Top 7 Intercom Alternatives and Competitors in 2025

What is Intercom?

• G2 Score: 4.5 ⭐ (3,361 reviews)

Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform designed to help you deliver better support and lighten your team’s workload with AI agents.

The key features of Intercom are its AI agents: Fin AI Agent and Fin Copilot.

Fin is a customer-facing support agent that chats directly with your customers to answer questions or solve issues. Copilot, on the other hand, works behind the scenes. It supports your team by quickly finding information about customers or processes, and help them complete tasks faster and more consistently.

Intercom offers features and capabilities for in-app engagement and contextual guidance, as well, including:

• Product tours
• Tooltips
• Onboarding checklists 
• Surveys 
• Banners 
• Help center (standalone)

On top of all that, Intercom lets you talk to your users across multiple channels. You’re not limited to just your platform or help center; you can also reach out through email, SMS, social media, or phone, and manage those conversations on one platform.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom has a (relatively confusing) pay-as-you-go pricing system.   

There are 3 main plans: Essential, Advanced, and Expert, all priced per seat and billed annually:

• Essential: $29/seat/month
• Advanced: $85/seat/month
• Expert: $132/seat/month

Fin and Copilot are available as add-ons. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, while Copilot costs $29 per support agent per month with unlimited usage.

All plans come with free and unlimited access to live chat, support email, in-app messages, banners, and tooltips. Other channels –like email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone– are billed separately under a pay-as-you-go model. You can check Intercom’s pricing page for specific rates.

There’s also another add-on called Proactive Support Plus, which costs $99/month.

With this add-on, Intercom offers unlimited checklists, A/B testing, and webhooks. Product tours, surveys, posts, mobile carousels, and push notifications are also available through the Proactive Support Plus add-on. 

The add-on comes with 500 'Messages Sent' each month. If you go over this for tours, surveys, posts, mobile carousels, or push notifications, you get charged per message.  

What are the weaknesses of Intercom?

Intercom has amazing AI agents and an intuitive support channel management system. However, features outside of its main scope (AI-first customer service) are pretty limited. Here are Intercom’s main downsides 👎🏻

• In-app engagement Features: Intercom’s product tours, guides, and tooltips aren’t interactive. So they end up feeling more like static in-app docs that users have to read, rather than something they can actually engage with. 

At a time when basic interactivity isn’t enough (and gamification is becoming more common) Intercom’s in-app engagement tools can feel a bit dull and underwhelming.

• Customization: The level of customization for in-app materials and flow design in Intercom is fairly limited. You can apply your brand colors and adjust fonts, but things like logic branching, complex conditions, or multi-path flows are pretty basic compared to more advanced tools. 

The same goes for targeting and personalization; you can use user attributes, but there’s no real dynamic personalization or advanced personalization/segmentation.

• Control over User Data: Intercom does offer some analytics and user engagement data, especially around your onboarding materials. But the insights are fairly limited. You don’t get much control over what data is collected, which means the dashboards and reports often lack depth. 
• Your User Experience: Many Intercom users point out issues with how connected the platform’s features are –or aren’t. Some tools, especially those related to in-app guidance, can feel a bit clunky and disjointed. This makes it tough to build a smooth, cohesive experience for your users inside your product.
• Pricing: As we’ve just explained above, Intercom has a pay-as-you-go pricing model. This works well when you’re just starting out; you pay less when your team and user base are small. But as you grow, whether by using more features or reaching more users, the cost can rise quickly and exponentially. 

7 Best Alternatives to Intercom

#1 Intercom vs. UserGuiding

• G2 Score: 4.7 ⭐ (622 reviews)

UserGuiding is a no-code, all-in-one product adoption platform that helps you with in-app guidance, feature engagement, customer support, and communication. It offers many features and capabilities that are easy to use, such as:

• Product tours
• Onboarding checklists
• Hotspots and tooltips
• Announcement modals (banners, slideouts, pop-ups, etc.)
• NPS and custom in-app surveys
• AI assistant
• Resource center (in-app)
• Knowledge base (standalone)
• Product updates (standalone) 
• Segmentation
• Analytics

You can also use UserGuiding to:

• Onboard new users
• Personalize your user experience (UX)
• Convert your trial users into paying customers 
• Announce new features and product updates 
• Offer an automated self-serve support 
• Collect user feedback and/or conduct user research for product re-design 

Intercom and UserGuiding share some similarities in both their use cases and feature sets. However, they don’t address the exact same customer needs and pain points.

