Comparing Intercom Alternatives: The Top 13 Choices

Intercom has changed a lot lately. It started as a messaging tool for sales and marketing teams. Now, by adding new features like detailed customer profiles and conversation notes, they're a decent customer service tool as well. These changes help teams do their jobs better.

The biggest change, however, is their focus on AI. They even call themselves an "AI-first customer service platform." Their AI tool, Fin, looks impressive. But many of their best features are only in expensive plans or are burdened by heavy usage costs. This means that not everyone can use them.

Other companies offer similar tools, often for less money. And if you're a fan of AI, plenty of these tools offer AI features as well. We've made a list of 13 alternatives to Intercom to help you find a tool that is best suited to your needs.

The 13 best Intercom alternatives for 2025

If supporting customers and transparent pricing are your priorities, here are the 13 best Intercom alternatives to check out.

1. Help Scout — Best for human-centered customer support

At Help Scout, we believe that delivering great customer service shouldn't be hard. There are too many support tools out there that are impersonal and cold, are cumbersome to set up and use, and have a user experience that's less than ideal for customers and support teams alike.

We wanted more for our customers, so we built Help Scout to do the exact opposite of what those other tools do: put the customer first.

Help Scout is an intuitive (but powerful!) customer communications platform, with all of the tools support teams need to provide high-quality support and create delightful customer experiences.

Inbox

Our shared inbox makes it easy to collaborate on incoming conversations across all of your channels (email, chat, social media) seamlessly, no matter how your customers prefer to connect.

Inbox has everything you need to do your best work, including:

• The ability to send private notes and tag a team member in a conversation.

• A searchable library of saved replies to streamline responses to common questions.

• Tags, custom fields, views, and automatic workflows to keep you organized and reduce busy work.

• The ability to snooze a conversation or schedule your reply to send later.

• Collision detection to prevent accidental duplicate replies.

• Keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate your queue with ease.

• Customer profiles to provide you with key customer information in the conversation sidebar so that your replies are always personalized and relevant.

In addition, we offer iOS and Android apps so that you’re able to respond to customers while on the go.

Self-service

We love to help our customers one-on-one, but we know that often customers would prefer to help themselves. That’s why our knowledge base tool, Docs, is available across all of our plans.

Docs makes it easy for you to get all of the information your customers need — things like answers to FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and company policies — published in a matter of minutes. With Docs you can:

• Build and launch a personalized help center.

• Create media-rich knowledge base articles quickly and easily.

• Customize your Docs site to fit your brand personality.

• Monitor article performance and spot content gaps via a dedicated reporting dashboard.

Proactive messaging and support

Our web widget, Beacon, can be embedded on any web page or within your app to provide your customers easy access to live chat. While we’re all about providing accessible support, good customer service should be a two-way street. That’s why, in addition to being a chat hub, Beacon is a great way to reach out to your audience in between email, chat, and social media sessions.

With Beacon you can:

• Provide customers with access to your help center content from anywhere within your user experience.

• Deliver proactive customer service by surfacing a chat window or support article to help customers through tricky spots in the customer journey.

• Send targeted messages to segments of your audience that are triggered by criteria like time on page and scroll behavior.

• Collect feedback through NPS and microsurvey features.

AI tools

Help Scout has always been customer-first, and we always will be. While we do think that the improvements in LLMs and increased access to generative AI can be helpful, we don’t think AI should replace customer service teams. 

Instead, we believe AI tools should empower them to do their best work and maybe get a little time back in their day to focus on more valuable tasks that can improve the customer experience. We’ve built four AI tools that we think do just that:

• AI summarize breaks down long conversation threads into a few bullet points, allowing you to get up to speed on cases more quickly.

• AI assist helps you polish customer replies and Docs articles by adjusting length or tone, checking for spelling and grammar issues, or translating the text with a single click. 

• AI drafts use generative AI, the content from your help center, and past customer conversations to draft accurate replies to customer messages. Simply review, edit if needed, and hit send. 

• AI answers (coming soon) is a smart search tool that can provide a specific answer to customer questions using generative AI and the content in your Docs site.

Integrations

We know how important it is for your entire tech stack to work together, which is why we offer integrations with popular software platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Jira. Don’t see the integration you’re looking for? Use our API and create your own!

Analytics

To make sure your team can measure success and identify areas of improvement, we offer reporting dashboards to track metrics like conversation volume, channel usage, team performance, customer satisfaction, and more. Want to track something else? No problem! You can create your own filters based on tags, custom fields, or views so that you can report on what matters most to you.

