Textedly vs SlickText

One of the most effective ways to reach your customers and grow your business is through Text Message Marketing. 

With an open rate of over 98% and a click-through rate of 45%, Text Message Marketing is one of the most effective ways to build a connection with your customers and grow the relationship making them lifelong partners. 

A recent study found that SMS Marketing campaigns generate 10x more conversions than email marketing campaigns. 

As a business, the most important feature of Text Messaging is being able to stay connected one-on-one with all customers, being able to promote new benefits and offers, and creating relationships with customers through timely reminders and follow-ups.

The best Text Message Marketing Platform will help your business spread its wings by helping you run campaigns easily, consolidating all texts in one single dashboard, and providing automation to help send texts automatically for reminders, wishes, and follow-ups.

There are many Text Message Marketing Platforms out there, but you’re here because you’ve narrowed it down to Textedly and SlickText. We have prepared a comprehensive guide for you that will cover the features they bring, the pricing, what real users feel about them, and the pros and cons of both of them. 

With this article, you’ll definitely be able to choose the right Text Message Marketing Platform for your business. 

Textedly

Textedly is an SMS Marketing Platform that has been around for around 7 years now and is primarily used by small businesses for their Text marketing campaigns. Over the years Textedly has evolved to add more features keeping up with the trends in text campaigns. Textedly allows you to instantly send SMS Text messages to mobile numbers by building an opt-in subscriber list. You can track text message delivery, schedule text messages, and use their Text-to-pay feature, allowing your customer to pay directly with their credit cards. 

texting service for small business

SlickText is a feature-rich SMS Marketing PLatform that has been around since 2012. With over 10+ years of experience, they know the game of Text Message Marketing well. They are used by small businesses, marketing agencies, large enterprises, and everything in between. SlickText allows you to send SMS Text messages, have 1-on-1 conversations with your customers, send bulk texts, and provide customer service. Their automated workflow tool allows you to create automated SMS sequences that engage with your customers one-on-one and can be customized the way you want. 

Both Textedly and SlickText have been key players in the industry for a long time, but this also means they are slow to change. More on that when we conclude on which SMS Marketing Platform you should choose between Textedly and SlickText. 

Text Messaging is a simple service in itself, but to make sure that your business gets the most out of the marketing efforts through SMS, here’s a ready-to-use checklist of things you should consider before making your pick:

  • Features – Your chosen Text Message Marketing platform should possess features essential to business growth. These include group texting features, automation and sequences, etc. to name a few.  Some essential features to consider are:
  • 2-way text messaging2-way text messaging allows you to respond to your patients’ queries and questions over text.
  • Group text messagingGroup text messaging allows you to create groups that you can text to directly. You can add your colleagues to a chat or have multiple patients texting you on a single chat thread.
  • Missed call to text: This feature converts missed calls from your patients to text messages with automated replies. You can either respond immediately or plan it for later. Missed clients because of missed calls are a thing of the past (not that we miss it).
  • Broadcast/Bulk SMSBulk SMS is a great tool if you want to inform a large group of customers about any promotional campaign you’re running.
  • Schedule-based text: You can set up schedule-based texts to send texts at the right time. Need to inform patients about the Holiday season offers? With schedule-based texts, you can set up the texts today and the texts will be sent just when you want them to – Thanksgiving or Christmas.
  • Text follow-ups: With this feature asking for reviews, the reason for cancellations, payment reminders, birthday wishes, and reminders about upcoming appointments are all automated.
  • Call-to-Text: An important text management feature is missed calls to text. It allows businesses to engage customers and leads through text messages if the customer calls go unattended.   

Some other notable features you should look out for include:

  • Automation and Sequences: Automation allows for trigger-based texts. This reduces the manual effort businesses need to put in to reply to texts.
  • Scheduling: This feature allows businesses to either send a text campaign immediately or schedule it for a later time.
  • Assigning conversations: Customer messages can be assigned to different team members or different teams.
  • Automated reminders: This feature allows you to send reminders automatically. You can simply set the content and cadence of reminder texts.
  • Automated follow-ups: This feature allows you to send follow-ups to customers based on your last conversation or their last visit. 

With the prerequisites cleared, if your business is considering Textedly and SlickText – we’ve got you covered with a feature-by-feature comparison between both software including pros and cons. 

This comparison guides you in making an informed decision and picking the right software for your business. 

