Intercom alternatives for a small business

People do not usually leave Intercom because it is bad. They leave because the bill stops matching the business. Understanding exactly where that happens is what makes the rest of this list useful rather than just cheaper.

Prices below were checked against each company's own site on 31 October 2026. This category changes its pricing often, so treat them as the shape of each deal and click through before committing to anything.

Where Intercom stops fitting

Intercom charges in two directions at once, and both are reasonable on their own.

Seats. Essential is $29 per seat per month on annual billing, Advanced $85 and Expert $132. Paying monthly costs more — Intercom's own help pages list $39, $99 and $139. A seat is a person who answers conversations.

Resolutions. Its AI agent, Fin, is billed at $0.99 per resolved outcome, on top of the seats. If Fin does not resolve it, you are not charged, which is a genuinely fair way to meter it.

Now put a small business into that. Two people who answer chat sometimes, between doing the actual work. Four hundred conversations in a good month. That is roughly $58 in seats and, if most of those conversations resolve, somewhere near $400 in Fin outcomes.

Nothing there is a rip-off. It is a structure built for a company where chat is somebody's job. If chat is nobody's job at your place, you are buying the shape of a support department.

Compare the bill, not the feature list

Every tool in this category lists the same features. What actually differs is what the meter counts:

Billed by	Goes up when	Suits
Seat	You hire	A real support team
Resolution	The AI succeeds	High volume, predictable margin
Conversation tier	You cross a bucket	Steady, forecastable traffic
Flat	Nothing	Lumpy traffic, no support team

Pick the row that matches how your business actually moves, then look at tools in that row. It is a far better filter than any feature comparison, and we wrote the longer version of this in how much an AI chatbot actually costs.

The alternatives, honestly

Tidio — if your volume is steady

Tidio plans start at $29 a month, with its Lyro AI sold separately by conversation volume: roughly $39 for 50 AI conversations, $140 for 200, $350 for 500 and $700 for 1,000 — about $0.58 to $0.65 each. Every plan, including the free one, includes 50 Lyro conversations.

Good when you know roughly how many chats you get and it does not swing much. Awkward when a campaign lands and you jump a tier mid-month.

Chatbase — if you mainly want answers from your own content

Free gives 50 message credits. Hobby is $40 a month for 700, Standard $150 for 4,000, Pro $500 for 15,000.

Watch the unit here: a credit is a message, not a conversation, and a real conversation is several messages. Divide by your realistic messages-per-chat before comparing it to anything priced per conversation.

Crisp — if you want a shared inbox without per-agent pricing

Priced per workspace rather than per agent: Free, Mini at $45 a month, Essentials at $95 and Plus at $295, with AI usage metered on top. Not having to pay per person is the real draw.

One caveat worth stating plainly: Crisp's own pricing page is the place to confirm these, as several of its pages quote the same figures in different currencies.

Tawk.to — if the budget is genuinely zero

The live chat itself is free and has been for years, which is a real offer, not a trick. The money appears in add-ons: removing their branding and the AI assistant are each billed separately, and tawk.to's own pages currently disagree with each other on the monthly rate — the add-ons page says $29 a month, the help centre says $39 monthly or $348 a year.

Good when you have people to staff it and no budget. Weak when you expected the AI to be part of "free" — it is not.

Site Pilot — flat, which is the argument we have an interest in

This is our own product, so read this section with that in mind. We price flat: one plan, all of it included, and the invoice does not move when the month goes well. That trades a higher floor for a ceiling you already know.

That is the right trade for a business without staffed chat and with uneven traffic. It is the wrong trade if you have steady, low volume — a metered tool will genuinely cost you less, and you should take it.

When Intercom is still the right answer

Three cases, and they are not rare:

• You have a real support team. Per-seat pricing is honest when seats are filled, and Intercom's tooling for a team is better than everything above.
• High volume with healthy margins. At scale, $0.99 a resolution against a support hour you did not pay for is good arithmetic.
• You already run your support on it. Migrating a working helpdesk to save a hundred a month is usually a bad trade once you count the week it takes.

How to choose in ten minutes

1. Count the people who would genuinely answer chats. If the answer is zero, cross every per-seat tool off the list.
2. Take your busiest month, not your average one, and price each option at that number.
3. Check what the unit is — message, credit, conversation or resolution. The difference between them is often fivefold.
4. Ask what happens at the cap. Does it stop answering, or keep billing? Both exist and you want to know which before it happens.
5. Test the answers before the price. Every tool here has a free tier big enough to find out whether it answers your customers correctly. A cheap bot that is confidently wrong costs more than any plan on this page.

If you are still deciding whether to automate chat at all, the comparison with live chat and a plain contact form is the question that comes before this one.