Support

We think our product is something special, but one of our greatest assets is our dedicated support team. Our support pros are Help Scout experts and are available 24/6 to ensure that you always feel properly supported. We also have helpful resources like live classes, blog content, ebooks, and a robust help center for those interested in diving a little deeper.

Great support at the right price 

We offer straightforward plans that are based on the amount of customers you support each month.

Our free plan gives you everything you need to get your support operations off the ground: unlimited users, an Inbox with all channels, a Docs site, basic reporting, in-app messaging, workflows, and 50 included monthly contacts.

Each of our paid plans also include unlimited users and offer benefits like additional Inboxes and Docs sites, advanced permissions, teams, NPS surveys, advanced reporting, customer properties, integrations, and more.

All plans, both free and paid, include unlimited access to all of our AI features. We don’t charge any AI usage fees, making Help Scout a great alternative to Intercom for teams looking for a customer-first approach to AI at a more competitive price point — free!

Migrating from Intercom to Help Scout

If you’re interested in making the switch, our platform’s data migration capabilities don’t require any IT involvement, making it easy to bring your customer data and conversation history to Help Scout. And if you have any questions along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out — we’re happy to help!

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

2. HelpCrunch — Best for multi-channel messaging

HelpCrunch allows agents to easily manage customer interactions across all of your channels from a single tool. Speaking of channels, aside from email and live chat, HelpCrunch supports tons of messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. You can even add Telegram and Viber chatbots to the mix.

Besides conversation management, HelpCrunch also has email marketing and automated messaging tools as well as a knowledge base builder to help customers find helpful information without needing to contact support. 

AI-wise, Help Crunch is in the process of rolling out AI features. The first is an AI-powered writing assistant that can help with your copy’s spelling, grammar, tone, length, and translation. While they have a long way to go to catch up with Intercom’s AI-frenzy, if you’re more focused on messaging than AI, the platform is worth a look.

Migrating from Intercom to HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch will migrate your Intercom data into their system for free. All you need to do is submit a request.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $12/team member per month. If HelpCrunch seems like the right choice for you, you can get assistance with migrating from Intercom for free.

3. Olark — Best for stand-alone live chat

If you’re looking for chat software that can help engage website visitors, Olark is a great choice. You can customize your chat experience to match your brand guidelines, grab important customer info upfront with pre-chat surveys, and when your team is offline, Olark has chatbots to help respond to customer queries. 

If you’re intimidated by creating your own chatbot flows, never fear — Olark will build them for you! If you choose to pay extra for Olark’s CoPilot program, their team will build bots catered to your business’ needs and use cases. They also offer several other add-ons called Powerups. These include things like live translations as well as visitor co-browsing and insights.

Other Olark features include automatic targeted messaging, integration with other tools in your tech stack, in-depth reporting capabilities, and searchable chat transcripts, ensuring that they can be easily referenced in the future.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $29/seat per month. AI and Powerup features require the Pro plan; contact for pricing details.

4. HubSpot Customer Platform — Best for customer management

HubSpot’s all-in-one suite of tools, HubSpot Customer Platform, includes software for landing page creation, lead generation, email marketing automation, customer support, sales prospecting, operations, and more.

This is why HubSpot makes sense as an Intercom alternative for companies who don’t just want to just focus on sales or service but instead want to view and support the entire customer journey from a single platform.

It’s also appealing in terms of price. Intercom plans and add-ons can be pricey and complex, whereas HubSpot Customer Platform has a free plan with all of the basics. When it comes to support, that’s going to look like a shared inbox for social media and email support, live chat, email templates, reporting, and a few other odds and ends. 

If you need a bit more functionality, the $15/seat per month plan will allow you to do things like make phone calls, automate routine tasks, and remove the HubSpot branding from your chat box. Both of these lower tier plans also have some access to Breeze Copilot, HubSpot’s AI product designed to provide agent assistance.

While some features are still restricted to higher tiered plans, this is a pretty good start, especially when you count in the non-support products included.

Migrating from Intercom to HubSpot

HubSpot does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Intercom data into its system. However, its service tool does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/seat per month. Learn about other tools similar to HubSpot.

5. Userflow — Best for product tours

Features that you don’t see in a lot of Intercom competitors are no-code tool tips and product tours. These features make onboarding new customers a breeze, and not having to bother your dev team to hard code them onto your site is priceless. If you’re mostly hanging with Intercom to take advantage of these features, there might be an alternative in Userflow.

