# Crisp

> Crisp is a French-built, bootstrapped customer support platform that bundles a shared omnichannel inbox, a live chat widget, an AI chatbot and no-code automation builder, a knowledge base, a lightweight support CRM, and marketing campaigns into a single workspace, sold at a flat monthly price per workspace with seats and AI credits included rather than metered per user or per resolved conversation.

- Category: Customer Support Platforms (https://saastracker.org/categories/customer-support)
- Website: https://crisp.chat
- Starting price: $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included)
- Free plan: Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included.
- Free trial: 14 days, all features, no credit card required
- Founded: 2015, HQ: Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team), Ownership: Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/crisp

## Overview

Crisp is the rare support tool that prices by workspace rather than by person. Mini is $45 a month for 4 seats, Essentials is $95 for 10, and Plus is $295 for 20 or more, with extra agents at $10 each. For a support team of eight, that is a fundamentally different cost curve from a $25-per-seat competitor, and it is the single most important fact about the product.

The feature set is broader than the price implies. One workspace carries a shared inbox spanning chat widget, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and eight more channels; a chat widget with file sharing, audio messages, video and audio calls, and screen sharing via MagicBrowse; a drag-and-drop bot builder; a knowledge base; a support CRM; campaigns for outbound email and in-app messages; and analytics. Crisp reports around 10,000 companies and over 600,000 users, with Air France, Decathlon, and Emma among the named logos.

The company is a genuine outlier in the category: founded in Nantes in 2015 by Baptiste Jamin and Valerian Saliou, completely bootstrapped with no venture capital or bank financing, and running on a team of roughly 20 to 30 people. That shapes the product in both directions. There is no growth-at-all-costs repricing and no metered AI meter designed to expand with your success, but there is also less polish, thinner documentation, and a support experience that is smaller in scale than the American incumbents.

## How it works

1. You install the chat widget (a script tag, or a Shopify, WordPress, or WooCommerce plugin) and connect the channels you already use: a support mailbox, WhatsApp Business, Messenger, Instagram. Everything lands in one shared inbox where the team assigns, replies, adds private notes, and sees a customer profile built from the visitor's session, page history, and any data you push through the SDK.

2. The widget is unusually capable for the price. Customers can send files, images, GIFs, and audio messages; agents can start a video or audio call and share screens without a plugin; MagicBrowse lets an agent see and guide the customer's screen; and MagicType shows what the customer is typing before they send it, so the agent can start composing the answer early.

3. Automation runs through a no-code drag-and-drop builder. You chain triggers, conditions, and blocks including a MagicReply block that answers from your trained AI model, with a configurable confidence threshold so the bot hands off to a human rather than inventing an answer when it is unsure. The model is trained on sources you connect: knowledge base articles, website content, past conversation history, answer snippets, and PDF or CSV imports.

4. Everything else hangs off that core. The knowledge base publishes a searchable help site and doubles as AI training data; Campaigns send outbound email and in-app messages to segments from the CRM; and analytics report on volume, response times, satisfaction, and conversation topics. Desktop and mobile apps exist for web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

## 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.

## Not the right fit for

- Teams of one or two agents with low volume; the free plan is thin (2 seats, no AI) and the $45 Mini jump makes Crisp less attractive than a free tier at Tidio or Chatwoot until you have real headcount.
- Enterprise buyers who need a heavyweight compliance package, documented data-residency options, and a vendor with an account team; a bootstrapped 20-person company in Nantes is not built for that procurement process.
- Engineering-led B2B teams that want customers supported inside shared Slack or Discord channels and an API-first workflow; Plain is the purpose-built option there.
- Teams that need deep, auditable enterprise workflow logic, complex approval chains, or ITSM capability; Crisp's automation is a no-code bot builder, not a service management engine.
- Anyone who needs the AI to be transparently metered; Crisp publishes credit allowances in dollar-equivalent terms and approximate conversation counts, which is friendlier than per-resolution billing but harder to audit precisely.

## Features

### Shared inbox and channels

One workspace inbox covering chat, email, and the messaging apps customers actually use.

