[cyberferret]

That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical.

For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years.

Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo apps (not really in app support chat and knowledgebase at all). Other suggestions, while being great front end web chat systems, were nowhere near the functionality of Intercom as far as back end app support chat systems and shared help desk features go.

I know this from personal experience jumping from system to system over the past 24 months, looking for a viable alternative.

(BTW - No affiliation with Intercom, apart from being a paying user 2 years ago, then a period of not using them, then back to using Intercom a couple of months ago due to not being able to find a good alternative).

[ayanb]

In this case, the primary category for Intercom is `User onboarding and Engagement` which can be broken down separately to `User Onboarding` and `In-app Support` or `In-app Chat`. That will suddenly spike up the sanity of both categories (maybe we can even normalize further - siftery has more than 700 categories/tags, a first for any such platform).

Categorisation of a data set like this can be non-trivial and will false positives. We can cherry-pick such a false positive and ignore all the actual positives. That said, thanks for this feedback - this is exactly what is needed to improve status quo. We are on it and will report back in a few hours with the category split I suggested in the previous paragraph. Do let me know if you think it can be broken down into a different type of granularity?

[ggiaco]

We use Intercom quite a lot at Siftery. What would you say are the top alternatives/substitutes if not what's listed?

Here's what we have for the "substitues" calculation: "When companies stop using Intercom, its most frequent substitutes are Drift (44.9% of the time), followed by Zendesk (9%), and by Zendesk Chat (Formerly Zopim) (7%)"

(Drift as the closest substitute closely matches my experience investigating options in this space; other products are more like partial or imperfect substitutes)

The alternatives ranked by NPS include Appcues, Chameleon, Clickhelp, Tawk.to, Olark, Freshdesk. Intercom is multi-faceted and difficult product to categorize, but all of those products are alternatives for some of its functionality.

Are there other products you think definitely belong here and were missed? Not trying to come off as defensive by the way, just trying to really understand where's the opportunity for improvement here.