The Best Intercom Alternatives in 2026: 9 Tools Compared by Price and AI

Intercom is powerful — and priced like it. Its AI (Fin) charges $0.99 for every conversation it resolves, so the bill gets hard to predict as your volume grows. There’s upheaval on top of that: the company rebranded from Intercom to Fin in May 2026, and in June Salesforce agreed to acquire it for about $3.6 billion. Plenty of teams are looking around. If you want an Intercom alternative that’s cheaper, more predictable, or simply a better fit, here are the nine that actually hold up — compared by real price, how they bill for AI, channels, and whether the bot answers with your own business data.

Full disclosure: we build one of these tools (Bravos AI), so we start with ours and then cover the rest without sugar-coating — each with a clear “pick it if / skip it if”. Prices are what each vendor publishes as of September 2026; where a price isn’t public or we couldn’t confirm it on the official page, we say so instead of guessing.

What actually separates these tools

Ignore the feature checklists for a second. Five things decide what you’ll actually pay and whether the bot is any good:

• How the AI is billed. Per resolution (Intercom’s $0.99), per seat, per message credits, or a flat plan. This one line is the difference between a bill you can forecast and one that spikes in your busiest month.
• Does the bot answer with your data? A real alternative ingests your content (help docs, URLs, product catalog) and answers with facts, not generic AI. That’s RAG — without it the bot makes things up.
• Channels. A web widget is table stakes; WhatsApp is where a huge share of customer conversations actually happen, and not every tool does it natively.
• Human handover. Can a person step into the chat when the bot should step aside — and does it cost extra per agent?
• Languages. Whether multilingual is on the entry plan or locked behind a higher tier.

Intercom alternatives at a glance

* Prices marked with an asterisk are third-party estimates or not published on the vendor’s official pricing page (HubSpot seat price, Zoho SalesIQ, Ada). Everything else was verified on the official site in September 2026, and the “From” column is the monthly price — what you pay month to month, no strings. Most of these knock 15-25% off if you commit to annual billing, but that only pays off once you’re sure the tool fits; Bravos ($23/$59) is monthly with no lock-in. Zendesk’s per-resolution AI price isn’t published openly, so treat it as “pay-as-you-go, contact sales”.

What you’d actually pay per month

The sticker price hides the real cost, because most of these bill the AI by the conversation — and a number like “$0.99 per resolution” means nothing until you know your volume. So here’s a realistic scenario: a small business with about 500 customer conversations a month, where the AI resolves roughly 70% on its own (a “resolution” is a chat the bot closes without handing off to a person) — so ~350 AI resolutions. These are ballpark monthly totals to compare orders of magnitude, not quotes: the base prices are verified, and the AI math simply applies each vendor’s published per-unit rate to that scenario.

Illustrative scenario, not a quote. Base prices are the monthly rates; a few drop with annual billing, but that only pays off once you know you’re staying. Zendesk’s per-resolution rate isn’t public (estimated from third parties), and Zoho SalesIQ is left out here because its price isn’t confirmed and its bring-your-own-LLM model shifts the AI cost onto your own model bill. The pattern still holds: the per-resolution and per-credit tools stay cheap on a quiet month and balloon on a busy one; a flat plan costs the same either way.

The 9 best Intercom alternatives in 2026

1. Bravos AI

From $23/mo · flat pricing · best for a predictable bill + native WhatsApp

This is us, so read it with that in mind. Bravos is an AI chatbot you train on your own content (site, documents, product catalog) and drop onto your website and WhatsApp. What earns it a spot on an Intercom-alternative list is the billing: the AI is included in a flat plan ($23/mo Starter, $59/mo PRO) with no per-resolution fee and no per-agent charge for human takeover. Where Fin bills $0.99 every time it resolves a chat, a busy month doesn’t move your Bravos invoice.

Two things genuinely set it apart from most of this list. It’s a verified Meta Tech Provider, so WhatsApp connects in a one-click popup — no middleware fees, no 60-day token juggling. And on top of standard RAG it runs structured search over your catalog: ask “waterproof jackets under $80 in size M” and it filters the real data instead of paraphrasing a description. Human takeover (live chat) is built in on Pro, and it’s natively trilingual (Spanish, English, Portuguese) plus 15+ widget languages. And unlike Intercom — which has no permanent free plan — you can try the whole thing on a 7-day PRO trial with no credit card.

Pick it if you want one flat bill for AI + WhatsApp + human takeover and you sell products with a catalog. Skip it if you need a full ticketing helpdesk with SLAs and agent queues — that’s Zendesk’s job, not ours.

2. Tidio (Lyro)

From $29/mo · Lyro AI is an add-on · best for small ecommerce

Tidio is the friendly, launch-in-an-afternoon option for small ecommerce. Its AI, Lyro, answers from your FAQs and a scraper of your own site, and the widget is genuinely easy to set up. The catch is what happens when you grow: Lyro is a separate add-on billed by conversation blocks (from ~$32.50 for 50 conversations), stacked on top of the base plan — and the jump from the Growth plan ($59) to Plus ($749) has no middle step, so scaling can multiply your bill overnight.

Pick it if you run a small store with modest volume and want something simple today. Skip it if you expect to scale — the pricing cliff is real.

3. Zendesk

From ~€25/agent · AI per resolution + Copilot add-on · best for large support teams

If you need a full helpdesk — tickets, queues, SLAs, omnichannel routing — Zendesk is the heavyweight, and it’s genuinely good at it. But the AI economics are the opposite of simple: its AI agents are billed per automated resolution, and separately, the “Copilot” that helps your human agents is a second add-on at €50/agent. A fully AI-enabled seat is seat price + resolutions + Copilot — three line items.

