Intercom alternatives: where to go, what you save, how to switch

Why switch to Crisp. Intercom charges every full seat ($19, $85 or $132 a month depending on the plan), then every Fin resolution on top. Crisp charges a flat price per workspace: Mini is €45 a month for 4 agents, Essentials €95 for 10 agents, Plus €295 for 20 agents. Four seats on Intercom Essential already cost $76 a month before Fin answers a single question. Crisp is a European company, based in France, which matters if your customers ask where their data lives.

Who it's for. Startups and small businesses that mostly use Intercom for website chat, a shared inbox and a help center, with 2 to 20 people answering.

Who it's not for. Teams that rely on in-app product tours and NPS surveys. Crisp covers chat and support, not guided onboarding inside your product.

Its limit. The jump from Essentials (€95) to Plus (€295) hurts if you have 12 or 15 agents, and priority support only comes with Plus. The official pricing page may show dollars or euros depending on where you are: check the currency on your invoice before you sign.

How to migrate from Intercom. Crisp publishes a dedicated guide for leaving Intercom. Contacts come in as a CSV (Contacts, then Actions, then Import). Articles import from the public URL of your Intercom help center. Tags become segments, saved replies become message shortcuts (also via CSV). Conversation history goes through the Crisp REST API and an import tool Crisp published on GitHub.

Why switch to Zendesk. Intercom is built around conversations. Zendesk is built around tickets: queues, SLAs, team views, several help centers. If your support has grown to the point where you manage priorities and tiers, this is where teams usually land. And you don't have to throw Fin away: Intercom documents a setup where Fin answers in the messenger and hands off to your agents inside Zendesk.

Who it's for. Support teams of 10 people or more, with SLAs to meet, several brands or several languages.

Who it's not for. A three-person team doing mostly chat. The Support Team plan at €25 per agent is missing the essentials, and the product only gets useful from Suite Team.

Its limit. It gets expensive fast: Suite Team is €69 per agent per month, Suite Professional €149. Live chat needs Professional. Zendesk also bills AI resolutions (5 included per agent on Team, 10 on Professional, then pay as you go), so you get part of the Fin model back.

How to migrate from Intercom. Zendesk's built-in data importer only brings users and organizations, not conversations. History goes through the Ticket Import API: it keeps the original creation date, takes 100 tickets per request, and runs no SLAs or triggers on imported tickets. Articles go through the API or a third-party service.

Why switch to Freshdesk. Freshdesk follows the Zendesk model at a lower price: Growth at $19, Pro at $55, Enterprise at $89 per agent per month on annual billing. Five agents on Growth come to $95 a month, about what five Intercom Essential seats cost, but with real ticketing. Its AI (Freddy) is billed in sessions: 500 free sessions once, then $49 per 100.

Who it's for. Small and mid-sized businesses that want proper ticketing, with email, forms and a knowledge base, without paying Zendesk prices.

Who it's not for. Teams whose support lives inside their product chat and who want a messenger as polished as Intercom's.

Its limit. Listed prices are annual. And one migration detail matters a lot: the ticket API does not accept the original creation date, so imported conversations carry the import date and skew your historical reports.

How to migrate from Intercom. Each Intercom conversation becomes a ticket, and contacts are matched by email address. Add an "original date" field so the real date stays visible. The knowledge base goes through Freshdesk's Solutions API or a CSV sent to their support team.

Why switch to Help Scout. A lot of teams use Intercom as an expensive shared inbox. Help Scout is built for exactly that: a clean shared inbox, a knowledge base and a widget (Beacon) that suggests an article before the contact form. Standard is $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user per month, and its AI costs $0.75 per resolution, against $0.99 for Fin.

Who it's for. Teams of 2 to 30 people whose support runs mostly over email, and who want a tool the whole team can pick up quickly.

Who it's not for. Teams running proactive chat, in-app campaigns or product tours.

