Customer Engagement Tools: What They Are and 9 Options

A customer engagement tool is software that helps a company reach, message, and understand its users on the channels those users already use: email, in-app, push, chat, and support. The label covers a wide range, because 'engagement' happens in more than one place, and no single product does all of it well.

Resources

The sections below sort nine tools by the job each one does. Loops is the publisher’s product and appears once, at the end. Each description was checked against the provider’s public documentation and pricing pages in July 2026. Pricing and plan limits change often, so confirm the current numbers on the provider’s site before choosing.

What counts as a customer engagement tool

The category splits into a few distinct jobs. A tool usually leads with one of them and touches the others.

Lifecycle and marketing email. Sends onboarding, product, and campaign email off contact data and product events. This is where most SaaS engagement starts, because email reaches users who are not currently in the app. See lifecycle email and marketing email for how these differ.

In-app messaging and product adoption. Shows tooltips, checklists, modals, and announcements inside the product to onboard users and drive feature use. It reaches people only while they are logged in.

Push and mobile messaging. Delivers push notifications to phones and browsers, often with SMS and email alongside. It is the main way to pull a user back into a mobile app.

Support and chat. Handles inbound questions through a shared inbox, live chat, and help center, increasingly with an AI agent answering first. Engagement here is reactive: the user starts the conversation.

Product analytics. Measures what users do so the other tools have something to trigger on. It does not message anyone by itself, but it defines the events and cohorts that the messaging tools act on.

9 customer engagement tools compared

Tool

1. Intercom

Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform that combines a shared inbox, live chat, help center, and in-app messaging, with the Fin AI agent answering common questions first. It reaches users inside the product and by email, so it works as an in-app engagement channel, not only a support desk.

Pricing is seat-based across three plans, Essential, Advanced, and Expert, with the Fin AI agent billed separately per resolution rather than per seat, and a free trial to start. A team leaning hard on AI deflection pays on Fin usage, not headcount, which is the line worth modeling before committing. It suits teams that want support and in-product messaging in one place.

2. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service platform built around ticketing, with live chat, messaging, voice, and AI agents layered on top. It fits teams whose engagement is mostly reactive support at volume, where a durable ticket record and routing matter more than outbound campaigns.

Billing is per agent per month, from a basic support plan up to an enterprise suite quoted by sales, with several capabilities sold as per-agent add-ons on top. Zendesk earns its place when support is the center of gravity and a durable ticket record matters more than outbound reach.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM-led platform whose Marketing Hub covers email marketing, automation, landing pages, and campaign reporting, all tied to the same contact database as its sales and service products. Engagement here is anchored to a CRM of record, which suits teams that want marketing, sales, and support reading from one system.

The model is freemium: a free CRM tier, then Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans that scale by marketing contacts and paid seats, with onboarding fees attached to the higher tiers. It fits teams that want engagement built on a CRM of record rather than a standalone messaging tool.

4. Customer.io

Customer.io is a messaging automation platform that sends email, push, SMS, and in-app messages from journey-based workflows driven by customer data and events. It is aimed at data-led teams that want to build cross-channel sequences off their own event stream rather than off list uploads.

Pricing is profile-based, billed on the maximum number of uniquely identified people and objects in the account rather than on send volume, across tiers from Essentials up to Enterprise. Early-stage companies under a stated funding threshold can apply to its startup program. The profile model rewards a clean, well-defined event schema and someone to own journey operations.

5. Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform for orchestrating messages across email, push, in-app messages, SMS, and other channels from one place, with journey building and AI personalization. It targets larger teams that coordinate campaigns across many channels and need that orchestration to scale.

Pricing is sales-led and packaged by monthly active users across four editions, Go, Select, Pro, and Enterprise, with a credit-based model that allocates spend across channels rather than publishing per-message rates. The packaging conversation happens with their sales team, not a public calculator.

6. OneSignal

OneSignal leads with push notifications for mobile and web, with email, SMS, and in-app messaging in the same platform. It fits products where push is the primary way to bring users back, and where the other channels are useful additions.

It is freemium, with a free tier and paid plans, Growth, Professional, and Enterprise, that pair a platform fee with usage charges based on subscribers and sends per channel. That hybrid is worth modeling against real volume, since two products on the same plan can cost very differently once sends scale.

7. Appcues

Appcues builds in-app experiences such as onboarding flows, checklists, tooltips, announcements, and surveys, without requiring engineering to ship each one. It is a product-adoption tool: engagement happens inside the app while a user is active, and the goal is activation and feature use.

Pricing runs on monthly active users across Start, Grow, and Enterprise tiers, each capping the number of published experiences, with a free trial and a separate program for small teams. The published-experience limit, not just the MAU count, is the constraint most teams hit first.

8. Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics platform for understanding user behavior through journeys, cohorts, experimentation, and session replay. It does not send messages itself. It defines the events and cohorts that the messaging tools above trigger on, which is why it sits in an engagement stack even though it is an analytics product.

Pricing is event-based: a free plan, a usage-scaled Plus plan, and Growth and Enterprise plans quoted by sales, with unlimited seats throughout. Qualifying startups can apply for a free year on a paid plan. Because the meter is event volume, the number worth forecasting is how many events your instrumentation sends, not how many people touch the tool.

9. Loops

Loops is an email platform for SaaS that keeps marketing, transactional, and lifecycle email in one product, sending off a single contact record with shared events and properties. It covers the email side of engagement for SaaS teams. It is not a push, SMS, in-app messaging, or support tool, so a team that needs those channels pairs Loops with one of the tools above.

Pricing is contact-based, billed on the subscribed contacts synced to Loops rather than on email volume, with transactional email included on paid plans and a free plan for early-stage use. Loops fits email-first SaaS teams that would rather get one channel right than run a broad platform at low utilization. Teams that also need push, SMS, in-app, or support should pair it with one of the tools above. For the broader email-automation comparison, see the best email marketing automation platforms.

How to choose

Start from the job, not the vendor. Write down the one channel where your engagement happens first: email for most SaaS, push for a mobile-led product, in-app for onboarding and adoption, or chat for support-heavy products. Buy the tool that does that job well, then decide whether a second channel is worth a second tool.

Then run the overbuying test. A cross-channel platform that covers email, push, in-app, and SMS looks efficient on paper, but you pay for every channel whether or not you send on it, and the setup work is real. If you will use one or two channels for the next year, a focused tool for each usually costs less and ships faster than a broad platform you grow into slowly. Match the tool to the channels you will send on this year, not the ones on a future roadmap.

Finally, check the data model. The tools worth combining share a contact and event model, so a signal captured in one place can trigger a message in another. Confirm how each tool identifies a user, how it ingests events, and whether marketing and product messages read from the same contact record before you commit.