First, let’s see if Textedly and SlickText offer some of the bare minimum features one can expect from a communication software:

FeaturesTextedlySlickText
Business MessagingYesYes
Missed call to textNoNo
2-way text messagingYesYes
Group text messagingNoNo
Webchat to textNoNo
Broadcast/Bulk SMSYes (Limited usage)Yes (Limited usage)
Text Follow-UpsNoNo
Text ForwardingNoNo
Text SignatureNoNo
Birthday WishesNoYes
Schedule-based textingYesYes
Omni Channel Messages (Google, Facebook)Yes (Limited)No
Unlimited Contacts and UsersNoNo
Location Based InteractionNoNo
Customer SurveysNoNo
Customer SupportNo 24×7 SupportNo 24×7 Support
Payment Follow-upsYesNo

Feature Review:

After checking the features of both Textedly and SlickText, here are some observations we have:

  1. Textedly is more feature-rich when compared to SlickText.
  2. Essential features like Group Texts, Webchat-to-text, and customer surveys are missing from both Textedly and SlickText.
  3. SlickText lacks features like Payment Follow-ups and Omni Channel Texting which are present in Textedly.
  4. Textedly lacks feature like Birthday wishes which is present in SlickText.
  5. Both Textedly and SlickText lack 24/7 support which is essential in this day and age. 

Textedly and SlickText have been around for a long time, but the lack of some features like Text Forwarding and Group Texts makes us question how they can provide holistic Text Message Marketing Services. 

Ratings and reviews are crucial to understanding how users feel about the product. 

Let us take a look at the ratings of Textedly and SlickText to understand how businesses feel about the product. Capterra, the #1 website for choosing better software, has the following ratings for the two platforms:

Textedly vs SlickText
  • Overall Rating: The Overall Rating takes into consideration multiple aspects of the lifecycle of the products – from deployment to use to customer support.Textedly is rated 4.5 stars
    SlickText is rated 4.8 stars

Let’s break down what contributed to the higher rating of SlickText when compared to Textedly.

  • Ease of Use: Ease of use can be defined by a few important characteristics-
    • How easy is it to deploy the product
    • How easy is it for you and your employees to run campaigns 
    • How customers receive the text messages (relevance, punctuality, etc)
    • The end-user experience of the product
    • How streamlined the dashboard is 

The Ease of Use Rating for Textedly is 4.5 stars, while SlickText has 4.8 stars. This illustrates SlickText is the Easier to Use software of the two ensuring a very small learning curve for your team.

  • Features: Both software comes with a bunch of essential business communication features. 

The feature rating for Textedly is 4.4 stars while SlickText is 4.8 stars.

  • Value for Money: Pricing is a major consideration when choosing alternatives. Are you paying a fair amount? Is the pricing justified for the features your business needs? Let’s take a look at the pricing of both platforms:
PLATFORM PRICE RANGE (per month)VALUE FOR MONEY RATING 
Textedly$26-$2999 4.5/5.0
SlickText$29-$19994.7/5.0

SlickText scores higher than Textedly in the value-for-money category. This is primarily due to the various tiers of pricing available for SlickText being cheaper than a comparable plan from Textedly. 

Here are some ways they both stand out from each other:

TextedlySlickText
Textedly has plans based on features and the number of texts available to send.Textedly has 14 different plans offering 50-200,000 texts.The price range lies between $26 to $2999.SlickText has plans based on the number of texts you needSlickText has 9 plans offering 500-100,000 texts.The price range lies between $29 to $1999.

The low-priced plans are very bare bones in terms of features and the number of texts you can send which means that any serious bulk-SMS campaigns will need you to upgrade to a higher price bracket.

  • Customer Service: Whether it’s Onboarding, Account Management, TroubleShooting, or resolving Technical Issues, the software of your choice should have robust customer support that answers your queries and solves your problems in seconds – not days!

The Customer Service rating for Textedly is 4.5 stars while SlickText has a stellar 4.9 stars. 

  • Likelihood to Recommend: “A strong likelihood to recommend reflects the true value a product or service brings to its users.”

The likelihood to recommend score for Textedly is 86 and SlickText is 93. 

SlickText here has a higher rating across all aspects, with a great likelihood to recommend rating. But where do they lack? What are their shortcomings? Let’s check some real user reviews and figure out. 

Reviews are crucial to understanding what customers say about the product.

