Best Customer Engagement Platforms in 2025

In today’s competitive landscape, customer engagement has become a key driver of long-term business growth. According to the recent Forrester research, companies that prioritize customer engagement achieve 41% faster revenue growth and 49% higher profit compared to those that don’t.

To succeed, businesses must continuously improve how they connect with customers, making each interaction more personalized and available across any channel, at any time. That’s where customer engagement platforms (CEPs) make a difference, helping companies deliver timely and relevant experiences throughout the entire customer journey.

In this article, we’ll explore what a customer engagement platform is, its core features and capabilities, and highlight top tools on the market to help you choose the right solution for your business needs.

What is a Customer Engagement Platform?

A customer engagement platform (CEP) is a software solution designed to improve customer service and support by interacting with customers across multiple channels, and intelligently coordinating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization. Built around customer case management records and processes, CEPs help businesses efficiently handle communication and resolution for issues, inquiries, and service requests that impact individual customers or different customer segments.

The primary goal of CEPs is to enable personalized, timely, and cross-channel customer interactions across every stage of the lifecycle — from the first touchpoint to post-sale support. Typically, this is achieved through case management, customer 360°, contact center, and knowledge management functionality. Customer engagement software also provides various productivity tools to manage tasks, track communications and collaborate with teams within a single system.

The advanced customer engagement platforms may include comprehensive AI and machine learning capabilities, helping service teams to drive efficiency and elevate customer satisfaction. AI tools can provide insights into customer data and automate routine tasks like case routing, sentiment analysis, and knowledge management to create intelligent, personalized communication on a scale.

What Can You Do with Customer Engagement Software?

CEP software allows businesses to seamlessly manage cross-channel interactions, provide personalized services and support, and collaborate more efficiently to resolve customer issues. With customer engagement platforms, your teams can:

• Capture real-time customer data across channels to better understand behavior and engagement patterns.
• Build unified customer profiles by consolidating data into a single, actionable view.
• Ensure seamless omnichannel engagement by meeting customers across multiple platforms.
• Respond instantly to inquiries with integrated helpdesk and social listening tools.
• Deliver personalized messaging at scale across email, mobile, and social touchpoints.
• Automate routine support using chatbots, auto-replies, and self-service tools to reduce response time.
• Optimize engagement strategies with performance analytics and actionable insights.
• Integrate with existing systems to streamline workflows and improve cross-platform coordination.

Main Benefits of Customer Engagement Platforms

Here’s what makes CEP a strategic asset for modern businesses:

Personalized Customer Experience

By consolidating and analyzing first-party data from multiple communication channels, customer engagement platforms create a unified view of each customer’s behavior, preferences, and needs. This helps teams to better understand individual customer intent and deliver personalized communication, relevant offers, and timely support.

Seamless Customer Support

Customer engagement platforms help businesses provide consistent, connected support across various communication channels — from websites and mobile apps to emails and social media. With a unified view of user data and engagement history, customer service teams can continue conversations without missing context. This helps teams enhance customer experience, avoid repeated questions, and enable faster, more personalized support.

Stronger Customer Loyalty

Customer engagement platforms serve a critical role in building long-term emotional connections between businesses and their clients. By analyzing customer interaction history, the software enables teams to create highly personalized experiences that foster trust and improve customer satisfaction. This consistent, value-driven approach to customer interactions helps businesses strengthen brand loyalty. 

Maximized Acquisition ROI

CEP also enables businesses to get more value from customer acquisition by increasing the customer lifetime value. Through personalized communication and timely outreach, they help teams seamlessly convert first-time buyers into repeat customers. As a result, it allows organizations to improve acquisition efficiency and generate higher returns from existing customers over time.

Difference Between CRM and Customer Engagement Software

Though both CRM and CEP can improve customer relationships, their functionality and approaches to interaction management are different:

• CRM software is more data-oriented, targeted at both current and prospective customers. It works as a centralized system for managing relationships but doesn’t necessarily include customer engagement tools. CRM software is focused on storing and organizing customer data, managing sales pipelines, and tracking service interactions.
• Customer Engagement Platforms are more service-oriented, designed to interact with customers. Their goal is to deepen relationships between businesses and customers and drive specific action through real-time communication, personalized messaging, and omnichannel engagement.

