Crisp vs Intercom in 2026: Pricing, AI Agents and Which to Pick

The Crisp vs Intercom question usually arrives with an invoice: a founder on Intercom adds the seats to the Fin outcomes at renewal and wonders whether Crisp's flat price per workspace would do the same job. Both products put an AI agent in front of a shared inbox, Hugo at Crisp and Fin at Intercom, but they bill the AI in different units, so the plan prices say little about the monthly total.

Written for small and mid-sized teams, the comparison covers who each product is for, prices both at 500 and 2,000 AI conversations a month with the arithmetic shown, and compares the AI agents, inboxes, channels and what a move involves. Our Crisp alternative and Intercom alternative pages compare each vendor with PepoChat, which is our product and appears here only as a short third option.

Every price and plan detail was read from Crisp's and Intercom's own pricing pages and help centers on 19 October 2026, and the totals use the assumptions of our AI customer support pricing index, published the same day. Both vendors changed plans or AI pricing during 2026, so re-check the figures before you sign.

What is the difference between Crisp and Intercom?

Crisp is a multichannel inbox sold at a flat price per workspace, with its Hugo AI agent metered by usage. Intercom is a helpdesk built around its Messenger and the Fin AI agent, sold per seat with every Fin outcome billed on top.

A flat price per workspace means one monthly fee covers a bundle of seats and features whatever your volume: Crisp's paid plans include 4, 10 or 20-plus seats and unlimited conversations. The AI is the exception, because Hugo credits are a dollar amount of AI usage included in each paid plan and drawn down by the tokens each conversation consumes.

Intercom bills people and results separately. Each teammate who replies to customers needs a full seat, and a Fin outcome is Intercom's billing event, counted at most once per conversation when the customer confirms Fin solved the problem, does not ask for more help after Fin's answer, or when Fin completes a Procedure set up to end in a handoff.

Crisp fits small teams whose customers write in from the website, email and messaging apps and who want a predictable bill, and its plan table lists EU hosting and a Data Processing Agreement on every plan. Intercom fits chat-first and product-led teams, above all software companies, that want in-app messages, a mature AI agent and room to grow into Workflows, SLAs and published certifications.

How much do Crisp and Intercom cost in 2026?

Crisp charges $0, $45, $95 or $295 a month per workspace, with seats included and, on paid plans, a small AI credit allowance. Intercom charges $39, $99 or $139 a seat a month, or $29, $85 or $132 on annual billing, plus $0.99 for every Fin outcome.

Last verified 19 October 2026 on the Crisp pricing page, Crisp's help center, the Intercom pricing page and Fin's pricing page. Crisp's prices exclude VAT.

Crisp: a flat workspace price plus Hugo credits

Crisp's Free plan is a two-seat inbox for the chat widget and contact form, with no AI. Mini adds email, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, X and Hugo; Essentials adds the omnichannel inbox, the knowledge base, analytics and routing rules; Plus adds the customer ticket portal and removes the Crisp watermark. The plan table lists extra agents at $10 a month only on Plus, and Crisp's Mini guide says to move to Essentials once you need more than 4 seats.

Crisp's Hugo billing article explains the meter. Credits reset on the 4th of each month, a Hugo conversation is billed as one exchange until it is resolved, routed or escalated, and its token cost moves with message length, knowledge size, language and model. When the credits run out, Hugo stops and new chats go to your operators unless you turn on Pay-As-You-Go under AI Agent → Billing → Pay As You Go with a spending limit; Crisp publishes no separate overage rate.

Intercom: seats plus $0.99 per Fin outcome

Intercom's pricing page displays the annual seat prices, and its structured price data lists the monthly ones. Lite seats are free logins for colleagues who read and comment without messaging customers. Advanced adds multiple team inboxes, the Workflows builder and round-robin assignment, and Expert adds SSO, HIPAA support and SLAs.

Fin's outcomes article counts a customer who goes quiet for 24 hours after Fin's last answer as an assumed resolution, so silence is billed. Intercom refunds the outcome if the customer reopens the conversation and does not bill escalations from Fin's default rules or failed Procedures. Our Intercom Fin pricing breakdown works through the rules at three resolution rates.

Add-ons often join the bill: Copilot for human agents costs $35 an agent a month, or $29 on annual billing, and Pro costs $100 a month for AI analysis of conversations. On 19 October 2026 Intercom was also running a price test that showed some visitors a $19 Essential seat on Fin's pricing page; the tables use the standard prices.

What do 500 and 2,000 AI conversations a month cost on each?

At monthly list prices, 500 AI conversations cost about $65 to $90 on Crisp Mini and $286.50 to $534 on one Intercom Essential seat. At 2,000 conversations the totals are about $140 to $240 on Crisp Mini and $1,029 to $2,019 on Intercom.

