Amazon SNS vs Intercom

Amazon SNS

It is well suited for generic push notification requirements. It can be quickly created and modified to best suit your application at any given moment. However for any notification service that needs to be highly customizable for a specific deployment should be implemented through a competing or custom built service run on company servers

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Dylan Cauwels

Vice President

Longhorn MakerStudioInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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Intercom

Intercom is great for high touch interactions with clients. If you want to have a human relationship with each user or account, this is a far superior tool than with a support ticket solution. It provides easy and quick access for any user/client to a human and can engage in a simple and easy environment. Intercom does not do as well if you have a high volume of clients and want to automate most interactions and not have a human devoted to 1:1 interactions with clients. For large client bases, it may not make sense to have a human dedicated to 1:1 interactions with every client. Intercom best supports this human touch relationship

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Corey Calder

Account Executive

ClientSuccessComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Pros

Super simple setup and deployment. You can have a new service set up within minutes and in a serverless environment as well
Well documented and incredibly easy to use. There are available APIs in almost every relevant language and are all well documented by AWS. Getting any team up to date on their new Notification architecture shouldn't take longer than a day.
Being managed by AWS themselves makes the service highly available in every possible way. Your SNS deployment is almost guaranteed to never go down without you ever lifting a finger to make it so.

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Dylan Cauwels

Vice President

Longhorn MakerStudioInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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Ease of use.
Alerts.
Mobile App.
Canned responses.

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Verified User

Employee in Sales

Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees

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Cons

The AWS website UI could use some definite improvement. The website itself is very clunky and hard to navigate and always seems to have the wrong information in the wrong places. It is a monstrous task trying to make a website as complicated as AWS look simple and easy to navigate but even with some minor improvements it would become much more user and beginner friendly.
Troubleshooting can be very difficult when encountering an issue with SNS and often many AWS services. By having all of your infrastructure in the cloud, it makes troubleshooting networking problems quite complicated. On top of this, aws provides little return information when a message fails to send, leaving a lot of guesswork to be done on your part to fix the issue.

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Dylan Cauwels

Vice President

Longhorn MakerStudioInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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Some of the automated messages don't work as well as I would like.
Occasionally a delay with the mobile alerts.
Navigating the actual website can be confusing.

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Verified User

Employee in Sales

Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

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Intercom9.1

Based on 3 answers

It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ

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Ariana Thompson

Support Operations

Hungry HarvestFood & Beverages, 11-50 employees

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Usability

No score

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Intercom9.0

Based on 1 answer

Intercom has really done a great job creating a focused product that provides huge value and is super easy to use. Our entire business group and a few engineering members are using it with no training whatsoever which is super rare for any platform.

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Ziv Peled

VP Client Services

AppsFlyerInternet, 51-200 employees

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Support

No score

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Intercom7.2

Based on 2 answers

I got very good support so far. New product features and feature requests are a bit slow.

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Ziv Peled

VP Client Services

AppsFlyerInternet, 51-200 employees

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Implementation

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Intercom10.0

Based on 1 answer

Super easy implementation, no issues whatsoever, I can say I envy this part of Intercom

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Ziv Peled

VP Client Services

AppsFlyerInternet, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

SNS is much more customizable compared to SES and allows for many more delivery methods. While it is better for email-based notification services, not being able to send notifications via SMS limits your app functionality considerably. Being able to switch message delivery types is an invaluable tool for any application deployment

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Dylan Cauwels

Vice President

Longhorn MakerStudioInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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Drift was not yet available when we chose Intercom, it was the most complete product available on the market at that time

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Verified User

Project Manager in Marketing

E-Learning Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Positive from the cost savings of the service itself
Positive from the labor savings from both the ease of setup and learning curve of the programmers

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Dylan Cauwels

Vice President

Longhorn MakerStudioInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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It was great to increase conversion on our website. Being a SaaS B2B product, people usually had questions or barriers preventing them from signing up. Having intercom was a key entry point for our sales team
Great for support with our clients

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Verified User

Project Manager in Marketing

E-Learning Company, 51-200 employees

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