Userflow is an onboarding product that helps you build customized, dynamic, and — most importantly — no-code onboarding experiences. The flows are built using a simple drag and drop interface, requiring no technical know-how. All you need is the ability to copy and paste the Userflow code into your site code and you’re ready to go.

Beyond product tours and tool tips, Userflow has other key Intercom features like task checklists, the ability to add access to your knowledge base and contact channels to your site, proactive messaging, survey and NPS functionality, and even an AI chatbot experience.

One thing to keep in mind is that Userflow is not a help desk, and it doesn’t have a shared inbox, ticketing, or knowledge base solution built into the product. It can, however, integrate with some customer service software platforms. If you’re looking to add on functionality to your existing service solution or really only need the onboarding tools, check out Userflow.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $240 per month.

6. Zendesk — Best for customization

Zendesk is a well-known customer service software solution and probably the most robust tool on this list. It provides service musts like a shared inbox, knowledge base builder, community forums, a customer portal, workflows and triggers to help automate mundane tasks, and more.

Zendesk is also an example of a company that has made a strong push toward AI. They offer a virtual agent, agent assist features, AI-powered ticket routing, and even tools for identifying content gaps in your knowledge base and measuring support quality for both human agents and AI ones.

Probably the best feature of Zendesk is the ability to really make it your own. There are over 1,000 apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, compared to only 450 or so in Intercom’s App Store. If you have the development resources, you can also build your own Zendesk-integrated solutions.

Of course, with this ability comes a heavier implementation lift, and some of Zendesk’s features do require add-ons on top of your monthly subscription costs. However, if you’re shopping for an enterprise company where your budget and resources are greater, then Zendesk can easily replace Intercom as a customer service solution.

Migrating from Intercom to Zendesk

Zendesk does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Intercom data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month, with plans that include the ability to create custom integration solutions starting at $115/agent per month. Some AI functionality is included in all plans, though most is limited to higher-tiered plans or available through an add-on.

7. Freshdesk — Best for phone support

Freshdesk plans offer access to help desk ticketing software that can help you manage communication across just about any channel. For teams that are focused on voice, such as call center teams, you can add on Freshcaller, the company’s phone solution. With Freshcaller, you can buy a phone number right from the tool and manage calls using helpful features like call transferring, queue callback, and IVR (phone trees).

The pricing for voice on Freshcaller is handled a bit differently than it is on Intercom. With Intercom, basic access to the channel is included in all plans, but you wind up paying usage fees. There are different rates for outbound and inbound calls as well as costs for recordings, transcripts, and the phone number itself.

Freshcaller plans are user-based, meaning that along with the cost of your phone number, you pay a certain amount of money each month for each agent on your team. Each plan comes with a certain amount of included monthly minutes, except for the free plan which is usage based.

If you’re only looking for a voice solution, then Freshcaller is a solid choice. If you also need the features and channels available through Freshdesk, you will need to pay subscription fees for both Freshdesk and Freshcaller. However, that price may still wind up being less than the same functionality on Intercom.

One last thing to consider is the products’ AI capabilities. Freshdesk has a strong AI component in Freddy AI. Freddy helps power chatbots, provide agent support via generative AI, and even provide insights into analytics. For Freshcaller users, Freddy can also power speech-enabled IVR experiences.

Migrating from Intercom to Freshdesk

Freshdesk does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Intercom data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans for both Freshdesk and Freshcaller start at $15/agent per month. Learn about other tools similar to Freshdesk.

8. LiveChat — Best for chat automation

LiveChat comes with tools for reporting, a ticketing solution, routing rules, AI-powered agent assistance, and more. Its live chat tool has a lot to offer as well, from automation and canned responses to chat transfers and personalization.

One thing to note about LiveChat products is that they need to be purchased separately. You need LiveChat for chats, HelpDesk for ticketing, KnowledgeBase for self-service, and ChatBot for AI-bot support. Since AI chatbots are kind of a big deal for Intercom, folks looking for an alternative in LiveChat will likely want to grab a subscription to ChatBot as well.

While paying for both tools may not seem like it would fit into the “smaller budget” category, the cost of $72 per month for one person for the base plans and an additional $20 per month for each additional agent doesn’t feel cost prohibitive when compared to Intercom’s pricing. This is especially true if you’re only focused on chat and don’t need the rest of Intercom’s tools.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $20/person per month for LiveChat. ChatBot plans start at $52 per month. Learn about other tools similar to LiveChat.