The totals follow the pricing index's assumptions:

• Billing: monthly list prices before tax, with no annual, startup or volume discounts.
• Seats: one, unless the plan includes more.
• Units: every AI conversation is one billable unit under the vendor's own rule. For Intercom that is the ceiling, so a second row shows outcomes in half of them.
• Crisp's AI line: Crisp's estimate of $0.05 to $0.10 per Hugo conversation, minus the included credits, billed through Pay-As-You-Go.

Last verified 19 October 2026. Totals are estimates from published list prices under the assumptions above, not quotes.

The AI unit decides the bill. At 2,000 conversations Intercom's AI line is $990 to $1,980, while Crisp's Hugo usage is $100 to $200, roughly a fifth to a twentieth as much. Fin's $0.99 buys a counted result; Hugo's few cents are spent on every conversation it handles, resolved or escalated.

Seats widen the gap. A three-person team adds two $39 seats on Intercom, which brings the half-outcome totals to $364.50 at 500 conversations and $1,107 at 2,000, while Crisp Mini already includes four seats.

Crisp's figure is an estimate; Intercom's is a count. A long-winded setup on a premium model can push Hugo past $0.10 a conversation, and Intercom's count includes customers who simply go quiet. Run both 14-day trials on the same traffic and compare Crisp's credit balance under AI Agent → Agent → Billing with the outcome figures on Intercom's Subscription page. Our guide to how many chatbot conversations a month to expect sizes the volume first.

Is Crisp's Hugo as good as Intercom's Fin?

Fin is the more capable and more proven agent, with Procedures, more knowledge connectors, weekly website sync, voice and every major messaging channel. Hugo covers the core job of answering from your content, escalating and looking up orders, at a fraction of the cost per conversation and with a choice of AI models.

Knowledge. Crisp's Hugo training article lists crawled web pages, Crisp knowledge base articles, TXT, CSV and PDF files, and Q&A snippets, from 1 domain and 1 file on Mini up to 10 domains and 100 files on Plus. Crisp's crawler does not run JavaScript, and crawled pages are not refreshed automatically, so someone presses refresh after the website changes. Fin re-syncs public websites weekly and syncs content from eight knowledge tools, Notion and Confluence among them.

Actions. Hugo's one-click MCP integrations look up customers, orders and invoices in Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Stripe, optionally after verifying the customer's identity, though Crisp's plan table lists the Stripe integration on Plus only; custom MCP servers cover other systems. Fin runs Procedures, multi-step instructions that can call external APIs, and a Procedure that ends in a planned handoff is a billable outcome.

Models and channels. Hugo runs on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Mistral models, or on models Crisp hosts, and the choice changes the credit cost; Fin runs on Intercom's own engine. Fin answers on chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Slack, Discord, voice and an API, in 45 languages on messaging and 28 on voice, while Hugo works on the channels your Crisp plan includes.

Escalation and results. Both agents escalate when they have no answer or the customer seems frustrated, and both leave the conversation in a shared inbox with its history, which is what makes a human handoff work, as our human handoff guide explains. Intercom says Fin averages a 76% resolution rate across more than 12,000 customers, and Crisp's Hugo page says Hugo can resolve up to 60% of tickets; both are vendor figures on the vendor's own definition.

The billing models push in opposite directions. Crisp bills every conversation Hugo handles, so a thin knowledge base wastes cents on escalations, while Intercom bills only outcomes, so a better knowledge base raises the bill.

Which has the better inbox and channels, Crisp or Intercom?

Crisp gives more channels and seats per dollar, but most of its channels start on Essentials at $95. Intercom gives in-app messaging on every plan and a deeper helpdesk on its higher tiers, and bills WhatsApp, SMS and phone per use.

Last verified 19 October 2026 on both vendors' pricing pages, help centers and security pages.

Crisp's channel ladder is easy to miss. As of October 2026, its plan table gives Free only the chat widget and contact form; Mini adds email, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and X, and Essentials adds Instagram, SMS, Viber, phone, Line and WhatsApp Business, with WhatsApp messages billed at Meta's per-message rates. If WhatsApp is why you are looking at Crisp, price Essentials, not Mini.

Intercom's helpdesk goes further up its tiers: ticketing and pre-built reports are on Essential, team inboxes, Workflows and round-robin assignment on Advanced, and SLAs and SSO on Expert. Crisp puts routing rules, workflows and analytics on Essentials and its customer ticket portal on Plus.

Tidio is Crisp's closest rival on channels and price, and our Tidio vs Crisp vs PepoChat comparison covers that pairing. If Zendesk or HubSpot is on your shortlist instead, Intercom vs Zendesk and HubSpot vs Intercom run the same comparison against Intercom.

How do you move from Intercom to Crisp?

You rebuild contacts, help center articles, saved replies and the AI setup, and Crisp documents each step in its Intercom migration guide, updated on 7 October 2026. Past conversations are the hard part: importing them takes the Crisp REST API and development work, so many teams keep Intercom readable for a while.