Some modern CRM solutions may include CEP capabilities alongside their sales and marketing functionality. For instance, they can provide a full-featured CRM suite for end-to-end customer experience, covering all stages of the customer lifecycle from initial engagement to post-purchase support. Moreover, advanced CRM platforms like Creatio also provide no-code functionality and AI-driven tools to help businesses create highly personalized workflows, streamline communication, and deliver consistent, real-time interactions across various interaction channels.

Best Customer Engagement Platforms – Overview

Before diving into individual capabilities, here’s a quick look at the most popular customer engagement platforms and the key features they offer:

10 Best Customer Engagement Platforms for a Business

1. Service Creatio

Service Creatio is a full-cycle AI-native service management platform that empowers teams to increase customer experience with no code and a maximum degree of freedom. It enables companies to accelerate service delivery and streamline customer engagement. Powered by no-code and AI, Service Creatio helps service agents minimize manual tasks and dramatically improve case processing times.

With Service Creatio, customer support reps can build a holistic customer view for smarter service delivery, unify all communication means in a single environment, align traditional and digital helpdesk operations, and build enterprise-grade automated service workflows that support limitless no-code customization and rich agentic AI.

Unlike traditional solutions with fragmented AI add-ons, Service Creatio features a unified AI architecture that integrates agentic, generative, and predictive AI patterns into a comprehensive service excellence platform. Its role-based AI agents help teams automate workflows and deliver actionable insights to support case routing, problem resolution, sentiment analysis, response generation, knowledge management, and overall service operations. As a result, businesses can ensure consistent and personalized experiences, foster trust, and strengthen customer relationships across the entire engagement lifecycle.

Service Creatio is an ideal solution for medium to large organizations seeking an adaptable, efficient, cost-effective service excellence software with a unified architecture. As a core module of the Creatio CRM suite – a comprehensive platform for marketing, sales, and customer service automation – Service Creatio benefits from seamless integration within a no-code environment and is enhanced by advanced AI capabilities.

Service Creatio Key Features

• Case Management – ensure full-cycle service processes, including request handling, feedback tracking, and performance monitoring to enhance service delivery
• 360° Customer View – gain a complete view of the customer profile with full interaction history, preferences, and behavioral insights across the entire journey
• Omnichannel Communication – unify multiple channels into a single interface for consistent and personalized customer interactions
• Contact Center – consolidate real-time access to tasks, customer data, analytics, and communication tools in one workspace
• Knowledge Management – organize and share interactive content through an AI-powered knowledge base
• Productivity Management – coordinate tasks, schedules, and communications using collaborative tools, calendars, alerts, and dashboards
• Advanced Integration Ecosystem – extend platform capabilities with 400+ add-ons, connectors, and templates via the Creatio Marketplace
• AI-Native Capabilities – automate routine workflows, surface insights, and support smarter, data-driven decisions

Service Creatio Challenges

• Creatio may have a learning curve for users unfamiliar with no-code development

Service Creatio Pricing & Trial Info

Creatio's customer engagement platform features a composable pricing model, in which businesses pay only for the products they use, with no hidden costs. The platform’s pricing starts from $40 per user per month for the Growth plan, with AI capabilities (Predictive AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI) automatically added to each plan at no cost. Additionally, Creatio offers 14-day free trials for Studio Creatio, and Creatio CRM products, as well as an option to schedule a live demo with no-code experts to explore the full potential of its solutions for your business.

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2. Zendesk 

Zendesk is an omnichannel customer engagement platform offering extensive customer service capabilities. This platform provides a scalable omnichannel system with intelligent ticket routing and built-in reporting, helping customer service reps manage complex customer relationships and streamline interactions. With access to hundreds of apps and integrations, businesses can tailor the platform to their specific needs and connect it easily with existing tools.

According to user reviews, the platform’s versatility and integration capabilities are its key strengths. Smooth transitions between customer conversations help businesses improve team performance and overall customer satisfaction.

However, Zendesk can be expensive and complex to set up. Some users also report difficulties in customization and integration, a steep learning curve for configuring advanced workflows, and occasional issues with uploading or exporting data.

Zendesk Key Features

• Live Chat & Messaging System – Ensure cross-channel customer support with robust tools like routing, CSAT ratings, time tracking, service level agreements, and other essential tools.
• Conversational Tools – Track interaction updates, customize your workspace and collaborate with other agents to deliver seamless customer experience and support.
• Knowledge Base – Create robust internal and external knowledge bases to facilitate access to the required information.
• Generative Search – Provide AI-generated responses to customers’ search queries through the created knowledge centers.

