Help Scout vs Intercom (2026): Which Costs Less, and for What
Shayan, Founder15 min read
Help Scout costs less than Intercom, and the two bills have the same shape. Help Scout's Standard seat is $25 a month on annual billing and AI Answers, its AI agent, charges $0.75 per resolution. Intercom's Essential seat is $29 and Fin charges $0.99. A two-agent team handling 500 conversations a month pays $60 on Help Scout and $78 on Intercom if people answer everything, and $173 against $227 once the AI handles 30% of it. Help Scout has a free plan for five users and 100 helped contacts a month; Intercom has none. Intercom wins on the messenger and on the AI agent's reach: Fin answers over email, phone, WhatsApp and Slack and takes actions through connectors, where AI Answers works in the Beacon widget, with email listed as not yet on the roadmap. Both charge for the AI per conversation, forever. We make UserJot, where the inbox, the AI agent and the feedback board come at one flat price, and the same three teams are costed on it at the end.
Seats
Both price per full user. Help Scout's plans have ceilings; Intercom's have gates.
| Help Scout | Intercom | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest seat with live chat | Standard, $25 annual, $30 monthly | Essential, $29 annual, $39 monthly |
| Cheapest plan of any kind | Free, $0; Beacon is a contact form and docs search, not live chat | Essential, $29 |
| Middle plan | Plus, $45 annual, $54 monthly | Advanced, $85 annual, $99 monthly |
| Top plan | Pro, $75 annual, $90 monthly, ten-user minimum | Expert, $132 annual |
| Read-only seats on the cheapest paid plan | None on Standard; 5 light users on Plus, $10 each beyond on annual billing | None on Essential; 20 Lite seats on Advanced |
| User ceiling | 25 on Standard, 50 on Plus | Not documented |
| Free plan | Yes: 5 users, 100 helped contacts a month, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 10 articles | No; 14-day trial, no card |
Help Scout's ceilings decide the bill as much as the seat price. Standard stops at 25 users and Plus at 50, so growth forces a plan change rather than another seat, and Pro has a ten-user minimum that makes its cheapest bill $750 a month. The free plan is a real plan: replies pause at 100 helped contacts in a month and resume the next, which works for a B2B product with a small user base and not for a consumer one.
Intercom's Expert plan is listed with a monthly price, but Intercom's billing FAQ only offers monthly billing on Essential and Advanced. Some visitors to its pricing page see a $19 Essential variant inside what the page source marks as a test; take it if you see it and do not plan around it.
On both, the product manager who wants to read support conversations is a full seat on the cheapest paid plan. Help Scout adds light users at Plus, five included and $10 each after on annual billing; Intercom adds 20 Lite seats at Advanced. Neither kind can reply to a customer, and Help Scout's light users cannot use the mobile apps.
The AI meter
Both charge per resolved conversation on top of seats. The rates are 24 cents apart. What the two agents do is not.
| Help Scout AI Answers | Intercom Fin | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per resolution | $0.75 | $0.99 |
| Included | Three months with no resolution charges on new accounts; nothing after that | None listed |
| What counts | An answer the customer does not follow up on; several answers in one session bill once | An answer followed by silence; a configured Procedure handoff |
| Human handoff | Not billed | Ordinary escalation not billed; a configured Procedure handoff is |
| Reversal | Not documented | Yes, if the customer returns to the same conversation and asks for more help |
| Spend cap | Yes, a monthly resolution limit; AI Answers stops and Beacon falls back to its configured mode | Yes, workspace-level, not during the trial |
| Where it answers | Beacon on web, in-app and mobile; email is on the roadmap, not yet available | Messenger, email, phone, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack and Discord |
| Knowledge sources | Docs, website URLs, public Google Docs, PDF, Word and Excel files by URL; past conversations coming soon | Articles, crawled sites, PDFs, past conversations, Notion, Confluence and Guru syncs |
| Actions beyond answers | Collects contact details and hands off; app connections coming soon | Data connectors, API and MCP actions, multi-step Procedures with human approval |
| Agent assist for humans | AI Drafts, included on Plus and Pro, not sold on Standard | Copilot, $29 annual or $35 monthly per agent, 10 free conversations each |
AI Answers is an answerer: it reads your Docs and the pages you point it at, replies in the widget, and hands off when it cannot help. Fin is an agent: it answers on every channel, reads more sources, and takes actions in other systems. That gap is what the extra 24 cents and the Intercom seat premium buy. Help Scout's own pages call the agent Scout in places and AI Answers on the pricing page; the billing line is AI Answers.
