Crisp vs Intercom for startups and small teams

Crisp charges for the workspace, however many conversations it handles. The plans are free, $45, $95 and $295 a month for 2, 4, 10 and 20 seats, and every paid plan comes with a month of Hugo credits, worth $5, $25 and $75. Crisp puts those at around 90, 450 and 1,350 automated conversations. Hugo draws on them by the token, and the model you pick, the length of the messages and each extra reply all change the cost. Crisp’s billing article puts a full Hugo conversation at around $0.05 to $0.10. The credits reset on the 4th of each month without rolling over. There’s no yearly price to compare. You switch to yearly billing in the app once you’ve subscribed.

Intercom charges for people and for results. Every teammate who replies to customers needs a paid seat, and Intercom is testing two prices for its cheapest plan on the same page. Essential is $19 or $29 a seat a month billed yearly, and $29 or $39 billed monthly, depending on which version you’re shown. We saw both within two minutes of each other. On top of the seats, Fin costs $0.99 an outcome, with none included. An outcome is counted when a customer says Fin solved their problem, when they leave without asking for more help, or when Fin completes a Procedure you’ve set up. It’s charged at most once a conversation, never when Fin can’t answer or the customer asks for a person, and refunded if the conversation is reopened.

So a growing team pays more on Intercom for each person it adds, and nothing more on Crisp until it outgrows a plan’s seats. The AI is billed differently too. Crisp gives Hugo a fixed allowance that stops when it’s spent, and Intercom charges for each problem Fin settles, with no ceiling unless you set a hard limit. For four people, Crisp’s Mini is $45 a month. Intercom’s Essential is $76 or $116 a month billed yearly before Fin settles anything, by our arithmetic. Intercom pricing works through the whole bill for a team of one to three.

Pick Crisp if a small team shares one inbox and you want the bill to stay put as conversations grow. Conversations are unlimited on every plan, Hugo is inside the plan from Mini, and Crisp hosts your data on European servers on every plan. From Essentials, at $95 a month, ten of you get WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS and the phone in the same inbox, a help centre Hugo learns from as you write it, routing rules and round-robin assignment. If you’re new to Crisp, have raised under $1M and are under three years old, its Startup Program takes 30% off Essentials or Plus.

Pick Intercom if you run a support team, or will soon, and want the fuller helpdesk. Every plan has the Messenger, a shared inbox, ticketing and a public help centre, and Workflows, multiple team inboxes and custom reports start on Advanced. Fin is billed only when it reaches an outcome, and it can handle refunds, cancellations and account changes with data from systems like Stripe, Shopify and Salesforce. If you’ve raised up to $10M, have fewer than 15 employees and aren’t a customer yet, Early Stage makes the first year of Advanced $33 a month.

Both are built around a team working an inbox. Crisp prices the workspace your team sits in, and Intercom prices each person in it. If you handle support yourself, between building, neither was shaped around you, and there’s a third option.

When you’re the whole support team, the same questions pull you off the product every day. Deacon answers them in seconds, at any hour, from your own docs and in the language your customer writes in, with no workflows to build first. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know rather than make something up, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard appears in their chat if it’s still open. There’s no inbox to staff.

Then you answer each new question once. A question your docs didn’t cover gets an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Save & check asks Deacon the question again, shows you the reply it now gives and tells you how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

You also see what customers need while you’re still small. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Deacon’s Topics group questions on their own, count how many people asked and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on, and a topic is listed once two people have asked. Intercom’s Topics Explorer needs at least 15 questions or conversations before it forms a subtopic, and the Pro add-on it needs starts at $99 a month. Hugo’s Topics match conversations against themes you describe in advance. Deacon’s are on every plan, free included, and the same script counts your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

The price stays plain, too. Every feature is on every plan, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats. The free plan gives you 50 answers every month. Every plan answers with the same model, nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, and no plan moves itself up a level. There’s no badge to pay to remove, and the free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.