9. Tidio — Best for video chat

Tidio’s easy-to-use interface makes it a great tool for quick setup within your customer support and marketing teams. In fact, Tidio boasts that teams can easily get started within five minutes.

While the platform’s strength is definitely chat, you can also use Tidio to manage your email as well as messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you’re interested in live video chat, Tidio has you covered there, too. You can easily connect with prospects and existing customers through video, helping you build better customer relationships.

The video calling on Tidio is especially nice because, unlike Intercom, which charges by the minute for Messenger and video calls, Tidio charges the same for video calls that they do for any other type of conversation (live chat, email, etc.).

For teams more focused on AI-powered chatbots like Intercom’s Fin, Tidio’s Lyro AI chatbot is worth a look. You can train Lyro on different knowledge sources like an FAQ page or your website, and it can automate all sorts of tasks such as checking order statuses and answering basic questions. For more complex situations, you can use Tidio’s Flows feature to build chatbot flows manually. 

Tidio provides a certain amount of Lyro conversations (50) and Flows customers (100) for free so that you can test out the functionality. If you decide you’d like to make them a regular part of your support process, you can opt for an add-on that will give you a certain amount each month.

Migrating from Intercom to Tidio

You can migrate contacts and important ticket information from Intercom to Tidio via CSV file, though it may not include the contents of your conversations. However, this information may be available via the Intercom API.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $29 per month.

10. Crisp — Best for use with WordPress

Crisp is a great tool for startups and small businesses due to its free plan, simple interface, and robust feature set.

Some of Crisp’s top features include co-browsing, a CRM, a shared inbox, a chat widget with audio and video chat options, chatbots, a knowledge base, and mobile apps for on-the-go support. Plus, it supports a number of integrations with popular platforms like Slack, Zapier, Salesforce, and WhatsApp.

Another platform that Crisp has built an integration for is WordPress. If your site is built on WordPress, you can use the Crisp plugin to add a chat widget. While using the standard method of pasting in an HTML snippet isn’t a huge lift, not having to is nice. In addition, Crisp’s widget has been designed to be light and efficient, ensuring that it doesn’t accidentally slow your site down.

Lastly, if your interest in Intercom was sparked because of its AI tools, Crisp has added functionality in this area of the product as well. It offers an AI chatbot, inbox assistant, conversation summaries, and automatic tagging, and it allows you to train the AI on data sources like your help center, web content, past customer conversations, and more.

Migrating from Intercom to Crisp

You can migrate contacts from Intercom to Crisp via CSV file, and you can request Crisp to pull in your knowledge base articles for you. Crisp isn’t able to migrate conversations from Intercom at this time, though you may be able to export this information using the Intercom API.

Price: Free plan with WordPress plugin support available. Paid plans start at $45/month per workspace. Learn about other tools similar to Crisp.

11. Gorgias — Best for ecommerce

If you’re supporting an ecommerce business, then you know how important it is to have easy access to customer information. While many of the tools on this list offer powerful integrations for ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Gorgias is the only tool that is specifically designed for ecommerce businesses.

Gorgias connects to Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. However, its main integration partner is Shopify. With this deep integration, agents can see customer orders, billing information, and shipping addresses from inside the ticket view. From there they can process refunds and returns, create and edit orders, and even create discount codes.

Those tasks are pretty standard for a Shopify integration; however, Gorgias can do more. You can use Shopify information to automatically personalize customer responses. While it’s easy enough to personalize a canned response for things like order updates, having it done for you is even better.

Outside of the Shopify connection, Gorgias has a standard suite of tools like a shared inbox, help center, workflows, and reporting dashboards. It also has an AI product called Gorgias Automate, which can help increase your rate of ticket deflection. Automate can be added on to any plan, with pricing dependent on your expected amount of automated tickets.

Migrating from Intercom to Gorgias

Gorgias does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Intercom data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Price: Free trial available. Paid plans start at $10 per month, with Gorgias Automate available for an extra fee. Learn about other tools similar to Gorgias.

12. Zoho Desk — Best for time management

Though Zoho is often most recognized for their CRM product, the company actually has an entire suite of software with titles available to help just about any department in your company. Zoho Desk is its support offering, and it has all of the features you’d expect to find in a help desk.

From ticketing to automation to self-service, it’s accounted for. It’s also another option for those looking to create community forums to augment their self-service options and create more customer engagement.