Zendesk Challenges

• Steep learning curve for complex workflows
• AI features can be difficult to configure
• Advanced add-ons may lead to higher-than-expected costs

Zendesk Pricing & Trial Info

Zendesk pricing starts at $55 and goes up to $115 per agent per month, with a free trial available. While core features are included, add-ons like AI tools, quality assurance, and advanced data privacy may significantly increase the overall cost.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a comprehensive platform designed to enhance customer relationships through multiple hubs, including Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, and more. Its customer service software – HubSpot Service Hub – provides different tools to streamline support operations and elevate the overall customer experience. For instance, service teams can create self-service resources using the knowledge base feature, allowing customers to resolve common issues independently. Through its customizable dashboards and analytics tools, customer experience teams can quickly spot engagement gaps and uncover opportunities for improvement. Additionally, the platform’s live chat and conversational bots enable businesses to ensure real-time, personalized support across multiple digital channels.

Service Hub features an intuitive interface and strong automation capabilities, which are often cited as the key strengths of the platform. However, pricing remains a common concern for most users, especially as businesses need access to more advanced features.

HubSpot Key Features

• Ticketing System – Organize and manage customer inquiries, issues and requests to streamline support workflows and improve overall customer satisfaction.
• Call Tracking – Make and receive calls directly within your HubSpot account, automatically log call history, and record conversations for better context and follow-up.
• Reusable Text Snippets – Save and insert pre-written responses across email, chat, and social platforms to speed up communication and maintain consistency.
• Email Management System – Automate emails, track performance metrics, and optimize outreach with customizable templates and engagement insights.

HubSpot Challenges

• High subscription costs for growing or large-scale teams
• Occasional issues with assigning and managing support tickets
• Limited usability when managing more than five pipelines on smaller screens

HubSpot Pricing & Trial Info

The platform offers 3 paid plans for its Service Hub, ranging from $20/month per seat with the Starter plan to $150/month per seat for the Enterprise plan.

4. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a customer experience platform that allows businesses to support multichannel communication, streamline workflows, and enhance collaboration across customer-facing teams. It offers a centralized interface for managing contacts, accounts, and interactions, making accessing data and automating daily tasks easier.

Popular features include intelligent chatbots, email and landing page builders, social media tools, customer service modules, and built-in survey capabilities. The platform also supports customization to fit specific workflows and boost team collaboration. However, users often find the platform overwhelming due to its extensive functionality. Implementation can be time-consuming, and the steep learning curve means many teams end up using only a portion of the available tools.

Zoho CRM Key Features

• Comprehensive Customer View – Access key customer data from a single interface.
• Email Segmentation – Prioritize incoming messages to improve customer response and engagement.
• Journey Orchestration – Automate tailored, multi-step engagement based on customer behavior and lifecycle stage.
• Collaborative Analytics – Analyze engagement funnels and collaborate across departments to improve experience.

Zoho CRM Challenges

• Feature-heavy interface can be overwhelming for non-technical users
• Occasional performance issues with large datasets
• Inconsistent support response times

Zoho CRM Pricing & Trial Info

Pricing starts at $69 per user/month, with a 30-day free trial available to explore the platform before committing.

5. Netcore

Netcore is a customer engagement platform designed to help businesses drive loyalty through personalized experiences and multi-channel communication. The platform focuses primarily on marketing-led engagement and offers a wide range of tools, including campaign management, journey orchestration, behavioral analytics, and data management. By leveraging AI tools, Netcore enables teams to connect with users across email, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp, and others, ensuring personalized interactions at scale.

Netcore is highly rated for its responsive and supportive product team, which offers tailored assistance during onboarding and platform adoption. However, since its core strength lies in marketing automation, the platform may lack broader capabilities for managing the entire customer lifecycle. Some users have also mentioned difficulties with onboarding materials and expect to get a more intuitive interface and self-serve video tutorials.

Netcore Key Features

• Marketing Ecosystem – Run and manage multi-channel campaigns with centralized audience targeting and customer engagement tools.
• Content Personalization Tools – Deliver dynamic content experiences and run A/B tests to optimize messaging for better engagement.
• Email & Interactive AMP Emails – Provide app-like interactions directly inside the inbox using AMP email technology.

