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Many customers who contact us and install Clerk on Slack for the first time often want to compare the features we offer versus others. The main comparison we get is often: how are we different compared to Avochato? We go into detail throughout this post to highlight the core differences but it really comes down to a few key differentiators:
- Clerk is natively built into Slack - it is not an integration built on top of a web-app or other
- Clerk costs significantly less - Avochato starts at $1, 200 on their annual plan and Clerk starts at $120 for our annual plan
- Clerk has a plethora of add-ons
Clerk is Native to Slack
All our competitors including Avochato have started with a standalone web-app where your SMS application lives. We have built Clerk with clear intentionality: you should never have to leave Slack to have an elegant SMS experience. We have no external apps, everything is managed right in Slack. In fact, we’ve obsessed over Slack’s user experience so much that we have designed Clerk to imitate a mobile phone experience as much as possible.
When you first install Clerk, you’ll notice there are a few critical things you can do:
- Send an SMS to a phone number
- Upload your contacts including our integrations with HubSpot and GSuite
- Send a group SMS
With other applications, you have to first create an account, upload your contacts, and only then migrate the experience to Slack. By having your entire experience live inside Slack you no longer need to create separate accounts, manage contacts in yet another app and spend hours formatting things to be your way. Clerk just makes SMS work.
Clerk is Affordable
We built Clerk to solve our own problems as small business owners. As such, we made small-business pricing, with a belief around a price we wanted to pay to get started with SMS. The reality is that small business owners want better management over their communication system and want to centralize experiences to one app. Given that millions of small businesses have made the switch to slack to manage their teams, having external experiences just for SMS is a headache so many teams never make the leap. In fact, it is the reason why we at Clerk never made the leap to any of the alternatives – they were just too costly and forced us to adopt a new system to onboard our staff.
Clerk has a Plethora of Add-Ons
At the request of our hundreds of users we have built add-ons we are sure can help your business. Discover our add-ons:
Caller-ID: standard across all plans *including free. Our callerID system automatically recognizes who is calling and allows you to save them to your address book.
Import your number: want to leverage your business number in Slack for two-way SMS? Look no further as Clerk enables nearly all phone numbers (VOIP / Landline) to have SMS, all through Slack.
Multiple Numbers: Most businesses leverage several numbers to get it all done.
Toll-Free Number: want to make Slack your support center? Toll-free, 1-800 numbers are now textable through Clerk!
Voicemail: Lots of clients will want to call you to finalize a deal or to connect with someone on the other line. Never miss a beat with our voicemail feature that allows you to listen to a message in .mp3 format so you can listen right away.
Call Transcription: Just want voice-to-text for your voicemail? Don’t care to listen to every message? Let us leave you transcript right in Slack.
Automation: Our most loved add-on lets you set up automatic welcome messages and off-hour autoresponders. Response time is everything in today’s world, never less your customers go unanswered when they text you with our automated messages.
Get Started With Clerk Today
Simplify your communication and connection with your business. It’s easy to get started completely free. Just click on “Add To Slack” in the top menu.