Intercom is a customer service platform with limited product engagement and adoption capabilities. UserGuiding, on the other hand, is a product adoption platform with features for both in-app and off-app user engagement and communication.

They differ in feature depth, core focus, customization options, and more. Here’s how Intercom and UserGuiding compare side by side 👇🏻

Intercom and UserGuiding differ in usability, pricing, and several other aspects that shape the overall customer experience:

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding has a transparent, MAU-based pricing model. There are 3 main plans: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise. Here are their starting points 👇🏻

• Starter: $174/mo (billed yearly) for up to 2,000 MAU
• Growth: $349/mo (billed yearly) for up to 2,000 MAU
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. 

You can also choose monthly billing if that’s what you prefer. It’s less cost-effective than yearly billing, but at least it's an option, unlike many other Intercom alternatives. With monthly billing, the Starter and Growth plans start at $249/month and $499/month, respectively, for up to 2,000 MAU.

For comparison, if you go with a yearly contract and increase your MAU from 2,000 to 5,000, the pricing looks like this:

•  Starter: $209/month
•  Growth: $419/month

UserGuiding packs a lot of value into its plans, even into the Starter plan, which includes almost all core features like guides, surveys, checklists, the resource center, analytics, hotspots, knowledge base, and product updates. 

The only real trade-off is usage volume, with limits on how many guides or checklists you can create.

For growing teams or those with more advanced needs, the Growth and Enterprise plans lift those usage caps and unlock premium features like advanced customization, localization, better account controls, and expanded customer services. 

🤖  The AI Assistant is available on all plans, but it's billed separately at $0.69 per resolution. There’s no upfront fee; you just pay at the end of each month based on your usage.

📜 Here’s what UserGuiding customers say about the platform:

#2 Intercom vs. Appcues

• G2 Score: 4.6 ⭐ (332 reviews)

Appcues is a multi-channel user engagement platform that offers features/capabilities for in-app messaging, feature engagement, trial conversion, user journey mapping, and workflow automation. Some of these features/capabilities are:

• Flows (modals, slideouts, and hotspots) 
• Tooltips
• In-app Surveys and NPS
• Checklists
• Launchpads (in-app resource center)
• Banners
• Resource Centers
• Segmentation
• Event Tracking
• A/B Testing
• Email Messaging

Appcues stands out with its support for mobile apps and iFrames, and it also allows you to send push notifications and emails alongside in-app messages. Thus, multichannel engagement.

Its mobile support is a big differentiator among Intercom competitors. 

On top of that, Appcues offers solid product engagement analytics and event tracking to help you understand user behavior more clearly. With Events Explorer, you can track user engagement, set specific goals, and monitor your progress toward reaching them. 

Intercom Wins at…

• AI Agent: Appcues doesn’t offer any AI agent features, neither for internal teams nor for end-users. Intercom, on the other hand, provides both.
• Knowledge Base: Unlike Intercom, Appcues doesn’t have a built-in knowledge base. However, it does support integrations with external knowledge base tools. So if you’re already using one and plan to continue, you can connect it to your in-app resource center.
• True Omnichannel Experience: While Appcues supports communication across multiple channels, Intercom is still more advanced and comprehensive when it comes to delivering a true omnichannel experience.

Appcues Wins at…

• Interactive Features: Intercom’s in-app engagement tools, like product tours and tooltips, are fairly basic and not interactive. Appcues, on the other hand, offers interactive features for in-app engagement.
• Analytics & Event Tracking: Intercom provides limited analytics around user engagement. Appcues offers a stronger set of reporting tools, more control over user data, and built-in event tracking for deeper insights.
• Workflow & User Journey Automation: While still in beta, Appcues has introduced a user journey mapping feature. It lets you build multi-channel journeys and automate messaging.
• Customization: Appcues gives you more flexibility when it comes to customizing and personalizing in-app content. 