Netcore Challenges

• Data delays and inconsistency when handling large volumes
• Steep learning curve for new users
• User interface is less intuitive compared to alternatives

Netcore Pricing & Trial Info

Netcore offers custom pricing based on business needs, a free trial plan available upon request.

6. MoEngage

MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform that helps businesses analyze behavior and engage customers across various channels, including web, mobile, email, and more. It combines behavioral analytics, AI-powered journey orchestration, and personalization features to help product teams manage customer expectations and increase retention.

Thanks to its user-friendly interface and omnichannel communication capabilities, the platform is a strong choice for tracking engagement and building long-term customer relationships. However, some users note that MoEngage has limited customization capabilities, particularly for homepage personalization, variations in email and push templates, and SMS personalization.

MoEngage Key Features

• Cross-Channel Engagement – Run coordinated campaigns across email, in-app messaging, push notifications, SMS, and web to maintain consistent customer interaction.
• Customer Insights & Analytics – Access a unified view of customer behavior and preferences through detailed analytics and interaction tracking.
• AI-Driven Personalization – Use AI to optimize timing, content, and channel selection for message delivery, improving engagement and conversion rates.

MoEngage Challenges

• Complex and time-consuming integration process
• Limited flexibility in customizing reports and dashboards
• Performance issues when handling large datasets

MoEngage Pricing & Trial Info

MoEngage offers Growth and Enterprise plans, with pricing available upon request. A 14-day free trial is also available to help businesses explore the platform’s core features before making a purchase decision.

7. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product and customer engagement analytics platform that helps businesses track user behavior, analyze interactions, and improve customer experiences. It’s a solid choice for teams looking for a user-friendly solution with real-time insights and robust data analytics tools. With cohort analysis, Mixpanel enables businesses to seamlessly identify customer segments for re-engagement and send targeted messages through built-in communication tools. Its generative AI assistant, Spark, can help teams quickly generate detailed reports and visualizations that support better decision-making.

Unlike similar analytics platforms, Mixpanel features a more intuitive user interface, which is particularly important for non-technical users. As for the drawbacks, some users mention difficulties in adding custom data to user profiles and would like to get more collaboration tools within the platform.

Mixpanel Key Features

• User Segmentation – Create detailed customer segments based on shared traits or behaviors to support personalized engagement.
• Funnels – Analyze customer journeys, identify drop-off points, and uncover trends to improve conversion and retention.
• Data Visualization – Switch easily between high-level summaries and granular views to make data-driven decisions faster.

Mixpanel Challenges

• Limited support for high-volume data
• Constraints when creating fully custom reports
• Pricing can be high for large-scale teams

Mixpanel Pricing & Trial Info

Mixpanel offers one free and two paid plans, Growth and Enterprise. The price is available only upon request.

8. Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps brands build personalized, first-party relationships through real-time, cross-channel communication. Designed primarily for marketing and customer experience teams, it allows businesses to act on live data and deliver targeted messaging across email, SMS, mobile, web, paid media, and more. The platform features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for building customer journeys without code, and its AI-driven optimization helps teams refine content, timing, and channel selection to boost performance.

A key strength of Braze is its flexibility. Users can create customized campaigns using pre-built templates, reusable content blocks, and visual canvases. However, the platform heavily depends on third-party integrations, particularly customer data platforms (CDPs), which can add complexity. Some users also report that the lack of auto-save and a less intuitive UI can hinder productivity.

Braze Key Features

• In-the-Moment Orchestration – Leverage real-time behavior and interactions to guide timely, personalized responses.
• Customizable Campaigns – Build and automate promotional, lifecycle, and transactional campaigns that feel cohesive across touchpoints.
• Channel Experimentation – Test different channel mixes to optimize engagement through built-in A/B testing tools.

Braze Challenges

• Less intuitive user interface
• Heavy reliance on third-party CDP integrations
• No automatic or in-template saving
• Limited built-in reporting and analytics tools

Braze Pricing & Trial Info

Braze offers a free trial, with pricing customized based on business needs. VC-backed startups may also qualify for up to four months of free access.

9. Intercom

Intercom is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses centralize all customer conversations within a unified dashboard. It is primarily designed to support customer service operations, improve team productivity, and provide advanced reporting, which makes it a universal solution for customer support centers. Marketed as an AI-first solution for midsize businesses, Intercom uses automation and real-time messaging to help support teams scale interactions across live chat, email, and in-app messaging channels.