- **Omnichannel inbox**: Chat widget, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram plus eight further channels land in a single queue with assignment, private notes, and shared visibility.
- **Custom email domain**: Available from the Mini tier, so outbound support email leaves from your own domain rather than a Crisp address.
- **Routing rules**: Conversations are distributed by rules on the Essentials tier and above, covering team, availability, and topic-based assignment.
- **Private notes and collaboration**: Inline internal discussion on a conversation, invisible to the customer, so escalation context stays attached to the thread.
- **Desktop and mobile apps**: Native apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android alongside the web app, which matters for small teams answering chat outside office hours.

### Chat widget

The most feature-dense part of the product, and the reason chat-led teams pick Crisp.

- **Customisable widget in 50 languages**: Colours, default text, and positioning are configurable, and the widget ships translated into 50 languages, which is a genuine advantage for European and multi-market businesses.
- **MagicBrowse co-browsing**: Agents can see and guide the customer's screen live, which turns 'click the settings tab, no the other one' into a thirty-second fix.
- **MagicType**: Shows the agent what the customer is typing before they hit send, so the response can be drafted in parallel. Divisive on privacy grounds, effective on response time.
- **Video and audio calls with screen sharing**: One-click escalation from chat to a call with simultaneous screen sharing, with no third-party plugin or separate meeting tool required.
- **Rich media messaging**: Files, images, GIFs, video, and audio messages in both directions, plus in-widget ratings surveys and inline help-article suggestions.
- **Easy installation**: A script tag plus native plugins for Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, and other builders, which keeps deployment to minutes for non-technical teams.

### AI and automation

Trained on your own content, metered by bundled credits rather than by resolution.

- **Custom-trained AI model**: Connect knowledge base articles, website content, conversation history, answer snippets, and PDF or CSV imports so the model answers in your language and from your facts.
- **MagicReply with confidence thresholds**: The bot block that answers automatically, with a configurable confidence level that hands off to a human when the model is unsure. This is the practical anti-hallucination control.
- **No-code drag-and-drop builder**: Visual chains of triggers, conditions, and actions for both customer-facing bots and internal workflow automation; Plus makes task automations unlimited.
- **Agent copilot**: An internal assistant that suggests contextual answers inside an in-progress conversation so a human sends a faster, better reply rather than the bot replacing them.
- **AI text utilities**: Transcription, translation, summarisation, categorisation, grammar correction, and rephrasing, all drawing on the same credit pool.
- **AI search widget**: An overlay site search powered by the trained model, so visitors get answers from documentation without opening a conversation at all.

### Knowledge base and campaigns

Self-service and proactive outreach, included rather than sold as separate products.

- **Knowledge base**: A hosted, searchable help site included from the Essentials tier, which also serves as the primary training corpus for the AI.
- **Campaigns**: Outbound marketing emails and in-app messages targeted at CRM segments, which is unusual to find bundled in a support tool at this price.
- **Support CRM**: Contact profiles with attributes, session data, and full conversation history, sufficient for segmentation and context without a separate CRM subscription.
- **Chat triggers**: Rules that open the widget proactively based on page, time on site, or behaviour, available from the Mini tier.

### Analytics and platform

Reporting, ticketing, and the integration surface, weighted toward the higher tiers.

- **Analytics**: Volume, response and resolution times, agent performance, satisfaction, and AI-derived conversation topics; advanced analytics is a Plus-tier feature.
- **Ticketing system**: A formal ticket layer on the Plus tier for teams that need statuses and queues rather than just an inbox.
- **White labelling**: Remove Crisp branding from the widget and knowledge base on the Plus tier, which matters for agencies and for brands selling upmarket.
- **100+ integrations**: Native connections plus a plugin marketplace, with the full catalogue positioned on the Plus tier.
- **APIs and SDKs**: REST API, JavaScript SDK for pushing customer attributes into the widget, and mobile SDKs, so the CRM data in Crisp can reflect your product's own state.