Intercom's $0.99 has not moved since Fin went on sale in 2023, but the definition widened in 2026: a handoff you configured as a Procedure now bills as an outcome. The Intercom pricing post has the detail. Help Scout's $0.75 is new; it arrived with the return to per-user pricing by December 2025, and the Help Scout pricing post has the history.
Three bills
Monthly billing, every agent on a full seat with chat (Help Scout Standard, Intercom Essential), no light users, no Copilot, no startup discount. "With AI" means the agent resolves 30% of conversations and people take the rest, after Help Scout's three free months.
| Team | Help Scout | Intercom | Help Scout with AI at 30% | Intercom with Fin at 30% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $60 | $78 | $173 | $227 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $150 | $195 | $600 | $789 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $300 | $390 | $1,425 | $1,875 |
On annual billing the human-only rows are $50, $125 and $250 on Help Scout and $58, $145 and $290 on Intercom.
Help Scout is about three quarters of Intercom at every size, on seats and with the AI on. The ratio holds because the two bills are built the same way: a flat seat and a meter that scales with conversations. The two-agent team can also run on Help Scout's Free plan for $0 if its 500 conversations come from no more than 100 distinct people a month, with email and the Beacon contact form rather than live chat.
The second pair of columns is the one to read. At ten agents, AI Answers is $1,125 of a $1,425 bill and Fin is $1,485 of $1,875. On both, the AI is the line that grows, and it grows with your customers rather than your team. The seat is the entry fee; the meter is the revenue. Help Scout's is a cheaper meter, not a different model.
Live chat, email and an AI agent, one flat price.
UserJot's support inbox and Juno come with every plan. No per-user seats, no per-resolution fee.
Where each one is stronger
Both have a shared inbox, live chat, a help center and an AI agent on every paid plan. The differences are in what the cheapest plan includes and in what the AI can reach.
Help Scout, for the inbox. Standard includes two inboxes, two Docs sites, 150 workflows, one SLA policy, saved replies, customer properties and two years of reporting. Round robin and the customer portal start at Plus. WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram direct messages are on Standard, SMS arrived through Twilio in August 2026, and phone goes through Aircall. Docs sites take a custom domain, custom CSS and header and footer code, and are indexable by default. The directory lists Slack, Jira, Linear, GitHub, Asana, Trello, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Stripe, Shopify, Segment, Zapier and Make, with GitHub, Jira, Linear, HubSpot and Salesforce marked as Plus integrations. An MCP server is on Standard. The iOS and Android apps reply, draft, assign, tag and run workflows. Intercom gates workflows and round robin to Advanced and SLA policies to Expert.
Intercom, for the messenger and for Fin. The chat widget is the product. Proactive chats, banners and tooltips are on core plans; tours, checklists, surveys and a public News Center come with Proactive Support Plus at $99 a month. Help Scout's equivalent, Messages, is metered by unique viewers, with 2,000 a month included on paid plans. Fin answers from help articles, crawled sites, PDFs, past conversations and Notion, Confluence and Guru syncs, takes actions through connectors and an MCP server, and Intercom says it replies in 45-plus languages. Slack Connect channels create inbox conversations. Voice and video calls with screen sharing run inside the Messenger. Data can live in Dublin or Sydney rather than the US; Help Scout hosts in the US and documents no other region. Intercom's integrations page advertises 450-plus apps. Its agent mobile apps are in maintenance mode: no Copilot, no reports, no new tickets.
Neither, for feedback. Help Scout lists no feedback board of its own; Canny and Savio integrate, and Canny can pull feedback out of closed conversations. Intercom lists none either, and has announced a Canny integration that put suggestions and voting inside the Messenger. On both, the feature request a customer makes in a support chat ends as a tag or a ticket. That gap is the product UserJot was built from; the last section has it.