Appcues Pricing

Appcues has 3 plans: Start, Grow, and Enterprise. 

The Start plan begins at $300/month (billed annually) for up to 1,000 MAUs. The Grow plan starts at $750/month for the same limit. As your MAUs increase, so do the prices:

• For up to 2,000 MAUs: Start is $375/month, Grow is $800/month
• For up to 3,000 MAUs: Start is $450/month, Grow is $850/month

So, Appcues is not the most flexible or generous when it comes to user limits.

And actually, when you break it down, Appcues has the steepest price increases per additional MAU among all the Intercom alternatives in our list. 

Unlike UserGuiding, Appcues doesn’t offer much in terms of features or product capabilities at its lower pricing tiers. 

Some important features, like resource centers, NPS surveys, and pins, aren’t included in Appcues’ Start plan. Instead, you can choose to add them individually as paid add-ons, depending on your needs.

It’s also worth mentioning that customer support is quite limited at the Start plan level, and several key integrations –including basics like Slack– aren’t available unless you’re on a higher-tier plan.

📜 Here’s what Appcues customers say about the platform:

#3 Intercom vs. Userpilot

• G2 Score: 4.6 ⭐ (726 reviews)

Userpilot is a product growth platform that helps you with engagement, onboarding, product analytics, user feedback, and user insights. It offers tools you can use to drive adoption, retention, and, in the end, revenue. Here are the platform’s main offerings:

• Tooltips and hotspots, 
• Guides, 
• Checklists
• Session replays
• Surveys
• Resource centers
• Announcement modals
• Feature tagging and event tracking capabilities 
• Segmentation

Like Appcues, Userpilot supports mobile applications and offers several mobile-first features, such as carousels, slideouts, and push notifications. However, the mobile support and features are not included in any of the plans (which we’ll talk about in a minute) and need to be bought separately as add-ons. 

Userpilot’s analytics is a solid one. 

It offers separate reports for funnels, user trends, and feature usage. The same goes for its event tracking capabilities. Userpilot allows you to track and label user events through several methods, such as labeling events visually, labeling with CSS, grouping multiple events, and more.

Intercom Wins at…

• AI Agents: Userpilot, too, lacks any AI agent capability. This will become a common theme across many Intercom competitors, as you've probably already noticed...
• Customer Support Features: In addition to AI Agents, Intercom offers several other powerful features for support teams, including task automation and support content management.

Userpilot Wins at…

• Event Tracking and Analytics: Apart from basic material engagement goals and monitoring, Intercom doesn't offer event tracking capabilities.
• Segmentation: Userpilot allows for advanced user segmentation and in-app content personalization based on both user attributes and user actions. 
• Surveys & User Feedback: Userpilot has 30+ in-app survey templates ready to use. Plus, it allows for more customization. 

Userpilot Pricing

Userpilot, also, has 3 plans: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise. 

The pricing of these plans is based on MAU, but unlike UserGuiding and Appcues, Userpilot doesn't allow you to calculate potential costs based on MAU directly on their pricing page. Instead, they only list the starting prices for their plans.

The Starter plan costs $249/month (paid annually) and includes up to 2,000 MAUs, with no scaling option available. The Growth plan starts at $799/month (paid annually) and offers custom MAU calculations.

While the Starter plan can be paid monthly, the price increases to $299/month. Unfortunately, there is no monthly billing option for the Growth or Enterprise plans.

In addition to the 2,000 MAU limit, the Starter plan has another important restriction: it doesn’t allow any add-ons. Whether you're looking for mobile support or additional integrations, these aren’t available on the Starter tier.

The Starter plan includes basic tools like guides, hotspots, NPS surveys, banners, checklists, segmentation, and basic analytics. However, it doesn’t provide access to key features like the resource center, custom surveys, session recording, or A/B testing, and there’s no option to add these features separately.