Its limit. The free plan allows 5 users but only one inbox and 100 contacts helped per month, which is mostly a trial. A 15-day trial covers the paid plans.

How to migrate from Intercom. Help Scout has an official page about moving from Intercom: the import runs through its email and ticket import tool. Snoozed conversations lose their reminder, and tags only apply to conversations. Help Scout says it sees up to 50% fewer conversations after the switch, because Beacon pushes people to articles first. One company that moved to Help Scout kept Intercom readable for a few months as a safety net, then let it go.

Why switch to HubSpot. If you connected Intercom to HubSpot so agents know who is a customer, who is a lead and what they bought, the obvious question is why pay for two tools. Service Hub puts the inbox, tickets and knowledge base on the same contact database as your sales and marketing.

Who it's for. Companies already on the HubSpot CRM, or that want one tool for sales and support.

Who it's not for. A team that just wants a chat widget and a shared inbox. HubSpot gets heavy and expensive once you leave the free plan.

Its limit. Service Hub is priced per seat: $100 at Professional and $150 at Enterprise, with an onboarding fee of around $1,500 on Professional. Read our review before signing an annual commitment: HubSpot has contract traps of its own, close to Intercom's.

How to migrate from Intercom. Before you sign, ask HubSpot whether it offers a direct Intercom import. If not, contacts go in through a CSV import, keeping the Intercom ID in a property. Conversation history needs the API or a migration service.

Why switch to Front. Front starts from email and adds teamwork: assign, comment internally, see who is answering what. For a team that mostly used Intercom to share incoming messages, it often feels more natural. Starter is $25 per seat (10 seats max), Professional $65 (50 seats max), Enterprise $105.

Who it's for. Support, account management and operations teams handling a lot of email together.

Who it's not for. Real-time product support over chat with anonymous visitors.

Its limit. Prices are on annual billing, and Starter caps at 10 seats. AI is extra: Autopilot from $0.05 per conversation, Copilot at $20 per seat.

How to migrate from Intercom. Ask Front whether it offers a direct Intercom import. If not, plan on the Intercom API to pull your history out, and a CSV import for contacts.

Why switch to Tidio. Tidio targets small stores that want chat and a bot on their site without setting up an enterprise tool. The free plan covers 50 conversations, Starter is $24.17 a month, and the Lyro AI bot is an add-on from $32.50 a month.

Who it's for. Shopify or WooCommerce stores with one or two people on support.

Who it's not for. SaaS product teams that need user data, product tours and per-team reporting.

Its limit. The headline price isn't the real price: base plan, Lyro and Flows (automation) are billed separately, which lands around $80 a month for the full suite. Departments and full API access need the Plus plan, a big jump.

How to migrate from Intercom. Ask Tidio support whether it can bring over Intercom history. For a store, old history often matters little: export it for the archive, import contacts as CSV and start from a clean inbox.

Why switch to Chatwoot. Chatwoot looks a lot like Intercom's inbox, with one deep difference: the code is open and you can run it on your own server, so your data stays with you. On the hosted version, Hacker is free (2 agents, 500 conversations), then Startups is $19, Business $39 and Enterprise $99 per agent per month.

Who it's for. Technical teams, companies with strict data rules, and anyone who wants out of per-seat pricing.

Who it's not for. A team with nobody to maintain a server, if self-hosting is the plan.

Its limit. Self-hosting is free in license but not in time: updates, backups and security are on you. The AI (Captain) runs on credits, $20 per 1,000.

How to migrate from Intercom. Check with Chatwoot whether a ready-made importer exists. If not, with open APIs on both sides, a script does the job: this is the kind of tool where someone technical runs the migration in-house.

Why switch to Zoho Desk. If your company already runs on Zoho (CRM, invoicing, projects), Zoho Desk connects support to the rest without a connector. It's a full ticketing tool, with a free plan for up to 3 users.

Who it's for. Small businesses on Zoho that want support tied to their CRM without paying for HubSpot.