1. Open Contacts → Actions → Import Contact Profiles and upload a CSV of your Intercom users, mapping the fields.
2. Open Knowledge Base → Actions → Import articles, paste the public URL of your Intercom help center, then check categories, images, tables and links. The knowledge base needs Essentials.
3. Open Settings → Inbox Settings → Message Shortcuts and import your Intercom macros from a CSV.
4. Open AI Agent → Agent → Settings, write Hugo's business description and switch on the default escalation rules.
5. Open AI Agent → Train, add your website, files and Q&A snippets, then turn Fin's guidance into Hugo instructions under AI Agent → Guidance.
6. Test in AI Agent → Evaluate → Playground, then go live from AI Agent → Agent → Activation.

Two timing details save money. Intercom says downgrades usually take effect at renewal, so start the Crisp trial a few weeks before the renewal date, and Crisp's yearly billing is paid in advance and not refundable, so stay monthly until the move has settled.

Going from Crisp to Intercom is mostly a content job. Fin's website sync can read a public Crisp knowledge base and re-sync it weekly, although Intercom lists no Crisp importer among its knowledge syncs, and its directory of helpdesks that Fin runs on names Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce and HubSpot, with a generic API route for the rest.

Is Crisp a cheaper Intercom alternative for startups?

At list prices, yes, by a wide margin once Fin handles a few hundred conversations a month. The exception is a startup that qualifies for Intercom's Early Stage program.

Intercom's Early Stage program is open to new customers with up to $10 million in funding and fewer than 15 employees. Year one costs from $65 a month and includes 6 Advanced seats and 300 Fin outcomes a month, with extra outcomes at the full $0.99, so 1,000 outcomes come to $65 plus 700 × $0.99, or about $758. The discount falls from 93% to 50% in year two and 25% in year three, with fewer free outcomes each year.

Crisp's Startup Program takes 30% off Essentials or Plus, not Mini, for new customers under three years old that have raised less than $1 million, which puts Essentials at $66.50 a month before Hugo usage. Our support stack for a bootstrapped SaaS prices the tools around either inbox.

Which should you pick, Crisp or Intercom?

Pick the product that matches where your customers write, billed in a unit you can predict.

Choose Crisp when

• Your team is two to twenty people and you want seats in a flat bundle: 4 for $45, 10 for $95.
• Customers also reach you on WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, Telegram or the phone, and Essentials at $95 is in budget.
• You want the AI on every conversation at a few cents each, and someone will watch the credit meter and refresh crawled pages by hand.
• You prefer EU hosting with a DPA on every plan, or want to choose the AI model yourself.

Choose Intercom when

• Support happens inside your web or mobile product, where in-app chats, banners and tooltips earn their keep.
• You want the stronger AI agent: Procedures, weekly website sync, many knowledge connectors and voice in 28 languages.
• You need helpdesk depth or paperwork: Workflows, SLAs, SSO, HIPAA support, and SOC 2 and ISO certificates.
• You qualify for Early Stage, which costs less than Crisp Essentials' list price in year one while Fin stays under 300 outcomes a month.

When is a standalone AI agent the better third option?

A standalone AI support agent is the better third option when nearly every conversation starts on your website, one to five people answer customers, and you need neither email ticketing nor WhatsApp or a phone line in the same tool.

PepoChat is one such AI support agent, and we make it, so weigh this section accordingly. It answers only from your own knowledge base, built from a website crawl of up to 200 pages, documents, Notion or Google Drive, and hands the conversation to a shared team inbox, emailing your team, when it cannot answer or the visitor asks for a person. URL sources are re-fetched weekly, unlike Crisp's crawled pages.

PepoChat counts AI replies, not tokens or outcomes. Every feature is on the free plan, with 200 AI replies a month and 5 knowledge sources; Starter is $49 a month for 2,000 replies and 3 members, Growth $149 for 10,000 replies and 10 members, and extra replies cost $10 per 1,000. At two replies per conversation, 500 conversations fit inside Starter's 2,000 replies for $49, and 2,000 conversations need 4,000 replies, $49 plus $20 of overage, or $69; the pricing page has the full plan list.

The limits are real. PepoChat is a website widget, not a helpdesk: there is no WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, phone or email channel, no email ticketing, SLAs or routing rules, and no SOC 2 or ISO certification. If those gaps matter, buy Crisp or Intercom.

What to do next

• Write down three numbers before any sales call: people who answer customers, AI conversations a month, and the share you expect the AI to resolve, then work your own row of the cost table at 30% and at 70%.
• Run both 14-day trials on the same traffic, and compare Hugo's credit usage with Fin's outcome count before you commit to anything annual. If neither survives the trial, the pricing index prices 30 tools on the same assumptions.
• If the third option fits, start a free PepoChat workspace without a card and run it beside your current inbox for a month.