Customer.io vs Reply

Customer.io is great for building segmented onboarding funnels within your product (e.g. a series of emails and push notifications based on the onboarding flow).

It allows you to manage all of your communication flows with the customer in a visual way.

We've been seeing more and more companies switch over to this due to their flexibility of native integrations.

You can also do things like push app sign-ups and in-app events to a shared channel in Slack, or even use it to automatically push out updates to shared Slack Connect channels.

Gosh, where do we begin here... Our thoughts on Reply are strong here.

No, really—like we used Reply for years. I'm talking 7+ years. So much in-fact that we got quite close to one of the co-founders that broke off to create a competing service. Yeah, it's a competitive space.

We even met with Reply at Copper HQ back in 2020 to try and convince them (Reply) to build a deep white-labeled integration with Copper directly, because we used them with every single customer of ours:

Founder of Reply (Oleg) on the left, along with me and his team (I'm 2nd from the right)

Spoiler alert: this didn't come to fruition—Outfunnel is who Copper chose as their white-labeled partner in the end.

Reply, like many others, are touting AI all the things—take this with a grain of salt though. Just like everything else, they are trying to use OpenAI to improve email writing.

We will give credit where credit is due though, back in the day, before this AI trend even happened, they did have a pretty nifty email sentiment analysis when writing emails which helped keep you concise and portraying the right tone. It was beyond its time.

They, like Close, integrate VoIP in quite core to their tool—same issues arise as with Close, you're essentially choosing Reply as your VoIP, and none of this SMS or Call information is going to sync over to your CRM (you know, where you'd love to have it).

There's some additional cool features that they do have like email warm-up and email validation baked into the tool (via partners)—this is appreciated, but you'll continually pay for credits to use these things.

They focused most of their API on adding leads to the system. They essentially want it to be relatively easy to get data into Reply from other tools, but getting insights out of Reply to your other tools, this becomes way more limited.

For the core things though, their API does work well, and they even have a pretty robust Zapier integration connector.

Don't let their pricing page fool you—they are incredibly expensive for this tool. Their free tier isn't even the tool, it's just a glimpse into how you can prospect to get leads in the system, so that you can pay them to actually send the outreach.

They charge per-seat (which isn't usually how marketing automation companies charge—again, they are trying to act more like a CRM in some ways, pricing included. This is where we highly recommend just purchasing a single seat and sharing it by adding email aliases if needed (oh, and they charge for that too).

Yeah, they charge for everything additional. Don't expect to get in at what's listed on the pricing page, they will upsell you in every single aspect of their product. To be fair, some of it makes sense since they are external integrations with 3rd party tools offering value, but in other ways, they are just being a bit 😅 (charging for adding email aliases, really?)