As a result, Userpilot’s Starter plan is arguably the most limited entry-level offering among the products we've reviewed (and will review in this article), both in terms of features and scalability.

📜 Here’s what Userpilot customers say about the platform:

#4 Intercom vs. WalkMe

• G2 Score: 4.5 ⭐ (482 reviews)

WalkMe is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that you can use to guide your users (and employees), automate tasks, standardize workflows, monitor SaaS software usage, boost employee productivity, and embrace the AI transformation.

In terms of in-app guidance and engagement, WalkMe offers:

• Product tours and walkthroughs 
• Hotspots and tooltips
• NPS, CSAT, and custom surveys 
• AI agent 
• Segmentation 
• Event tracking (task completion and user interaction reports)

WalkMe also has powerful and comprehensive analytics. 

⚠️ Some WalkMe users complain about the platform’s heavy focus on quantitative analytics and user data, and state that the dashboards and reports might be misleading, as they don’t dive into the details of individual interactions but instead provide a bird’s-eye view of the overall picture.

👉🏻 Check out WalkMe’s use cases and individual features. 👈🏻 

Intercom Wins at…

• Help Center: WalkMe doesn't provide a standalone knowledge base feature, whereas Intercom offers a dedicated help center feature along with separate analytics for the articles within it.
• Usability: While Intercom can feel disconnected and unintuitive at times, it’s still easier to set up, maintain, and use. On the other hand, WalkMe requires significant technical knowledge and time to overcome its learning curve.
• Pricing: The same goes for pricing; while Intercom can get pricey, it’s nothing compared to WalkMe’s costs. Though WalkMe doesn’t offer transparent pricing, it’s known for being expensive, with plans often averaging five figures.

WalkMe Wins at…

• Employee Onboarding and Productivity: WalkMe offers a separate plan for employee use, which includes several unique features, such as WalkMe Workstation.
• Process Standardization: WalkMe Stories is a screen recording and guide creation feature that works through the WalkMe extension. Instead of spending time manually creating guides, you simply record your screen while completing a task, and WalkMe handles the rest. 

You can then share your Stories library with your team to maintain consistency across processes and workflows.

• ActionBot: ActionBot is WalkMe’s AI agent that helps you with task completion/automation, change detection, and next-step recommendations. It’s more advanced than Intercom’s Fin. 
• Analytics and Control over User Data: WalkMe provides more detailed analytics and greater control over user data compared to Intercom. 

WalkMe Pricing

Unlike all the platforms and software we’ve examined so far, WalkMe doesn’t share its pricing publicly. However, thanks to (former) WalkMe customers on the internet and forums, we know it’s very pricy 💸💸 

According to Vendr data, the average cost for WalkMe is about $79,000 annually 💰💰

And it can even reach up to $400,000… 

WalkMe offers two main plans (WalkMe for Customers and WalkMe for Employees), with the distinction primarily being for the Employee Plan. 

This plan includes everything in the customer-facing plan, such as in-app guidance, content management, and analytics. But it goes further by providing additional features for workflow automation, boosting employee productivity, and enabling real-time collaboration. 

Both plans also offer add-ons like AI features and advanced security options to further customize and enhance the user experience.

📜 Here’s what WalkMe customers say about the platform:

#5 Intercom vs. Pendo

• G2 Score: 4.4 ⭐ (1,489 reviews)

Pendo is a Software Experience Management (SXM) platform that offers several features for product analytics, user sentiment analysis, in-app guidance, experience personalization, and user support. Here are the features you can use for these use cases:

• Guides, tooltips, onboarding modules,
• Resource centers,
• NPS surveys (in-app/ in-app + email),
• Product roadmaps,
• Session recordings, 
• And detailed reports for your funnels, user events, paths, and workflows

You can use Pendo for product planning, as well. 

Pendo Listen is an add-on feature set that helps with user research. It lets you analyze survey responses using AI, build product roadmaps, and prioritize your backlog based on real user insights.