## Use cases

- **Ecommerce store with a six-person support rota**: Chat, Instagram DMs, and WhatsApp are answered in three different apps, and a per-seat help desk would cost $150 a month before anyone touches AI. Outcome: Essentials at $95 a month covers 10 seats, all channels in one inbox, the knowledge base, and roughly 450 automated conversations of AI credit, which is less than a single seat elsewhere would cost the same team.
- **European SaaS company with multilingual customers**: Customers write in French, German, and Spanish, the team speaks two of those languages, and translating manually slows first response to hours. Outcome: The widget ships in 50 languages, AI translation and rephrasing run on bundled credits, and the trained model answers from a multilingual knowledge base, so the team covers markets it could not staff for.
- **Founder doing support alongside everything else**: Support is one of six jobs, the inbox is checked between meetings, and the goal is to deflect anything routine without spending an afternoon configuring a bot. Outcome: The drag-and-drop builder plus a MagicReply block trained on the knowledge base handles repeat questions with a confidence threshold that escalates the rest; Mini at $45 covers 4 seats and about 90 automated conversations while the volume is still small.
- **Agency supporting multiple client products**: Each client needs a branded widget and help site, and per-seat pricing multiplied across accounts makes the maths ugly. Outcome: Plus at $295 a month adds white labelling, unlimited task automations, ticketing, and the full integration catalogue for 20 or more seats, so headcount growth does not change the bill.

## Pricing

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 per month. 2 agent seats; Basic shared inbox; Chat widget; Mobile apps. No AI credits at all, which makes it a genuine free tier rather than an AI trial. Useful for a two-founder team, thin for anything more.
- **Mini**: $45 per month, flat (4 seats included). Email inbox and custom email domain; Shortcuts and chat triggers; Roughly $5 of AI credits, about 90 automated conversations; Additional agents at $10/mo.
- **Essentials**: $95 per month, flat (10 seats included). Omnichannel inbox and AI chatbot; Knowledge base, analytics, routing rules; Workflow automation; Roughly $25 of AI credits, about 450 automated conversations. The tier most small teams should start on; per-seat it works out to under $10 a head at full occupancy.
- **Plus**: $295 per month, flat (20+ seats included). Full AI-first suite and unlimited task automations; Ticketing system and advanced analytics; White labelling and 100+ integrations; Roughly $75 of AI credits, about 1,350 automated conversations. Marked Best value by the vendor. The jump from $95 to $295 is steep, so confirm you need ticketing, white labelling, or the integration catalogue before taking it.
- **Enterprise**: Custom quoted. Dedicated onboarding; Personalised SLAs; Custom AI credit allocations.

Add-ons:

- Additional agent seats ($10 per agent per month): Applies once the included seat block on Mini or Essentials is exhausted.

Billing notes:

- Pricing is flat per workspace, not per seat, which is the structural difference from almost every competitor in this category. Each tier includes a seat block and charges $10 for agents beyond it.
- AI credits are bundled by tier and quoted by the vendor in approximate dollar-equivalent and conversation terms (about $5 and 90 conversations on Mini, $25 and 450 on Essentials, $75 and 1,350 on Plus). Crisp states plainly that you will not pay a dollar per resolved conversation.
- The free plan includes zero AI credits, so any automation evaluation has to happen on the 14-day trial or on a paid tier.
- Yearly billing is offered alongside monthly; the vendor does not publish a headline annual discount percentage on the pricing page.
- The gap between Essentials at $95 and Plus at $295 is the sharpest step in the ladder; teams that only need more seats should add $10 agents to Essentials rather than jump tiers.
- Prices are as of August 2026 and are quoted in USD.

Value assessment: 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.

## 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.
- Bootstrapped and profitable with no investors, which historically correlates with stable pricing and no forced repricing to hit a growth target.
- Fast to deploy through native Shopify, WordPress, and WooCommerce plugins, so a non-technical team is live the same day.

