Avochato is a leading SMS / text message platform. While relatively new compared to some of their competitors, their product has quickly surpassed most others in terms of features and usability. Avochato's customer service is extremely responsive and friendly. Avochato's product is industry agnostic and supports sales, marketing, and operations teams according to their website. Their most popular features are their one-to-many messaging, auto-response text messages, and surveys. They offer a free trial that we recommend exploring if you're looking for a text message solution.
Pros
- As a leader in the space, Avochato’s team will help you define your text message strategy and teach you how to implement it step by step.
- Avochato can get you up and running on their platform same day (usually in under an hour).
- Avochato accommodates businesses of all sizes Whether you’re looking to send messages to a small group or millions of text messages a month Avochato can help.
- Avochato can offer discounts for businesses willing to commit to annual billing.
- Avochato’s ideal client seeks to engage with their customers in one-on-one communication via text message.
Cons
- Based on your needs, this site is a great fit for you. There aren’t any major cons to call out.
Other SMS Providers
#2 – EZ Texting
EZ Texting is an affordable and efficient text message marketing solution used by companies, businesses, and organizations. EZ Texting helps organizations launch mobile campaigns and engagements through text messaging, helping them acquire and interact with customers better, send out notifications and reminders, promote brand awareness, or build strong communities.
Pros
- Great introductory system. Very easy to use for businesses with less than 100 contacts.
- Customer service very responsive via their chat.
- Excellent platform for mass texting.
Cons
- Not a great product to use for customer loyalty campaigns or reminders.
- Can become difficult to use as your contact list grows.
#3 – Heymarket
Heymarket is an SMS marketing for small and large text campaigns. Your leads never have to install an app and receive normal text messages they can reply to. Unlimited lists, templates, merge tokens, contacts, and campaigns make it simple to engage with customers. Reports, integrations, and auto replies help administrators keep track. Send, read, and reply with shared inboxes on your computer, the iOS app (featured by Apple), or Android app. Works with existing contacts an custom fields.
Pros
- Has an iPhone and Android app so you can get all messages on the go.
- Templates make it easy to quickly send out mass text messages.
- Grouping contacts into lists makes it simple to send messages to the appropriate customer segment.
Cons
- Integrations are lacking.
- App can be laggy and buggy.
- Customer service can be slow to respond.
#4 – Textline
Textline is a business SMS platform that offers tools for customer support workflow, team collaboration, and process automation. They add text messaging capabilities to your existing landline or give you a new, textable phone number in your local area code.
Pros
- Analytics come standard.
- Integration with Zendesk and Shopify
Cons
- Autoresponder does not turn off when a person is actually responding.
- Customer support can take a long time to respond.
- Interface is constantly changing which can make it difficult to use.
#5 – Hustle
Hustle can expand the scope and effectiveness of your outreach and connect with a younger demographic in the way that they prefer to communicate: through text. Texting with Hustle is 77x faster than phone banking and results in 40x more engagement than email. Organizations like Planned Parenthood, New York University, SEIU, and the Bernie Sanders campaign have all used Hustle to facilitate authentic, peer-to-peer conversations with their most important contacts.
Pros
- Great for political and event use.
- Android and iOS apps for mobile use.
Cons
- Can be a bit clunky for use cases outside of politics and events.
- Geared more towards mass texting than one on one conversations.
#6 – Zipwhip
Zipwhip enables businesses to send and receive text messages using their existing landline, VoIP, and toll free phone number to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Pros
- Allows texts to same number voice calls are taken on.
- Easy to use single inbox.
- Historical conversations and response tags give the entire team conversation context.
Cons
- Customer service is often unresponsive.
- Not built for bulk text messaging.
- No notifications, need to be logged in to see incoming messages.
- Filtering / sorting options are minimal.
#7 – Zingle
Zingle is a customer-to-business mobile engagement platform that enables two-way communication via mobile messaging including SMS, MMS, and Social Messaging. Established in 2009, Zingles AI-driven intelligent messaging platform enables businesses to personalize and automate communication with customers, helping them increase operational efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and drive additional revenue.
Pros
- Instant translation helps businesses with international customers.
- Setting up and editing templates is super easy.
- Customer service is very responsive.
Cons
- Mobile apps are a clunky
- One inbox can be difficult to manage for larger teams
- Analytics and reports not as details as some competitors
#8 – Trumpia
Trumpia offers a complete text messaging solution that starts with basic features like mass texting and keywords. They’ve distinguished themselves by pioneering advancements like: Smart Targeting: send only relevant messages, Auto-Campaign: carry out tasks without human intervention, & Enterprise: set data and feature access rights. These culminate into what they call Lifecycle Engagement, helping you automatically build relationships, from lead collection to conversion to feedback loop.
Pros
- Very robust product with many options for engagements.
- Great training materials.
- Good analytics tools.
Cons
- Can take a while to get up and running due to the complexity.
- Mobile web version is clunky. No Android / iOS apps.
- Limited number of keywords per account.
#9 – Textedly
Textedly is a truly functional and flexible text message marketing tool with a beautiful interface. The application assists businesses in reaching their target audiences through their mobile phone. By using SMS for marketing and promotional purposes, they instantly reach their subscribers who are likely to have their phones with them most of the time.
Pros
- Priced lower than many of its competitors.
- Works great for bulk messaging.
- Allows for scheduling of future texts.
Cons
- Uses shared short codes
- Difficult to import / export subscribers
#10 – Gladly
Gladly is reinventing customer service by putting people at the heart of its platform, not cases or tickets. Enable agents to be naturally productive by letting them see every conversation across the lifetime of any customer across any channel (voice, email, chat, text or tweet). Real-time insights provide visibility into agent productivity, topics that are trending and key metrics like SLA’s and response time. Gladly is backed by top VC firms Greylock and NEA.
Pros
- Supports SMS, voice, and email
- Can see conversation history
Cons
- Support can be unresponsive
- Too expensive a solution for SMBs
How to Choose the Best SMS Provider for Your Business
Finding the best SMS messaging platform is no easy endeavor. Unless you're an experience veteran of the messaging space, you likely won't know how to navigate the complexities of the various text messaging platforms out there. That's completely okay—there's plenty of sites and services to help you along the way.
Conversational SMS platforms like Avochato, are great solutions for businesses that want to have one on one conversations with their customers. For those that don't want to take to build out conversational SMS functionality using something like Twilio, Avochato is an excellent choice.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are platforms that utilize shared short codes and specialize in sending bulk or mass texts (one-to-many). EZ Texting and Textedly are great choices if you are interested in sending out messages to a lot of people but don't want or need to have a back and forth conversation.
Some solutions are going to be cheap easy to get up and running extremely quickly, and could be good choices for businesses with fewer contacts. Platforms like Zipwhip and Textline have a product that's very easy to use but makes you pay more for more users. While good for a smaller business if your business is growing you could end up paying a lot very quickly. The platform could also become more difficult to use as your contact list grows.
All of the SMS platforms on this site have their own pros and cons. Which platform will best serve you depends on your situation. We recommend taking the quiz so we can give you a better recommendation.
Ultimately, which platform you choose depends on a multitude of factors, such as:
- How many contacts you want to send text messages to
- If you want to send one-to-many messages or have text message conversations with customers
- What software and services do you need to integrate with
- What your budget constraints are
- How important security and privacy to your business