Intercom Wins at…

• Omni-Channel Communication: While Pendo supports mobile, it doesn’t offer communication channels like email, chat, or SMS. Intercom excels here with true multi-channel support.
  Ease of Use: Pendo has a steeper learning curve and may require technical knowledge, whereas Intercom is more user-friendly and easier to get started with.
• AI Agent: Pendo offers AI tools mainly for insights and content generation, but lacks the full-service AI agents Intercom provides for customer support and internal help.
  Pricing Transparency: Pendo’s pricing is not publicly listed and is generally considered expensive. Intercom, while not cheap, at least gives you more visibility into potential costs.

Pendo Wins at…

• User Research: Pendo has a comprehensive toolkit for user research and A/B testing. 
• Product Planning: Pendo offers a roadmap feature. 
• Product Analytics: Pendo allows you to create detailed reports for funnels, paths, retention, and workflows. 

Pendo Pricing 

Like WalkMe, Pendo doesn’t disclose its pricing. However, like WalkMe, Pendo’s customers also provide information about their prices, and according to Vendr, the average customer pays Pendo around $46,987 per year.

Pendo has 4 paid plans: Base, Core, Pulse, and Ultimate. What makes the difference between Pendo’s plans (and ultimately shapes each customer’s contract) is a mix of several key factors. These include:

• Number of monthly active users (MAUs)
• Number of apps you track
• Depth of analytics or guide usage
• Access to premium features (resource center, NPS, session replays, etc.)
• Advanced capabilities (localization, automation, data sync, and more)
• Number of integrations needed
• API access
• Account and data management preferences
• Contract length and terms negotiated

Pendo also has a free tier. 

However, it is extremely limited. It includes just a small set of features, namely in-app guides, Pendo-branded NPS surveys, and basic analytics. The plan supports up to 500 monthly active users (MAU), but it comes with no customer support at all. 

So yes, it’s free, but calling it a true freemium model feels like a stretch, especially when compared to other tools that offer far more generous and functional free tiers.

📜 Here’s what Pendo customers say about the platform:

#6 Intercom vs. Product Fruits

• G2 Score: 4.7 ⭐ (126 reviews)

Product Fruits is a user onboarding and retention tool that mostly focuses on in-app user experience and guidance. In terms of features, it offers:

• Tours and hints (tooltips and hotspots)
• Onboarding checklists
• NPS and surveys
• Announcements (banners, pop-ups, and newsfeed)
• Life ring button (resource center)
• Knowledge base 
• AI writer 
• Segmentation

Product Fruits has a pretty simple and easy-to-navigate UI. 

You can use it to collect user feedback, announce product updates, centralize your help materials, and create a self-serve support hub. 

Intercom Wins at…

• AI Agent and Customer Support Features: Intercom offers AI-powered agents designed for both your customer support team and your end users. Its support tools, like the inbox and the help center (or knowledge base), are also well-designed, intuitive, and simple to navigate.

Product Fruits Wins at…

• In-app Engagement: Product Fruits’ features are interactive and also come with more customization options. 
• Usability: Product Fruits offers a well-integrated and smooth UX. Especially compared to Intercom’s highly criticized buggy and disconnected UX. 
• Pricing: Product Fruits is one of the most budget-friendly onboarding solutions available in the market. It starts at $79/mo (yearly). 

Product Fruits Pricing

Product Fruits has 3 plans: Core, Boost, and Enterprise. 

The Core plan starts at $79/month (billed annually) for up to 1,500 MAUs, while the Boost plan begins at $139/month for the same limit. If you prefer monthly billing, it’s still available, though slightly more expensive. 

With monthly billing, the Core plan goes up to $99/month, and the Boost plan to $159/month, both still for up to 1,500 MAUs.

To give you a sense of how pricing scales with usage: when you increase your MAUs from 1,500 to 3,000, the annual prices become $149/month for the Core plan and $209/month for the Boost plan.

The Enterprise plan has custom pricing. 