Users give positive feedback on Intercom’s survey tools and support chatbot, which helps easily gather feedback and uncover insights. However, many users find the pricing structure confusing and note that the AI assistant requires significant training to perform effectively.

Intercom Key Features

• Chat Prioritization & Management – Organize and respond to conversations based on urgency, team workload, or customer status.
• Knowledge Hub – Offer customers self-service support through articles, FAQs, and searchable content.
• Workflow Automation – Set up rules and triggers to streamline support processes and reduce manual effort.

Intercom Challenges

• Occasional issues loading past conversations and managing closed tickets
• Limited third-party integrations
• AI chatbot requires extensive training to reach high accuracy

Intercom Pricing & Trial Info

Intercom offers multiple pricing tiers, starting at $39 per seat/month, with higher-tier plans offering more advanced AI and support features. Also, the platform offers a 14-day free trial to test core functionality.

10. Twilio

Twilio is a customer engagement platform that enables businesses to integrate various interaction methods into their applications through a comprehensive suite of APIs and tools. The platform helps teams unify client data, orchestrate journeys, and deliver meaningful communications across multiple messaging channels. Twilio also enables making, receiving, and monitoring calls worldwide, supporting features like text-to-speech and global carrier connectivity.

Programmable messaging, particularly for SMS and calls, is reported to be Twilio’s most favored feature according to users. The drawback of the platform, based on user feedback, is the pricing: based on the pay-as-you-go model, it can become quite costly for large-scale campaigns.

Twilio Key Features

• Interactive voice response (IVR) – Create personalized experiences through voice messages for call routing, emergency alerts, proactive push notifications, and more.
• Cross-Channel Messaging – Engage customers on their preferred digital channels, including SMS, RCS, MMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
• Traffic Optimization Engine – Get real-time updates on the messaging traffic to plan, prioritize and improve customer interactions.

Twilio Challenges

• Complex pricing structure
• Steep learning curve, particularly for non-technical users

Twilio Pricing & Trial Info

Twilio offers a usage-based pricing structure: SMS are billed per message, voice calls per minute, and email plans start at $19.95 monthly.

How to Choose the Right Customer Engagement Platform for Your Business

To find the best customer engagement platform for your business, consider the following criteria:

1. Core Features and Capabilities — Look for software that offers extensive functionality, including customer 360, case management, contact center, knowledge management, and productivity tools. It should also support multiple customer engagement channels to deliver consistent, relevant experiences at every customer touchpoint.
2. System Integration Options — Make sure the platform seamlessly connects with the existing tools, such as your CRM, analytics software, knowledge management tools, and other important solutions. Strong integration capabilities improve real-time data exchange and collaboration, helping teams to act on insights faster and ensure high-level customer journey coordination.
3. Platform Customization — Consider customer engagement platforms that can adjust to your specific workflows and business objectives. Some popular customizations include dashboards and analytics, customer journeys, messaging templates, customer feedback tools, and branding elements.
4. Automation and AI Functionality — Prioritize software with advanced automation features like behavior-triggered workflows, AI-powered recommendations, chatbots or predictive analytics. These tools are essential for scaling customer engagement and managing complex customer relationships.
5. Pricing and Scalability — Evaluate pricing models based on the specific needs of your business. While some platforms may appear affordable initially, costs can quickly rise with increased usage. The total cost typically depends on factors such as feature access, number of users, contact volume, and overall platform usage.
6. Ease of Use and User Experience — Choose customer engagement platforms with a clean interface, intuitive setup, and reliable vendor support to streamline adoption and accelerate time to value.

Maximize Your Business Performance with Dedicated CEP Software

A comprehensive customer engagement platform is a powerful solution that helps businesses drive customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. By providing timely, relevant and highly personalized responses to your customers, this software enables teams to build stronger customer relationships, boost satisfaction, and encourage their retention. At the same time, it empowers businesses to proactively anticipate customer needs, refine engagement strategies, and create more meaningful, data-driven interactions.

To choose the best customer engagement solution, companies should look for a platform that’s easy to use, flexible and fits smoothly into their existing systems. Among the many options available, Creatio is a leading CRM platform that offers powerful customer engagement capabilities within a single solution. Its no-code interface, AI-powered automation, and industry-specific features allow companies to deliver meaningful customer experiences while supporting scalable business growth.