Is Crisp or Intercom cheaper?

Crisp starts at $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available). Intercom starts at $29 per seat per month (Essential), plus $0.99 per Fin resolution (free plan available).

Crisp vs Intercom

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Intercom compared with Crisp

Crisp charges a flat monthly fee per workspace with AI credits bundled in, which for a small team doing high-volume chat is a fraction of Intercom's combined seat and resolution bill. Intercom is the far deeper platform: better ticketing, better help center, better API, better reporting, and an AI agent that is several steps ahead. Crisp is the right answer for a bootstrapped team that wants a competent messenger and predictable costs; Intercom is the right answer once deflection is worth paying a real meter for.

Choose Crisp if

Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.

Choose Intercom if

Product-led SaaS companies with an in-app user base, a decent help center, and enough repetitive question volume that a competent AI agent can absorb a large share of it. Intercom rewards teams whose support is high volume and reasonably well documented, and whose customers are already inside a web or mobile product where the Messenger can live.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Crisp	Intercom
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available)	$29 per seat per month (Essential), plus $0.99 per Fin resolution (free plan available)
Pricing model	Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted.	Per-seat subscription across three published tiers, plus outcome-based billing for the Fin AI agent at a flat rate per resolution, plus per-seat and per-month add-ons for Copilot, proactive messaging, and analysis, plus pay as you go channel charges.
Free plan	Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included.	No free plan. An Early Stage programme offers qualifying startups up to 93 percent off plus one year of Fin at no charge.
Free trial	14 days, all features, no credit card required	14 days, no credit card required
Best for	Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.	Product-led SaaS companies with an in-app user base, a decent help center, and enough repetitive question volume that a competent AI agent can absorb a large share of it. Intercom rewards teams whose support is high volume and reasonably well documented, and whose customers are already inside a web or mobile product where the Messenger can live.
Setup time	Under an hour for a live widget and a connected mailbox, especially through the Shopify or WordPress plugins. Adding WhatsApp and Instagram, writing the knowledge base, training the AI model, and building bot flows is more like one to two weeks, most of it content work.	A day for the basics: install the Messenger snippet, forward your support address, invite the team, and import or write help center articles. Getting Fin to a trustworthy answer rate takes longer, usually two to four weeks of watching its answers and fixing the underlying documentation.
Learning curve	Low for agents, moderate for the person building bots. The drag-and-drop builder is approachable but the confidence thresholds, fallback paths, and training-source management need deliberate testing before you let a bot answer customers unsupervised.	Moderate for agents, who mostly need an hour. Meaningful for the admin: Workflows, ticket types, custom attributes, and Fin content sources are a real configuration surface, and Intercom rewards someone owning it rather than nobody owning it.
Platforms	Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs	Web app, iOS and Android agent apps, Web Messenger, iOS and Android Messenger SDKs, Browser extensions
Compliance	GDPR handling as a French company operating under EU law, Formal certification evidence (for example a SOC 2 report or trust portal) is not prominently published on public pages	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA support on the Expert tier, ISO 27001
Founded	2015	2011
Headquarters	Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team)	San Francisco, California, United States, with a large office in Dublin, Ireland
Ownership	Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned	Venture-backed and privately held; corporate entity renamed Fin in May 2026 with Intercom retained as the platform brand, and a definitive agreement for Salesforce to acquire the company for approximately $3.6 billion signed in June 2026 and not yet closed as of this review

Strengths and limitations

Crisp

Strengths

Flat workspace pricing with included seat blocks, which breaks the per-agent cost curve that makes support software expensive as a team grows.
AI is bundled as credits rather than metered per resolution, so successful deflection lowers your cost per conversation instead of raising your bill.
The widget is the most feature-dense at this price: co-browsing, video and audio calls with screen sharing, MagicType, rich media, and 50 languages.
Genuinely broad scope for one subscription: inbox, chat, bot builder, knowledge base, CRM, campaigns, and analytics, where competitors sell several of those separately.

Limitations

AI credit consumption is published only as approximate dollar equivalents and conversation counts, which is friendlier than per-resolution pricing but harder to forecast precisely or audit after the fact.
The free tier has no AI credits and only 2 seats, so it is not a realistic long-term home the way Chatwoot's or Tidio's free plans can be.
A team of roughly 20 to 30 people cannot match the documentation, help content, or support responsiveness of vendors ten times the size, and it shows.
Enterprise compliance evidence is thin on public pages: no prominently published SOC 2 report, certification portal, or data-residency options, which will stall a formal security review.