Pick it if you’re a mid-to-large support org that needs real ticketing. Skip it if all you want is a chatbot that answers — you’ll pay enterprise prices for a fraction of the platform.

4. Freshworks (Freshchat)

From $23/agent · Freddy AI is a separate charge · best for omnichannel on a budget

Freshchat has one of the widest channel line-ups out of the box — including Line and Google Business Messages, which almost nobody else here offers — and a free tier for up to 10 agents makes it easy to start. Two things to watch: its AI, Freddy AI Agent, is a separate charge (roughly $49 per 100 sessions after an initial batch), and translation only unlocks on Pro and Enterprise, so if you sell in several languages the cheap plan won’t cut it.

Pick it if you need lots of channels without paying a premium. Skip it if multilingual support on the entry plan is a must.

5. Crisp

From €45/mo (4 seats) · flat per-workspace · best for many messaging channels

Crisp bills per workspace rather than strictly per seat, so a small team gets in cheap, and it carries the longest messaging-channel list here (WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, Telegram, Messenger, Line and more). The honest catch: AI credits are capped per plan, and truly unlimited AI plus full ticketing only arrive on the Plus tier at €295/mo — below that, the credits run out.

Pick it if your customers reach you across many messaging apps. Skip it if you need heavy AI volume without jumping to the €295 plan.

6. Chatbase

From $40/mo · billed by message credits · best for building a custom bot

Chatbase isn’t a helpdesk — it’s a bot builder aimed at developers and agencies who spin up chatbots for clients. You train it on documents, URLs and PDFs, its RAG is solid, and it’s cheap to start at $40/mo. The trade-offs: AI is billed by message credits, each plan includes only one agent (extras are +$25/mo), and human handover doesn’t appear until the $150 Standard plan.

Pick it if you’re technical and want to assemble a custom bot cheaply. Skip it if you want a customer-service platform working out of the box.

7. HubSpot Service Hub

From ~$20/seat* · real AI $0.50/resolution (Pro+) · best for existing HubSpot users

If your sales and CRM already run on HubSpot, Service Hub keeps support in the same place and lets the bot use your CRM data. But the real AI (Breeze Customer Agent) is only on Professional and Enterprise, billed at $0.50 per resolved conversation in HubSpot credits shared across the whole Breeze suite — which makes month-to-month cost genuinely hard to compare — and third parties report setup fees on the higher tiers.

Pick it if you’re already a HubSpot shop. Skip it if you’re not — you’d buy a whole CRM to get the chatbot.

8. Zoho SalesIQ

From ~$10/operator* · bring-your-own-LLM · best if you use Zoho

Zoho SalesIQ is the only tool here that lets you plug in your own LLM — OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Gemini or a self-hosted model — instead of being locked to the vendor’s AI, which is genuinely useful if you already have a model or an API key you want to control. Third-party sources put entry pricing around $10/operator, but we couldn’t confirm the exact figure on Zoho’s official page, so verify it before you commit.

Pick it if you want to bring your own model or you already use Zoho. Skip it if you want everything managed and don’t care which model runs under the hood.

9. Ada

Pricing not public* · per-conversation, enterprise · best for large enterprises

Ada is built exclusively for big companies — no self-serve plan, no public pricing, and no pretense of serving SMBs. Third-party buyer data (Vendr) puts contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, with enterprise deployments well into six figures; useful as a ballpark, never a confirmed price. What you get for it is serious: a reasoning engine over rich business context and scale measured in billions of interactions.

Pick it if you’re an enterprise with the budget and the volume. Skip it if you’re a small or mid-sized business — it’s not for you, and that’s fine.

The short version

• Predictable bill + WhatsApp: Bravos AI.
• Small store, easy setup: Tidio (mind the price cliff).
• Big team, full ticketing: Zendesk.
• Most channels on a budget: Freshworks or Crisp.
• Build your own bot: Chatbase.
• Already on HubSpot: HubSpot Service Hub.
• Bring your own LLM: Zoho SalesIQ.
• Large enterprise: Ada.

FAQs

What is Intercom called now?

Intercom rebranded to Fin in May 2026, and in June Salesforce agreed to acquire it for about $3.6 billion. The platform you knew as Intercom still exists under the Fin name; its AI agent — also called Fin — is billed per resolution.

Is there a free version of Intercom?

Intercom doesn’t offer a permanent free plan for general use (it runs trials and specific early-stage startup programs). If a free or low-cost entry point is what you need, Freshworks has a free tier for up to 10 agents, and Bravos, Tidio and ChatBot.com all start well below Intercom’s effective cost once Fin resolutions are added. Bravos also runs a 7-day PRO trial with no card required, so you can test it end to end before paying anything.

Which Intercom alternative is the most predictable on price?

The per-resolution and per-credit models (Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk, Chatbase, Tidio’s Lyro) all move with volume. If you want a bill that doesn’t change when a busy month hits, a flat plan that includes the AI — like Bravos AI or Crisp’s higher tiers — is the safer bet.

What are the open-source alternatives to Intercom?

Chatwoot is the best-known open-source, self-hostable option. It gives you full control and no per-seat license, but you take on hosting, maintenance and wiring the AI yourself — worth it for teams with engineering time to spare, less so if you want something live this week.

Related reading: our comparison of the best WhatsApp chatbots, what an AI customer service chatbot can and can’t do, and how much an AI chatbot really costs.