Ownership. Help Scout was founded in 2011, is a Delaware public benefit corporation of about 140 people, took investment from Lead Edge Capital in 2021, and named Toby Gabriner CEO on April 15, 2026, with co-founder Nick Francis as chairman. Intercom renamed its company Fin on May 12, 2026, and Salesforce completed its acquisition on September 10, 2026; Intercom stays the product name and Fin joins Salesforce AI Labs. One of the two changed hands this September; the other changed its billing unit twice in two years.
Reviews. Help Scout's G2 page has 431 reviews at 4.4, Capterra 226 at 4.6 and TrustRadius 62 at 9.3. The praise is simplicity and a "clean and effective interface" (G2, August 2026); the complaints are analytics that are "a bit too basic" (G2, May 2026), seat-cost growth (G2, January and August 2026), and the 2025 contact-based billing. Intercom's G2 page, now listed as Fin, has 3,922 reviews at 4.5 and TrustRadius 154 at 8.8. A Capterra reviewer in November 2025 wrote that "pricing could be simpler," a TrustRadius reviewer in October 2026 called Fin's answers "too generic or cycled," and a Reddit thread describes a 40-agent team whose bill went from roughly $4,000 to $9,000 a month after turning Fin on. That is one unverified account, and it matches the arithmetic above.
Fine print that differs
- Refunds. Help Scout refunds the first payment, monthly or annual, within 30 days, and nothing after that. Intercom's annual fees are non-refundable from the start.
- Renewal notice. Both renew annual plans unless they receive written notice at least 30 days before the renewal date. Help Scout's annual payment is a credit balance rather than twelve fixed months: added users and AI resolutions draw it down, and it bills again when it runs out.
- Data after cancelling. Help Scout ends access the moment the owner cancels, deletes data 60 days later, and promises a restoration only within 14 days. Intercom keeps your data but you cannot reach it without resubscribing, and access ends 30 days after termination. Export before you cancel on either.
- Startup programs. Help Scout for Startups is six months free on Plus with AI Answers, for incorporated tech startups under two years old with under $1 million in revenue, then list price. Intercom's Early Stage program is $65 a month in year one for companies under 15 people and under $10 million raised, with six Advanced seats and 300 Fin outcomes a month; 50% off in year two and 25% in year three.
- Price changes. Help Scout's terms let it remove your plan or require an upgrade on 60 days' notice, and it switched to contact-based billing in November 2024 and back to per-user billing a year later, at higher prices than before. Intercom's seat prices have been the same since at least January 2024, and its terms let it change prices before a renewal.
Which one to pick
Pick Help Scout when support is email first and the inbox is the thing you are buying: a shared inbox the team likes, Docs, workflows and an SLA on the cheapest paid plan, an AI that answers questions in the widget, and a bill about three quarters of Intercom's, with a free plan to start on.
Pick Intercom when the chat widget is the product and the AI agent needs reach: in-app messaging, proactive messages, Fin answering on email, phone and WhatsApp, actions in other systems through connectors, and data residency in the EU or Australia. Budget for Fin per outcome, set a spend cap the day the trial ends, and read the first invoice after you turn it on.
Pick UserJot when support and product feedback are the same conversation, which for a SaaS product they are. Your customers write to you from inside the app and over email, and the question after "how do I" is usually "could you add". If you are choosing between Help Scout and Intercom because you want chat in your app and an AI that answers from your docs, that is the product UserJot is, with the feedback board built in rather than bolted on, at a price that rounds to zero next to either bill above.
The same three teams on UserJot
UserJot runs your public feedback board, roadmap and changelog, and the same product carries your support. Live chat on your site and support email land in one inbox. Juno, our AI agent, answers from your docs and the sites you point her at, searches the feedback board before she replies, writes in the customer's language, and hands the thread to a person the moment a question needs one. When a customer asks for something that does not exist yet, she finds the matching request or drafts a new one, and files it with their vote once they confirm. AI Answers and Fin close the ticket; Juno closes the loop. A feature request that arrives in a support chat gets filed, voted on and announced from the same place, and the customer who asked hears about it when it ships. Everyone on the team can work the inbox, because there are no agent seats.
