Kustomer vs. Twilio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Kustomer
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month, per user
Twilio
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Twilio offers a CPaaS and CCaaS solution, with the combination of its programmable Voice, Video, and Messaging APIs, as well as the Twilio Flex cloud contact center. Additional capabilities include Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking, as well as API for WhatsApp.
$0
per min per participant
Pricing
KustomerTwilio
Editions & Modules
Enterprise
$89
per month, per user
Ultimate
$139
per month, per user
Programmable Video
$0.0015
per min per participant
WhatsApp Business API
$0.0042
Per WhatsApp Template message sent
WhatsApp Business API
$0.005
Per WhatsApp session message
Elastic SIP Trunking
$0.007
Per min for termination
Programmable Messaging
$0.0075
per message sent or received
Programmable Voice
$0.0085
per minute to receive a call
Programmable Voice
$0.013
per min to make a call
Elastic SIP Trunking
$0.045
Per min for origination
Twilio Conversations
$0.05
per active user per month
Twilio Authy
$0.09
per authentication
Programmable Wireless
$0.1
per MB
Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
$1
per active user hour (5000 hours free)
Programmable Wireless
$2.00
per SIM card
Twilio SendGrid Email API
$14.95
per month up to 100k emails. (Up to 40k emails free for 30 days)
Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns
$15
per month for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 emails. Your first 2,000 contacts are free
Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
$150
per named user per month (5000 hours free)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
KustomerTwilio
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsAll plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Simple usage-based pricing means you don’t get locked into big contracts. 2. Volume discounts: Discounts trigger as your usage grows, so you always get a fair price. 3. Start building today with free trial credit and full API access.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
KustomerTwilio
Features
KustomerTwilio
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Kustomer
8.1
Ratings
1% above category average
Twilio
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Kustomer
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
Twilio
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Kustomer
8.0
Ratings
3% above category average
Twilio
-
Ratings
Customer portal8.60 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
KustomerTwilio
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Dialpad Support
Dialpad Support
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.1 out of 10
Verint Community
Verint Community
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
KustomerTwilio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.4
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.9
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
KustomerTwilio
Likelihood to Recommend
It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.
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Twilio is well suited to sending SMS reminders to prospects on the lead-up to sales appointments. This has helped us improve attendance rates for these meetings. We also use Twilio to communicate with these prospects post-meeting to make offers on products and services and for feedback on their meeting.
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Pros
  • All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
  • The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
  • We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
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  • Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
  • Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
  • Excellent services and support.
  • The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.
Read full review
Cons
  • For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
  • Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
  • Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
  • I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
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  • Authy does not support the "push button" multi-factor authentication from your application's native apps. This means if you want to use Authy, you still need to use TOTP based codes.
  • Not really a shortcoming of Authy, but it does nothing to help with multi-factor authentication using text messages - those are still sent to your platform's messaging app.
  • Authy doesn't always display how much time is left before your current token expires, making it difficult to know how much time you have left to enter the current code.
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Likelihood to Renew
Because there's no other tool like Kustomer
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We are happy with Twilio because the price per message is low. The API is not difficult to implement and the documentation is very complete. Twilio as a company keeps you well informed of issues that happen. They also offer free online workshops or conferences to make notices of new laws, etc.
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Usability
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
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Overall the product API is extremely well documented so it is very easy to build a product with their technology. The website is a little bit cumbersome to use as they have greatly expanded the number of products that they have over the years, but the dashboard UI has not been improved much since.
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Reliability and Availability
Because Kustomer is available when you need it
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity
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The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.
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Support Rating
It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.
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Good interface to connect with different API systems for communication through different channel[s]. Twilio has good market coverage of the client across the globe for generating revenue through multi-channel approach. It works with [a] programmable feature that makes life easy for every user. Automated call is one of the advance[d] feature[s] of this tool.
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In-Person Training
Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Online Training
It was very easy to understand.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.
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The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.
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Alternatives Considered
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.
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We have looked at some of Twilio competitors, like Infobip, Sich and Bandwith. Prices on all of them for voice minutes and SMS are way cheaper than Twilio. But none of them seem to offer as many features and ease of use as Twilio. Specially from an API point of view
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Scalability
Because customer is flexible and scalable
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
  • Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.
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  • We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
  • We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
  • We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand
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ScreenShots

Kustomer Screenshots

Screenshot of Example of a customer profile within Kustomer.Screenshot of Example of how Kustomer’s automated chats can save agents time by handling less complex requests automatically.

Twilio Screenshots

Screenshot of To access any of the products in Console, head over to the “Explore Products” section and start building.Screenshot of Whether you prefer to build with a drag-and-drop visual editor or with code, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns helps you engage your customers through email.Screenshot of Flex is a programmable Contact Center that puts you in control.