While not a feature that gets a lot of focus when it comes to lists like these, Zoho offers time tracking features that could be helpful for call centers or teams with folks that are paid hourly. Zoho can track time spent on a ticket either manually or automatically and can also track time used on calls and tasks. This can be helpful for creating invoices or simply keeping an eye on support costs.

Since it’s impossible to discuss an Intercom alternative without discussing AI, let’s talk about Zoho’s AI product, Zia. It powers chatbots to help with customer requests, automatically tags tickets to aid in organization, performs sentiment analysis, notifies your team of unusual activity in the queue, and more. 

Although most AI features are restricted to the highest tier plan, that is only $40/user per month, which feels pretty accessible when compared to Intercom.

Migrating from Intercom to Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk has its own platform, Zwitch, that can be used to migrate your data from Intercom. It will transfer your agents, tickets, conversations, threads, customers, contacts, and knowledge base articles.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $7/user per month. Plans including AI features start at $40/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Zoho Desk.

13. Kustomer — Best for AI-powered support

Kustomer is a CRM platform that has been on a wild ride over the last few years. The company was swiped up by Meta in 2020 and then spun back out again in 2023. Since being back out on its own, the platform has rebranded to heavily focus on AI, offering features for both automated and human-driven interactions.

AI agents for customers provide customer assistance across all channels — email, SMS, voice, chat, messenger, and more. You’re able to develop AI agents that specialize in specific areas of expertise like order management or troubleshooting. If the conversation gets too complex, the agent will seamlessly tap in human support. The AI can also handle tasks like product recommendations autonomously.

The AI features for support reps are pretty similar to what is offered in other tools on the list: ticket summaries and writing assistance that help with spelling, grammar, and tone of voice. The AI can also offer your team suggestions on how to resolve a customer’s issue, such as offering a related help center article or surfacing company policy for the agent that they would have otherwise had to look up.

Beyond AI, Kustomer has a standard list of included features such as conversation management tools, workflows, integrations, macros, customer profiles, and reporting. However, if we’re being honest, it’s kind of difficult to find much information about them on the company’s marketing website. Like Intercom, Kustomer has put all of its chips down on AI, so if that resonates with you, it’s an alternative worth exploring.

Migrating from Intercom to Kustomer

While Kustomer doesn’t have a special integration tool like it does for Zendesk migrations, Intercom customers can still import their data either by using their API or by uploading a CSV. You can also use a third party service like Help Desk Migration which can do the transfer for a fee.

Price: Contact for pricing.

What to look for in an Intercom alternative

Intercom is a powerful tool that can bring a lot of value to some support teams. However, if you’ve found it’s not the right solution for your business needs, there are a few features we think you should look for in any alternative you consider. 

AI access at a lower price point

Intercom has many attractive features, but access to some of those tools can come with a hefty price tag — a drawback for most business owners. Full access runs $139/agent per month, and some of the most impactful features (like Fin) have additional usage fees. 

There are a lot of options on the market that offer similar levels of functionality for a fraction of that price. So, it may be worth looking around if affordability is a priority for your team. 

Ease of use

Flashy features don’t mean a lot if the tool is troublesome to use. Look for tools that have a quick setup and are also intuitive for agents to use. You could even choose to look for options with trials to get a better perspective on what works best for you. 

Stable pricing

Most of Intercom’s tools are covered through the monthly subscription cost. However, as mentioned above, their Fin AI agent — a bot that answers requests autonomously — is subject to additional volume-based pricing. Each “resolution” the Fin AI agent completes costs an additional $0.99. Fin AI Copilot, an AI inbox assistant for agents, is free for the first 10 tickets per agent, but then it requires an additional $29/agent per month.

These are just the AI add-ons — features like their proactive support bundle and certain channels like phone, SMS, and WhatsApp all have additional cost implications which can add up quickly.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with usage-based pricing or charging more for premium features, but when you do a mix of all of these strategies at the same time, cost becomes confusing and unpredictable. Their pricing calculator helps, but it’s still a lot to get your arms around when trying to make a decision.

Choose your top Intercom alternative

Ready to jump off the Intercom train? The 13 Intercom alternatives above provide great options for sales, marketing, and support.

Reflect on what your goals are and which features are most important to your company. Choosing the right platform is much easier when you know what you’re looking for. 

Then, it’s simply a case of reading reviews (try asking people in your network or using a site like G2), testing different options, weighing the benefits, and seeing what works for your team.

If you’re interested in delivering more delightful experiences to your customers without the hefty price tag, give Help Scout a try today!

Additional content was written by Jesse Short.