Textedly review 1

Key Pros:

  • A simple dashboard that brings everything you need to one place
  • Provides a virtual number for you to text from

Key Cons:

  • The free trial only allows you to text yourself and is irrelevant to understanding how the service actually works. 
  • Some customers might find the texts spammy as they are from a different number leading to opting out from the marketing list. 
Textedly review 2

Key Pros:

  • Texts can be easily scheduled. 
  • Easy to use 2-way text messaging.

Key Cons:

  • Customer service has been on a decline.
  • Increased prices without prior information.
  • An annual plan means you cannot terminate the contract easily.
Textedly review 3

Key Cons:

  • Account closure is not easy as they only allow a small window of time when you can cancel the subscription.
  • The service is overpriced.

Key Pros:

  • Easy to set up the service and get started. 
  • The dashboard of Textedly is visually simple. 

Key Cons:

  • Link tracking to track the number of clicks on links is not available
  • They remove features without proper intimidation.

PROS

Visually simple dashboard that brings everything to one place.Virtual number to keep your personal number safe.Text messaging features are easy to use.Easy to set up the service and get started.

CONS

Core features like link tracking and group texting are missing.Contractual obligations with hard-to-cancel subscription.Expensive, with important features being tier-locked.No intimidation about pricing change or feature removal.Free trial is just a namesake.
Slicktext review 1

Key Pros:

  • Easy to import customer details as a CSV file
  • Great Customer Service

Key Cons:

  • Character limit in text messages means that you will be charged for multiple texts when sending a large text.
Slicktext review 2

Key Pros:

  • The features are laid out in a simple and easy-to-use dashboard.
  • The simplicity and customer service mean it is a good platform to get your Text Message Marketing started.

Key Cons:

  • Advanced functionalities, features, and integrations are buried within the platform making it harder to find and use by most people.
Slicktext review 3

Key Pros:

  • Simple interface that is easy to operate.
  • How-to videos on utilizing the features are available on YouTube.
  • Great Customer Service.

Key Cons:

  • You cannot use your own form even if it is built on WordPress. 
  • Lead from different platforms does not automatically sync with SlickText.
Slicktext review 4

Key Pros:

  • Ability to send texts to different groups.
  • Unused text messages are rolled over. 

Key Cons:

  • Contacts cannot be added to different groups directly. One has to manually create another contact with all the information by creating another contact in the other group.

PROS

  • Easy to set up and use. 
  • Features required for Text Message Marketing are all present.
  • Great Customer Service.
  • Unused text messages are rolled over.
  • Easy to import and export customer data as CSV file.

CONS

Character limit in text messages – large message counts as multiple text messages.Inability to use custom forms created on third-party platforms.Advanced functionalities are hidden away.Does not integrate with other services like MailChimp.

Both Textedly and SlickText are great when put in isolation, but when we see real users’ reviews their flaws start popping out. 

On one side we have Textedly which has more features than SlickText but is also more expensive. On the flip side, SlickText does not integrate well with third-party forms or email marketing platforms like Mailchimp.

So which one do you choose for your business?

If your business is looking for a Text Message Marketing service that:

  1. Can collect payments from your customers
  2. Gives you the option of omnichannel messaging, and
  3. Provides you with a virtual number to keep your personal number safe

Then your go-to option should be Textedly. 

If your business is looking for something more, like:

  1. The ability to automatically send Birthday or Anniversary wishes to build a relationship with your customers 
  2. Provides you the option to convert your landline number into your Text Messaging number, and
  3. Rolls over the unused text messages to the next month

Then, the option that suits your requirements best is SlickText. 

But, if your business wants anything more (in terms of features) that are necessary today like Missed Calls to Text, Unlimited Messages, and even the ability to collect reviews from customers easily through custom forms or surveys, then you need to look beyond Textedly and SlickText. 

Let us introduce you to Emitrr – a communication and reputation management tool that is designed to be the right tool for any business looking for a Text Message Marketing Service but with added benefits at a fraction of the price.

Emitrr is a young and dynamic startup that is challenging behemoths like Textedly and SlickText by providing better features at more value-for-money pricing. Emitrr was built in 2019 considering the shortcomings of these legacy SMS Marketing Services, but you don’t have to take our word for it. 

