedicated to your success, ensuring that your queries are addressed promptly. Whether you choose to reach out via chat, email, or Discord channel, you can expect swift responses within minutes, not hours. Their support representatives are not only quick to assist but also deeply knowledgeable.
Their learn page is a masterstroke as well. It contains well-made and thorough video documentation that takes you through various “How to” style videos that make using their software and understanding their features a cinch. It can be extremely helpful for users during the onboarding process.
They understand your questions and provide clear, concise guidance, making your interactions with ThriveDesk refreshingly effective. They prioritize customer success, and their exceptional customer support is there to ensure that you get the most out of your ThriveDesk experience.
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.
Our pick: Both plugins offer robust customer support options and comprehensive documentation. Your choice between Fluent Support and ThriveDesk will depend on your preference for support channels and the level of independence you require when using the plugin.
User Reviews and Testimonials
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk has mostly positive reviews. Users particularly appreciate its robust ticket management, sleek and user-friendly UI, live chat and the availability of a mobile app which allows them to provide support on the go.
It holds a modest 4.8/5 G2 rating with user reviews such as
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.
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: ThriveDesk. On average, ThriveDesk’s customer service agents reply faster than Fluent Support. Quick and efficient customer support is hard to compete with when it comes to preference.
Security and Data Privacy
ThriveDesk
ThriveDesk takes data security very seriously. With a robust set of measures in place, they ensure customer information remains protected and their interactions with the platform are secure. Two-factor authentication is employed for ThriveDesk access, and their Secure Shell Protocol is password protected. The infrastructure is continuously hardened to withstand potential threats, and all servers receive regular security updates.
They host their servers in EU regions, maintain Denial-of-service protections, and implement a comprehensive monitoring system to identify issues proactively. Their encryption practices follow state-of-the-art techniques, including strong TLS keys and Forward-Secrecy, guaranteeing the confidentiality and integrity of customer data. ThriveDesk complies with GDPR regulations to safeguard customer 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.
Our pick: ThriveDesk. Their explicit mention of implementing GDPR principles and emphasis on transparency may provide a slightly higher level of assurance for users concerned about privacy and compliance with evolving privacy regulations.
Making Your Decision: Fluent Support vs ThriveDesk
You’ve conducted a thorough comparison of ThriveDesk and Fluent Support, exploring their features, pricing, user-friendliness, integration capabilities, customer support, and user experiences. Now, it’s time to decide which solution best suits your business’s unique requirements.
Prioritize Your Needs: Start by defining your business priorities. Are you primarily focused on efficient support ticket management, or do you seek a more comprehensive tool that includes marketing automation and email marketing? Clarify your specific needs.
Budget Considerations: Carefully assess your budget and select the solution that fits your financial constraints. Both plugins offer free versions and paid plans, so choose the one that delivers the most value for your investment.
Team Skills and Workflow: Consider the proficiency of your team and your current workflow. If you have a support-centric team and require a straightforward, user-friendly solution, Fluent Support may be your ideal choice. For businesses seeking a broader platform that combines support with marketing and customer management, ThriveDesk could be the right fit.
Integration Alignment: Take into account your existing and planned toolset. Ensure that the chosen plugin seamlessly integrates with your ecosystem to streamline your business operations.
Support and Resources: Assess your preference for support options and the importance of documentation. Select a plugin that aligns with your preferred support channels and your reliance on self-help materials.
Real-World Insights: Lastly, factor in the experiences of other users. Reading reviews and feedback from fellow businesses can provide valuable insights into the practical performance of each plugin.
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.
On the other hand, ThriveDesk offers a broad range of features, including support ticket management, workflow automation and live chat. While its perfectly suited for most small to mid sized businesses it can also support larger businesses, it also places a high value on data privacy and security.
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.