The price is flat: $0, $29 or $59 a month for the whole workspace, with no per-user seats and no meter on resolutions. We priced it that way on purpose. A support tool should not earn more when your customers need more help. The third row is the one to read: a team that grows from two agents to ten and from 500 conversations to 5,000 pays $29 at ten agents where it paid $0 at two, and on the other two that growth costs $1,252 and $1,648 a month more.
| Team | Help Scout with AI at 30% | Intercom with Fin at 30% | UserJot |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 agents, 500 conversations | $173 | $227 | $0 |
| 5 agents, 2,000 conversations | $600 | $789 | $29 |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations | $1,425 | $1,875 | $29 |
Free covers three teammates. Starter at $29 covers up to 100 and adds a custom domain, private boards, guest posting and the API. Pro at $59 adds single sign-on, identity masking and white-labelling. Conversations is in beta and free on every plan while it is, and beta workspaces hear before anything changes.
UserJot is a support inbox with a feedback board, not a help desk suite. It has no SLA policies, no workflow builder, no phone or SMS channel, no canned replies and no app marketplace. If your support runs on workflows and SLA reports, you are not our customer, and Help Scout is the right answer. If it runs on a chat widget, a support address and a docs site, you are, and you can be live this afternoon.
Questions people ask
Is Help Scout cheaper than Intercom?
Yes, by about a quarter at every size. Help Scout's Standard seat is $25 a month on annual billing against $29 for Intercom's Essential, and AI Answers' $0.75 per resolution is under Fin's $0.99. Help Scout also has a free plan for five users and 100 helped contacts a month, and Intercom has none.
Which has the better AI agent?
Fin does more: it answers on email, phone, WhatsApp, SMS and Slack as well as in the widget, reads past conversations and Notion, Confluence and Guru, and takes actions in other systems. AI Answers answers from your Docs and the pages you point it at, in the Beacon widget, and hands off; email, past conversations and app connections are listed as coming. Fin's billing is broader, since a configured handoff counts as an outcome; AI Answers bills only an answer the customer does not follow up on. Neither vendor's accuracy claim has been independently verified.
Does either have a free plan?
Help Scout does: five users, 100 helped contacts a month, one inbox, one Docs site and ten articles, with the Beacon contact form rather than live chat. Intercom offers a 14-day trial with no card and no free plan; its cheapest ongoing option is one Essential seat at $29 a month on annual billing.
Can I move from Intercom to Help Scout, or the other way?
Help Scout has a self-serve importer on Standard and above that lists Intercom as a source; it moves conversations, customers and tags, not articles, macros or automations, and the first 500,000 records are free. Intercom's route from Help Scout is a contacts CSV and a help-center URL import for articles; a self-serve Help Scout conversation import is not documented. Export before cancelling either: Help Scout ends access the moment you cancel, and Intercom's ends 30 days after termination.
What happened to Intercom?
The company renamed itself Fin in May 2026 and Salesforce completed its acquisition on September 10, 2026. Intercom is still the help desk product and Fin is still the AI agent, which is also sold on its own for teams on other help desks.
What happened to Help Scout's pricing?
In November 2024 Help Scout dropped per-user pricing for billing by helped contacts, with unlimited users. Teams with large user bases watched their bills multiply, and by December 2025 the per-user model was back at $25, $45 and $75 a user on annual billing, higher than before the experiment, with the new $0.75 AI meter alongside. The current page is that model.
Which is better for a small SaaS team?
We make UserJot, so weigh this accordingly: for a SaaS team whose support happens in the app and over email, UserJot puts the inbox, the AI agent and the feedback board in one product at a flat $0 to $59 a month, with no per-user seats and no resolution meter, and it is the only one of the three with the board built in rather than reached through a second product. Of the other two, Help Scout: the same bill shape as Intercom at three quarters of the price, and a free plan to start on.
Is there a free alternative to Help Scout and Intercom?
UserJot's Free plan includes live chat, a support email inbox and Juno for up to three teammates, next to a public feedback board, roadmap and changelog, with no contact cap. Help Scout's Free plan covers five users and 100 helped contacts a month without live chat. Intercom has a 14-day trial and a $65 startup program that steps down to a 25% discount by year three.