Who it's not for. Teams looking for a modern Intercom-style messenger for a SaaS product.

Its limit. Its appeal is mostly the Zoho ecosystem: outside Zoho, Freshdesk or Zendesk are easier to compare. And don't confuse Zoho Desk with Zoho CRM, which is what our Zoho review covers.

How to migrate from Intercom. Ask Zoho whether it offers a direct Intercom import. If not, same approach as Freshdesk: contacts by CSV, conversations converted to tickets through the API, old ID kept in a field.

Why switch to Brevo. Some teams picked Intercom to send emails and answer chat in one place. If email marketing is your main need, Brevo brings campaigns, SMS, a light CRM and a conversations inbox together, from a European company.

Who it's for. Small businesses that mostly do email marketing and a bit of chat.

Who it's not for. A support team handling hundreds of conversations a day with SLAs.

Its limit. Brevo is an email marketing tool first: its conversations inbox suits a small team, not a support desk with queues and SLAs. Its free email plan sends 300 emails a day.

How to migrate from Intercom. Import contacts by CSV (with their subscription status, so you never email someone who unsubscribed) and rebuild campaigns by hand. Chat history stays in your Intercom export.

Open Intercom billing and write down three things: monthly or annual, renewal date, and whether you signed a sales contract. Under contract, you need written notice 30 days before renewal, or the subscription rolls over for another 12 months. On annual billing, early cancellation isn't refunded pro rata, and a downgrade only applies at renewal.

So your switch date follows the renewal date, not the other way around. Send notice as soon as the decision is made: you keep using the tool until the paid period ends.

List what no export will ever move: workflows, SLAs, saved replies, office hours, routing rules. Add bots, proactive messages, product tours and NPS surveys. Note every integration (CRM, Slack, Stripe, your app) and every place the messenger snippet is installed.

One line per item, with its equivalent in the new tool. That sheet tells you whether the tool really covers your use before you pay anything.

Intercom only returns data for up to 2 years, in CSV or JSON. Anything older is gone from the export. Ask what your team needs day to day: often 12 to 24 months of history is enough, and the rest goes to the archive.

Split three bundles: contacts and companies, help center articles, conversations. The first two are easy. The third takes almost all the migration time.

The UI exports 200 to 300 conversations per operation. The reports CSV only has metadata, not message text. The S3 export has no transcript. The only path to full content is the Conversations API: list the IDs, then fetch each conversation.

Rules to know: 90 days max per export request (with no volume cap), 20 results per page by default and 150 max, and 429 errors when you go too fast, so build in pauses. Attachment links expire in under an hour: download files in the same pass, or you end up with dead links.

Before the full import, push about twenty varied conversations through: one with attachments, one very long, one with several agents, one from a contact with no email. Check dates, authors, internal notes and tags.

Keep the Intercom ID of every conversation and contact in a field of the new tool. The day a customer quotes an old thread, you'll find it in seconds.

Recreate by hand what your inventory lists: teams, assignment rules, office hours, saved replies, bots. In Crisp, replies come in by CSV as shortcuts. Elsewhere, copy them one by one and use the chance to delete the ones nobody uses.

If you keep Fin on top of Zendesk, this is when you set up the handoff to Zendesk agents. Otherwise, point the new tool's AI at your imported articles and check its answers on your 20 most common questions.

Run the full import a few days before the switch. On the day, freeze Intercom (no new conversations), import only what changed since, then replace the messenger snippet on your site and in your app. Point the support email address to the new inbox.

Brief the team the day before, with the list of replies and shortcuts that changed names.

Keep a full, frozen export outside any tool (JSON files and attachments). Once the subscription ends, Intercom doesn't delete your data but you lose access to it, and your help center and outbound messages are paused. So make sure your articles are live in the new tool and that old help center URLs redirect.

Intercom has no pause option. If your annual term is still running, drop to the minimum seats at renewal, or cancel within the notice period.