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Alexander Haque Co-Founder at Clerk Chat
Alexander Haque

Co-Founder at Clerk Chat

Best Zipwhip Alternatives in 2023

Best Zipwhip Alternatives in 2023

4 Tools To Text Your Customers

If you’re a Zipwhip user, you probably know that it has been acquired by Twilio, which has announced that it will be shutting down Zipwhip. The official permanent shutdown date for Zipwhip is December 1, 2023.

On that day, you will not be able to use or access Zipwhip to send or receive texts on any of your phone numbers. You also won’t be able to export your data or contact lists.

That’s why now is the time to find a new business texting platform. Before it’s too late.

Here are 4 of the best business messaging tools out there, starting with our platform — Clerk Chat.

Clerk Chat

Clerk Chat is a business messaging platform that lets you text your customers from within Slack or Microsoft Teams. Unlike the other alternatives on this list, you don’t have to download another app or register for another service — you can send and receive SMS from within the collaboration tools you’re already using.

Some of the unique benefits we offer include:

How does it work?

Clerk is simple to set up and use. First, install via the Slack or Microsoft Teams app store. It will prompt you to either choose a phone number or enter your existing phone number. We’ll help you transfer your Zipwhip phone number.

We offer a variety of integrations to let you import your contacts from any platform including Salesforce, Shopify, Google Contacts, Hubspot, and of course .csv files.

Clerk works natively inside of Slack and Microsoft Teams or a dedicated app, and you can start sending and receiving SMS and WhatsApp messages in seconds. We’ll handle your transition from Zipwhip to Clerk by transferring all of your data including contacts, conversations, opt-in lists, snippets, and groups.

Book a demo with us today.

RingCentral

RingCentral offers omnichannel solutions to let you communicate with your customer across voice, chat, social media, SMS, and email.

Its benefits include:

  • A wide variety of solutions including video and fax
  • An open ecosystem and developer platform

Some of the cons:

  • It’s expensive, at 25$/user/mo
  • It offers a lot of things that most businesses don’t need (e.g. fax)
  • Unfriendly UX (e.g. according to one of their G2 reviews, it doesn’t show most recent messages first)

While it does give you the core functionality that Zipwhip offered (send and receive SMS), most companies would be overpaying if they went with RingCentral — and that money would go towards features that they may never use; when’s the last time you sent a fax?

Openphone

Openphone is another Zipwhip alternative used by businesses that want to text their customers.

Its benefits include:

  • Claim local or toll-free North American phone numbers for all your teammates
  • Dedicated inboxes for each of your customer’s phone numbers
  • Texts, call logs, call recordings, and transcribed voicemails all appear in one seamless conversation

The most common complaint about Openphone on G2 is that there are frequent outages and disruptions to service. For example, in October of 2022, multiple outages affected users’ ability to text their customers. If you’re doing mission-critical or time-sensitive work like handling appointments, this could mean losing business. Another complaint was that sometimes push notifications don’t come through.

Heymarket

Heymarket is a strong alternative to Zipwhip. Businesses of all sizes use their service to text customers for use cases including customer service, marketing, and even sales.

Its benefits include:

  • The option to text your customers from Slack/Teams
  • Enterprise-grade security
  • Lots of integrations

It has 2 major cons, however.

The first is that glitches occur pretty often, according to G2 reviews — this includes messages not going through, deleted chats reappearing, and conversations randomly closing.

The second con is its inaccessible pricing tiers. For example, its base tier starts at 19$/user/mo, and is missing many of the features available in the tiers that cost 39$/user/mo and 59$/user/mo. And we’re not talking about fancy features that most companies won’t need — these are crucial features including integrations, SMS campaigns, and automations.

By contrast, Clerk offers integrations and SMS campaigns at all tiers. And we have 2 simple and affordable tiers depending on how many SMS you need to send per month.

Selecting a Zipwhip Alternative

Zipwhip isn’t an option anymore. And if you don’t transition to another business messaging platform soon, you’ll lose all your customer data including contacts and conversations.

For most businesses, a Zipwhip alternative like Clerk Chat is the best option for companies that already use Slack or Teams since it’s a simple way for anyone to text their customers without having to onboard their team onto yet another tool. Clerk is easy to set up, and we guarantee you’ll hit the ground running in minutes.

If you have more questions or want to discuss things like security, compliance, and IT considerations, talk to our sales team — get started with Clerk Chat today.

  • December 2, 2022