Intercom

Strengths

Fin is the most mature AI support agent on the market and the per-resolution model only charges when it actually resolves, which is a fairer meter than charging per AI reply.
The Messenger carries real product context into the conversation, so agents see plan, usage, and event history without asking the customer to identify themselves.
The help center is good, supports a custom domain and multiple languages, and doubles as the knowledge source Fin reads, so investment in docs pays off twice.
The Workflows builder is a genuinely capable visual automation canvas rather than a list of if-then rules.

Limitations

The real cost is unpredictable by design. Support spend now tracks customer growth and deflection success rather than headcount, which breaks most small-business budgeting habits.
Essential is a deliberately hollow tier. No workflow automation, no round robin, no multiple inboxes, no SLAs, and no Lite seats means the honest entry price for a functioning help desk is $85 a seat, not $29.
SLA policies sit on the Expert tier at $132 a seat, which is an absurd height for a feature that Zoho Desk includes at $23 and Freshdesk at $55.
Copilot costs another $29 per agent per month after a token free allowance, so agent-facing AI is a third meter.

Pricing compared

Crisp

Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted.

Free$0
Mini$45
Essentials$95
Plus$295
EnterpriseCustom

On raw capability per dollar Crisp is the best value in this category and it is not particularly close. Essentials at $95 a month covers ten seats, every channel, a knowledge base, a trained AI bot, and campaigns; the equivalent team on a per-seat platform with per-resolution AI would spend three to five times that. The bundled AI credits are the sharpest contrast: Help Scout charges $0.75 for every AI resolution while Crisp includes roughly 450 automated conversations in the $95 tier. What you trade away is polish, documentation depth, enterprise compliance evidence, and the reassurance of a large vendor. If your evaluation is a spreadsheet, Crisp wins; if it is a procurement review, it may not survive one.

Intercom

Per-seat subscription across three published tiers, plus outcome-based billing for the Fin AI agent at a flat rate per resolution, plus per-seat and per-month add-ons for Copilot, proactive messaging, and analysis, plus pay as you go channel charges.

Essential$29
Advanced$85
Expert$132

Intercom is expensive and, for the right buyer, worth it. Fin is the best-known AI support agent in the category and the $0.99 outcome-based charge is honest in a way that per-message billing is not, because you pay for results rather than attempts. The problem is that the seat tiers are structured to make Essential look affordable while withholding workflow automation, round robin, multiple inboxes, SLAs, and Lite seats until $85 a seat. A four-person team that actually needs those things is at $340 a month in seats before Fin, before Copilot, and before proactive messaging. If your volume is high and your documentation is good, the AI economics work and Intercom is defensible. If your volume is low, you are paying a premium for a Messenger, and Zoho Desk or Freshdesk will give you more help desk for a fraction of the money.

Editorial verdict on each

Crisp

Crisp is the value play in customer support software, and its flat per-workspace pricing with bundled AI credits looks better every quarter that competitors push further into per-resolution billing. The widget is genuinely the best in this price range, the scope covers products that other vendors sell separately, and being bootstrapped means the pricing is unlikely to be re-engineered against you. The costs are real too: thin compliance evidence, a support and documentation operation sized for a 25-person company, and a steep jump to the $295 tier for features small teams reasonably expect. If you are a chat-led team of five to twenty who will never face a formal security review, Crisp is the shortlist leader. If your buyer is a CISO, look at Help Scout instead.

Read the full Crisp profile

Intercom

Innovation

Intercom is the clearest illustration of what has happened to customer support pricing, and the company renaming itself after its AI agent removes any doubt about where its attention sits. Fin is very good, and $0.99 to make a ticket disappear is cheap measured against a support hour. But the per-seat tiers are engineered so that Essential at $29 looks affordable while withholding automation, routing, multiple inboxes, SLAs, and Lite seats until $85, and every meaningful capability beyond the inbox is a separate meter: Copilot, proactive messaging, analytics, and every channel that is not email. Buy Intercom if you are a product-led SaaS company with high volume, good documentation, and a genuine deflection opportunity, and build the resolution spreadsheet before the trial ends. If your volume is modest or your budget needs to be predictable, Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, or Help Scout will serve you better for a fraction of the money.

Read the full Intercom profile

Crisp profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Intercom last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.