Leaving Intercom? Here's how Crisp, Help Scout, Chatwoot, and Plain stack up — cheaper hosted, B2B-focused, open-source self-hostable, or developer-shaped. All credible support platforms without Intercom's $99/seat Advanced upgrade wall.
Help Scout if you want Intercom-equivalent B2B support at half the price ($25/agent Standard). Chatwoot if open-source self-host fits ($0 OSS, $19 cloud Startups). Crisp if cheap-per-workspace pricing beats per-seat (free 2 seats, $45/mo Mini). Plain if your team is developer-shaped B2B SaaS ($35/seat). Intercom still wins if you genuinely need its AI agent ecosystem and accept the $99+/seat bill.
One row per dimension, the values side-by-side. The olive dot marks the clear winner for that dimension when there is one — most rows are a wash, and that’s the point.
The incumbent. Essential $29-39/seat unlocks the core inbox; Advanced $85-99/seat adds workflows + AI. Fin AI Agent at $0.99/resolution stacks on top. Premium positioning, premium price.
Per-workspace pricing — not per-seat. Free 2 seats, Mini $45/mo (4 seats), Essentials $95/mo (10 seats). European, GDPR-native, multi-channel inbox bundled.
B2B-shaped customer support. Standard $25/agent unlocks inbox + Docs + reporting. Plus $45 adds workflows + CRM integrations. Email-first, customer-friendly UI.
MIT-licensed open-source support platform. Self-host free; Cloud Startups $19/agent, Business $39, Enterprise $99. The open-source Intercom alternative.
Developer-shaped B2B support. Foundation $35/seat with Slack, email, live chat, in-app forms, Linear + Jira integrations. Horizon $89 adds AI suggestions + Help Center.
Three receipts, three scales. The line items are the same; the prices move. Every number is from the public May 2026 pricing page — we round to the nearest dollar but don’t invent.
Common pitfalls visible in public docs and community discussion. None of these will stop you shipping; all of them will cost you an afternoon if you don’t know about them.
Intercom's Fin AI Agent — the deflection AI that often does the heavy lifting in modern support — is billed at $0.99 per resolution on top of your per-seat plan. For a team with 5 agents on Advanced ($85 × 5 = $425/mo) handling 1,000 monthly AI deflections, that's an additional $990/mo. Total bill scales aggressively with AI usage.
Intercom's Advanced plan includes 20 Lite Seats (read-only access) free; Expert includes 50; Essential charges for them. For teams with many engineers who occasionally view conversations, this affects total cost meaningfully. Compare against Plain's free viewer seats which are unlimited on all plans.
Crisp's Plus plan at $295/mo gets you ticketing, white-labeling, advanced analytics, and unlimited AI — but it's $295 per workspace. For a team with 30 agents who'd otherwise pay $29-85/seat on Intercom, $295/mo is dramatically cheaper. The workspace-pricing model is Crisp's main differentiator and biggest gotcha for teams used to per-seat thinking.
Help Scout's Standard plan ($25/seat) supports up to 25 agents. Adding the 26th agent forces upgrade to Plus ($45/seat) for the entire team — an 80% per-seat increase. For teams approaching 25 agents, plan the upgrade as a budget event, not a single-seat addition.
Chatwoot's open-source MIT version is fully featured but you get community support only — no SLA, no priority response, no white-glove onboarding. For mission-critical support tooling, this matters. Cloud plans include support; self-host plus paid maintenance ($19-99/agent) is the middle path.
Plain doesn't offer a free tier like Crisp or Chatwoot self-host. The 14-day trial gives full access but you must subscribe to Foundation ($35/seat) to continue. For pure cost-minimization this rules out Plain; the developer-shape B2B positioning is the tradeoff.
Editorial framing only — we have not migrated either way ourselves. What follows is the pattern visible in public post-mortems, GitHub issue threads, and conference talks. Take it as observed-pattern, not lived experience.
Common B2B migration when Intercom's $85+/seat Advanced tier becomes the dominant infrastructure cost. Help Scout has a built-in Intercom importer for conversations, contacts, custom attributes, and tags. Plan 1-2 weeks for non-trivial workspaces; the harder part is re-routing inbound channels (forwarding email addresses, updating Intercom-hosted chat widget code).
The biggest mental shift: Help Scout is email-first while Intercom is chat-first. Some teams find this clarifying (email is async, no agent-on-a-chair pressure); others miss the live-chat immediacy. Most B2B SaaS teams find Help Scout matches their support shape better — Intercom's chat-first model was built for B2C.
Migration for teams wanting either open-source values, dramatic cost savings, or on-prem control. Chatwoot Cloud has Intercom import; self-host requires manual migration but the SQL schema is documented.
Plan 2-4 weeks. Self-host setup is real DevOps work (Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, ActionCable for real-time, email infrastructure). For teams without Linux ops experience, Cloud Startups at $19/agent is the easier path — still 70-80% cheaper than Intercom Advanced.
Migration for B2B SaaS teams whose support workflow is increasingly developer-centric — engineers triaging tickets, Linear/Jira integration mattering more than marketing campaigns. Plain has a built-in Intercom importer.
Plan 2-3 weeks. The migration is mostly about workflow redesign — Plain encourages Slack-native triage, Linear-issue creation from tickets, and developer-friendly Customer Cards. Teams that complete this migration often report higher engineering team engagement with support, since Plain's UX is designed for them.