When it comes to features, most of what the platform offers is available across all three plans. However, there are a few key differences to keep in mind. The AI Writer and survey features are only available in the Boost and Enterprise plans, so if you’re on the Core plan, you’ll miss out on those. 

Another limitation of the Core plan is that it only supports public knowledge bases, while the higher-tier plans offer the option to create password-protected ones for more controlled access. 

On the bright side, all plans include unlimited seats and domain usage, which is a solid plus for growing teams.

📜 Here’s what Product Fruits customers say about the platform:

#7 Intercom vs. Userflow

• G2 Score: 4.8 ⭐ (105 reviews)

Userflow is a user onboarding tool that zeroes in on the in-app experience and guidance, much like Product Fruits. It’s a no-code solution with virtually no learning curve, meaning you won’t need help from developers or technical teams to get set up or keep your onboarding materials running smoothly, unlike platforms like WalkMe or Pendo.

Here’s what Userflow offers:

• Product tours (flow builder) 
• Checklists
• In-app surveys
• Resource center
• Banners
• Feature announcements 
• AI assistant 
• Segmentation
• Event tracking

Userflow allows you to create user paths by adding steps to a diagram, or a "flow."

You can include speech bubbles, tooltips, hotspots, announcement modals, and even survey questions within a flow, all while viewing the entire UX in one chart.

Resource centers, checklists, banners, and AI assistant have their own feature builders. 

Userflow also provides a good level of customization for your in-app experiences. While some customization options are located directly within each feature’s builder, others are accessible through the main settings page.

The customization tools within the builders are generally straightforward and easy to use, though the interface can feel a bit cluttered at times, especially for new users. 

Intercom Wins at…

• Help Center: Userflow doesn’t have any standalone features like a knowledge base or product updates. 
• AI Agents: Userflow offers an AI agent for your end users, similar to Intercom's Fin. However, Intercom's Fin is more advanced, and when combined with the Copilot, it becomes even more powerful than Userflow's more limited AI assistant.

Userflow Wins at…

• User Path Designing: You can see the whole in-app user journey with Userflow.
• Usability: Userflow provides a smooth and intuitive user experience. Unlike Intercom’s sometimes disconnected features, Userflow’s flow design framework feels seamless and easy to navigate.
• Pricing Plans: Depending on your needs and use cases, Intercom might seem cheaper than Userflow. However, the value you get for the price is much higher and more optimized with Userflow. 

Unlike some other Intercom alternatives, Userflow doesn’t hold back when it comes to offering powerful capabilities.

Userflow Pricing

Userflow has 3 plans: Startup, Pro, and Enterprise. 

The Startup plan starts at $240/month (billed annually) for up to 3,000 MAU, while the Pro plan begins at $680/month (billed annually) for up to 10,000 MAU. Like UserGuiding and Userpilot, Userflow also offers a monthly billing option. 

In that case, the prices rise to $300/month for the Startup plan and $850/month for the Pro plan.

To give you a reference point for MAU-based pricing increases under annual billing: the Startup plan goes up to $320/month for 6,000 MAU, while the Pro plan reaches $760/month for 15,000 MAU. 

The Enterprise plan comes with custom limits and pricing. 

So, while Userflow’s pricing isn’t exactly budget-friendly, its generous MAU limits can be a great value –if you actually need that much. 

Otherwise, it might feel like you’re paying for more than you use.

Each Userflow plan comes with unlimited flows, launchers (hotspots), banners, and checklists. The Startup plan includes 2 surveys, while the Pro and Enterprise plans offer unlimited surveys.

All plans also include access to the AI Assistant. Features like event tracking and localization are only available in the Pro and Enterprise tiers.

📜 Here’s what Userflow customers say about the platform:

In Short...

Written by

Ceren Kurban

Creative Content Writer

Ceren is a Creative Content Writer at UserGuiding. She writes about the latest development in SaaS and product. She decided to pursue a career in journalism and content upon seeing The Bold Type. When she is not writing, you can find her gossiping with stray animals or listening to the Alvin and the Chipmunks covers of random songs

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