Here’s what real users have rated Emitrr, Textedly, and SlickText on Capterra, giving you a glimpse of which is the better service provider for your needs:

emitrr vs slicktext vs textedly

The reasons for high ratings:

  1. Ease of use: Both Emitrr and SlickText are rated at 4.8 stars, illustrating that both are Easier to Use compared to Textedly, and ensuring a minimal learning curve for your team.
  2. Customer Service: Emitrr provides 24/7 live support in the form of calls, messages, chats, and emails (Tickets), along with a full-fledged knowledge base on Youtube allowing it to edge out SlickText which has great service itself, allowing it to score the highest-rating of 5 stars in customer service.
  3. Features: Emitrr offers a tailored feature list according to your business’s unique requirements – charging for features that you use and nothing more.
  4. Value for Money: At $149-$249, Emitrr offers all the significant features of both Textedly and SlickText, adding on some unique features driven through extensive research of the Customer Journey while keeping the costs manageable and flexible. You only pay for what you use with Emitrr with completely customizable plans.
PLATFORM PRICE RANGE (per month)VALUE FOR MONEY RATING 
Textedly$249*4.5/5.0
SlickText$350*4.7/5.0
Emitrr$149*4.9/5.0

* Plans compared are the Business plan of Textedly providing 10,000 Text messages, the 10,000 Texts plan of SlickText, and the Base plan of Emitrr with Unlimited Texts.

Let’s take a peek at what users say about Emitrr:

Emitrr Logo
Emitrr Review 1
Emitrr 4
Emitrr 1
Emitrr 2
Emitrr 3
Emitrr 5
Emitrr review
Emitrr Review 1
Emitrr 4

PROS

  • Comprehensive Text Message Marketing features.
  • Tons of extra features.
  • Competitive Pricing.
  • Excellent Customer Support.
  • High level of customization.
  • Integrations across all major CRMs, PMS, EMR, and other platforms.
  • Constantly Evolving to add more features.

CONS

  • Some features are yet to come.
  • Does not allow private conversations with customers or teams within the platform.

Let’s see how the three software stack against each other in terms of features –

FeaturesTextedlySlickTextEmitrr
Business MessagingYesYesYes
Missed call to textNoNoYes
2-way text messagingYesYesYes
Group text messagingNoNoYes
Webchat to textNoNoYes
Broadcast/Bulk SMSYes (Limited usage)Yes (Limited usage)Yes
Text Follow-UpsNoNoYes
Text ForwardingNoNoYes
Text SignatureNoNoYes
Birthday WishesNoYesYes
Schedule-based textingYesYesYes
Omni Channel Messages (Google, Facebook)Yes (Limited)NoYes
Unlimited Contacts and UsersNoNoYes
Location Based InteractionNoNoYes
Customer SurveysNoNoYes
Customer SupportNo 24×7 SupportNo 24×7 Support24/7 Live Rep
Payment Follow-upsYesNoYes
Review ManagementNoNoYes (No separate charges)

After comparing the features, ratings, reviews, pros and cons, and pricing we can conclude that Emitrr is the better choice when compared to Textedly and SlickText:

  1. Emitrr has great support with a live representative available to help you no matter what time it is.
  2. Unlike Textedly and SlickText, Emitrr provides Text Message Marketing features along with features like review management, call management, and location-based interaction that help you cover the whole lifecycle of the customer at a much more competitive pricing.
  3. Emitrr has unique features like:
    1. Missed Calls to Text
    2. Webchat to text
    3. Text Follow-Ups
    4. Schedule-based texting
    5. Group Text Messaging
    6. Highly Customizable Deployment
  4. While SlickText does not integrate well with email Marketing Tools like MailChimp properly, with Emitrrs’ email Marketing feature the need for other tools is cut down.
  5. Emitrr offers businesses to choose the features they want to use, and only charges for them.

Being a young dynamic startup also means that Emitrr introduces features faster than any competition out there helping you stay on top of the marketing game.

Is Textedly expensive?

Textedly’s pricing starts at $26 and goes up to $2999, so it is definitely quite expensive. An affordable alternative to Textedly is Emitrr. Emitrr offers all the texting features as Textedly, and its pricing starts at just $149 a month. 

Is there a Textedly app? 

Yes, Textedly offers an app for both Android and iOS and users can download the app for free from the Play Store or App Store.

Is SlickText free to use?

SlickText offers a free trial but gives insight into very basic features that may not even be that useful to you. To get the best out of SlickText, you would have to subscribe to one of their monthly subscriptions.

The right Text Message Marketing software for your business depends on a lot of factors, but if you were considering Textedly or SlickText, maybe you need to rethink your options and check out Emitrr. 

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