Acquire vs Respond.io

Acquire starts at $500/month base plus $25 per agent for the Self-Service plan; Respond.io starts at $79/month on annual billing (or $99/month monthly) for 5 seats and 1,000 monthly active contacts. The two platforms solve different problems: Acquire (acquire.io/pricing) is built around visual engagement — co-browsing, 1-way and 2-way video, screen sharing — for teams in financial services, healthcare, and enterprise SaaS. Respond.io (respond.io/pricing) is built around messaging automation — WhatsApp Business API, AI Agents, broadcast campaigns — for sales-oriented teams that move leads through messaging-first funnels.

Acquire holds a 4.2/5 rating on G2 from 43 reviews (G2, 2026) and counts United Airlines, Audi, and Samsung among published customers per SMB Guide. Respond.io has 460+ G2 reviews as of 2026 and is the more frequently picked option for teams whose primary channel is WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, or WeChat. Annual billing is required on both platforms to hit the advertised prices; monthly billing on Respond.io costs 25–35% more.

Acquire wins on visual engagement; Respond.io wins on messaging channel breadth and automation. The two platforms barely overlap on capability, which makes the comparison less about feature parity and more about which workflow you're building.

Acquire's distinctive features are co-browsing (agent and customer interact with the same browser session without downloads), 1-way and 2-way video calling, and screen sharing — all running inside the same agent workspace so an agent can switch between text chat, video, and co-browse during a single conversation. The platform also includes a chat widget, SLA alerts, workflow rules, priority queues, a knowledge base, mobile SDK, and 50+ integrations (Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Slack, Shopify). What Acquire does not support natively: WhatsApp (it routes through Twilio as an intermediary, and Acquire's own help center carries reliability warnings on the integration page), Telegram, Discord, Instagram, or Zalo. Email and SMS are gated to the Integrated Solution tier at $2,000/month base.

Respond.io's distinctive features are its visual Workflow builder (conditional branching, external triggers, broadcast scheduling), AI Agents that handle automated conversations end-to-end, AI Assist for human reply suggestions, broadcast messaging for WhatsApp marketing campaigns, and native channel coverage for WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE, Viber, WeChat, TikTok Business Messaging (Beta), and SMS via Twilio/MessageBird/Vonage. It also offers native CRM sidebar panels for HubSpot and Salesforce, which surface deal stages and contact properties inline with conversations. What Respond.io does not support: Discord, Zalo, co-browsing, screen sharing, or video calling.

Channel coverage gap. If your customers reach you through messaging apps, Acquire is the wrong tool — its Self-Service plan covers web chat and video only, and even the $2,000/month Integrated Solution lacks WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, LINE, WeChat, Viber, Discord, and Zalo natively. If your support workflow depends on guiding customers through a document, application form, or in-product flow visually, Respond.io is the wrong tool — it has no co-browsing, no screen sharing, no video. The choice rarely comes down to "which is better"; it comes down to which channels your customers actually use.

For a 5-agent team, Acquire Self-Service costs $625/month ($7,500/year); Respond.io Growth costs $159/month annual ($1,908/year) — Acquire is roughly 3.9× more expensive at the same team size before WhatsApp conversation fees are added to Respond.io. The pricing structures aren't directly comparable, though, because Acquire uses base-fee-plus-per-agent and Respond.io uses tiered seats-plus-contact-caps.

Acquire pricing (per acquire.io/pricing, confirmed by SMB Guide and Findstack): Self-Service is $500/month base + $25/agent (chat widget, SLA alerts, workflows, 1-way and 2-way video, reporting — no email, no SMS, no data export). Integrated Solution is $2,000/month base + $45/agent (adds email, SMS via call deflection, data import/export). Annual billing required. There is no self-serve signup — you must contact sales. Real cost: 5 agents on Self-Service = $625/month; 10 agents = $750/month; 5 agents on Integrated Solution = $2,225/month; 15 agents on Integrated Solution = $2,675/month.

Respond.io pricing (per respond.io/pricing): Starter is $79/month annual or $99/month monthly (5 seats, 1,000 monthly active contacts, no workflows, no broadcasts, no CRM integrations). Growth is $159/month annual or $199/month monthly (10 seats, workflows, broadcasts, Zapier and Make). Advanced is $279/month annual or $349/month monthly (25 seats, SSO/SAML, API, webhooks, multiple workspaces). Extra users on Growth cost roughly $12 per batch of 5. Meta's WhatsApp per-conversation fees apply on top of every plan — a US team running 500 service conversations adds $30–50/month. Once you exceed 1,000 monthly active contacts on Starter, you're forced onto Growth or pay overage; e-commerce and lead-gen operations hit this ceiling fast.

The 5-agent and 10-agent scenarios. A 5-agent team picking Acquire Self-Service pays $625/month; the same team on Respond.io Growth pays $159 + WhatsApp fees ($189–209/month). A 10-agent team on Acquire Self-Service pays $750/month; on Respond.io Growth they need an extra-user add-on (~$12) plus base $159 + WhatsApp fees ($201–221/month). Acquire is more expensive at every team size in this comparison, but the cost is partly buying access to capabilities (co-browse, video) that Respond.io doesn't offer at all. Both vendors require annual commitments to advertise their headline prices.

Choose Acquire if co-browsing, screen sharing, or video calling is part of how your team resolves issues — financial services walking customers through documents, healthcare guiding patients through portal flows, enterprise SaaS troubleshooting in-product UIs. Acquire is HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR, and PCI-DSS compliant per its privacy policy, and visual engagement is genuinely the platform's differentiator. Budget needs to support $500–$2,675+/month plus annual billing and a sales-led evaluation.

Choose Respond.io if your customers reach you through WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Messenger, LINE, Viber, or WeChat, and your workflow benefits from broadcast marketing campaigns, AI Agents handling lead qualification, or visual workflow automation. The contact-based pricing fits teams with many agents and a stable customer base; it works against teams with high new-contact volume (e-commerce, lead generation), where the 1,000 MAC Starter cap and overage fees compound quickly.

The actual decision usually isn't Acquire vs. Respond.io — it's "do we need visual engagement?" If yes, Acquire is the right shortlist entry. If no, Respond.io's messaging-first architecture is the better fit, and pricing is roughly a quarter to a third of Acquire's at comparable team sizes. The trap is paying $500+/month for Acquire to get a chat widget you'd get from any cheaper messaging platform.

For teams that need messaging-first support across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and Zalo, Converge offers all channels at $49/month flat for up to 15 agents — removing the per-seat cost calculations that make both Acquire and Respond.io expensive as teams grow.