## 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.
- The $95 to $295 tier jump is steep, and several features small teams reasonably expect (ticketing, white labelling, advanced analytics, the full integration catalogue) sit behind it.
- Automation is a bot builder, not a workflow engine: no approval chains, no complex conditional escalation trees, no service-management concepts.
- MagicType showing agents what a customer is typing before they send it is a privacy posture some teams and some regulators will not accept.

## Comparisons

- **Crisp vs Help Scout**: Help Scout is the more polished, more compliant, more email-native product with SOC 2, HIPAA, and fifteen years of stability behind it, and it costs per seat plus $0.75 per AI resolution. Crisp is scrappier and cheaper by a wide margin, with a far better widget and bundled AI. Pick Help Scout when support is high-touch email and someone will run a security review; pick Crisp when support is chat volume and the budget is the constraint.
- **Crisp vs Tidio**: Both target chat-led SMB support and both are strong on ecommerce, but the pricing philosophies are opposite: Crisp bundles AI credits into a flat workspace fee while Tidio meters Lyro at roughly $0.5 per AI conversation on top of conversation-limited plans. Tidio's Shopify depth, 40-plus Flows templates, and free tier make it the better start for a DTC store beginning from zero. Crisp becomes the better answer once you have several agents and want a bill that stops tracking both headcount and deflection volume.
- **Crisp vs Chatwoot**: Chatwoot is the open-source answer to the same problem: self-host under MIT for nothing, or pay $19 to $39 per agent in the cloud with Captain AI credits at $20 per 1,000. Crisp costs money from day one but needs no infrastructure and ships a far richer widget with co-browsing, MagicType, and in-chat video calls. Choose Chatwoot if data residency or a zero licence budget is non-negotiable and you have engineering capacity; choose Crisp if you would rather pay $95 a month and never think about Postgres.

## Implementation

- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding: Self-serve on all published tiers with a 14-day full-feature trial and no credit card. Dedicated onboarding and personalised SLAs are reserved for the Enterprise tier.
- Migration: Contacts and conversation history can be brought in through the REST API, and knowledge base content usually needs reformatting rather than a clean import. The bigger migration cost is retraining the AI: because the model is trained on your connected sources, moving from another vendor means rebuilding the training corpus and re-tuning confidence thresholds rather than exporting a bot.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs
- API: REST API for conversations, contacts, and workspace data, a JavaScript SDK for pushing customer attributes into the widget, mobile SDKs, and a plugin marketplace; the full 100+ integration catalogue is positioned on the Plus tier.
- 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
- Data residency: Not published in detail on public pages; the company is headquartered and operated in France.
- SSO: Not published as a standard self-serve feature; enquire on the Enterprise tier.
- Security notes: Crisp's public security disclosure is lighter than the American competitors in this category. Buyers with a formal vendor-review process should request documentation directly rather than assume parity with SOC 2 certified alternatives. EU buyers may find the French operating base advantageous for GDPR posture.

## Support

- Channels: Live chat (through their own product), Email support, Help centre, Dedicated onboarding and SLAs on Enterprise
- Documentation: Help centre and developer documentation covering the API, SDKs, and bot builder; adequate rather than exhaustive, reflecting the team size.
- Community: Active in European startup and indie-SaaS circles; no large official user forum.

## Company

- Founded: 2015
- Founders: Baptiste Jamin (Co-Founder and CEO), Valerian Saliou (Co-Founder and CTO)
- Headquarters: Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team)
- Ownership: Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned
- Employees: ~20 to 30 (company about page states 30+; third-party trackers report around 20)
- Funding: No venture capital and no bank financing; the company states it has entirely self-financed the product.

Timeline:

- 2015: Founded in France by Baptiste Jamin and Valerian Saliou as a live chat widget, self-financed from the start.
- 2018: Opens a physical office in Nantes while keeping a remote-first, flat-structured team.
- 2020: Expands from chat into an omnichannel workspace, adding email, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram alongside knowledge base and campaigns.
- 2023: Ships the differentiating widget features that still define the product: MagicBrowse co-browsing, MagicType, and in-widget video and audio calls with screen sharing.
- 2025: Rebuilds around AI: a custom-trained model fed by knowledge base, website, and conversation history, plus the MagicReply bot block with confidence thresholds. Named a G2 High Performer, Momentum Leader, and Loved product for Winter 2025.
- 2026: Settles on flat per-workspace pricing with bundled AI credits (Free, Mini $45, Essentials $95, Plus $295), explicitly positioning against per-resolution AI billing. Reports around 10,000 companies and 600,000+ users.

## Integrations

Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce, WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack, Telegram, Zapier, REST API and webhooks, JavaScript and mobile SDKs, 100+ integrations and plugin marketplace (vendor count)

## FAQ

### What is Crisp?

Crisp is a customer support platform from Nantes, France that combines a shared omnichannel inbox, a feature-rich chat widget, an AI chatbot with a no-code builder, a knowledge base, a lightweight CRM, and marketing campaigns in one workspace. Its distinguishing commercial trait is flat per-workspace pricing with seats and AI credits included, rather than per-seat plus per-resolution billing.

### How much does Crisp cost?

There is a free plan for 2 agents, then Mini at $45 a month for 4 seats, Essentials at $95 for 10 seats, and Plus at $295 for 20 or more, with additional agents at $10 per month. Enterprise is quoted. Each paid tier includes a bundled AI credit allowance, and a 14-day full-feature trial is available with no credit card.

### How does Crisp's AI pricing work?

Every paid plan includes a bundled AI credit allowance rather than charging per resolved conversation. Crisp quotes these as roughly $5 of credits (about 90 automated conversations) on Mini, $25 (about 450) on Essentials, and $75 (about 1,350) on Plus, and states directly that you will not pay a dollar per resolved conversation. The free plan includes no AI credits at all.

### Is Crisp cheaper than per-seat help desks?

For teams with more than two or three agents, substantially. Essentials covers ten seats for $95 a month, which is less than four seats on a $25-per-user platform, and adding an agent costs $10 rather than a full seat price. The saving grows further once AI deflection volume climbs, because Crisp's credits are bundled while several competitors bill per AI resolution.

### What are MagicBrowse and MagicType?

MagicBrowse is Crisp's co-browsing feature: an agent can see and guide the customer's screen live during a chat, which resolves navigation problems in seconds. MagicType shows the agent what the customer is typing before they send it, so a reply can be drafted in parallel. MagicType is effective for response times but is a privacy posture some teams will decline to enable.

### Does Crisp support WhatsApp and Instagram?

Yes. The omnichannel inbox covers the chat widget, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram plus eight further channels, all landing in one queue. Omnichannel is positioned from the Essentials tier; Mini adds email and a custom email domain to the widget.

### Can Crisp's AI make things up?

Crisp trains the model exclusively on sources you connect (knowledge base articles, website content, conversation history, answer snippets, and PDF or CSV imports), and the MagicReply bot block exposes a configurable confidence level so the bot escalates to a human when it is not certain. That is the practical hallucination control, and it is worth tuning deliberately before letting the bot answer unsupervised.

### Is Crisp venture-backed?

No. Crisp is entirely bootstrapped, with no venture capital and no bank financing, run by a team of roughly 20 to 30 people from Nantes. That independence is why its pricing has stayed flat-fee while much of the category moved to metered AI, but it also means less scale in support, documentation, and compliance artefacts.

### Is Crisp suitable for enterprise buyers?

Not comfortably. There is an Enterprise tier with dedicated onboarding and personalised SLAs, but public pages carry little formal compliance evidence, no published SOC 2 report or trust portal, and no documented data-residency options. Buyers with a real vendor-security process should request documentation before shortlisting it, and may find the answers thinner than from larger vendors.

### Who is Crisp best for?

Small and mid-sized teams of roughly 3 to 25 agents doing chat-led, multi-channel support who want a predictable flat bill and AI included. It is particularly strong for European and multilingual businesses (the widget ships in 50 languages) and for ecommerce stores that install through the Shopify or WooCommerce plugins.

## Editorial verdict

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.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology