Ada vs Intercom
A side-by-side comparison of Ada and Intercom on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
1 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both differs.
| Measure | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Sales-gated | $29/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Not published | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | Not published | $0.99 per AI resolution |
| Included, where the other says no | 0 capabilities | 1 capability |
Capability by capability
1 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both products differs.
Channels
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedThe Ada Email Channel bills as an Email Conversation with a 72-hour inactivity window. | IncludedAll plans | |
| Live chat | IncludedChat is the default channel and the default billed unit. This is bot chat with escalation, not a human live-chat console. | IncludedAll plans |
| In-app messenger | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
| Voice | Included | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| SMS | Not published | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| Not published | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | |
| Community forum | Not published | NoNo community product. Nothing in the plan comparison offers forums, member profiles or moderation, so a team that wants customers answering each other buys that elsewhere. |
Ticketing
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Multiple team inboxes arrive at Advanced, so the entry plan is a single shared inbox. |
| Ticket queues | Not published | IncludedAll plans carry the ticketing system. The customer-facing tickets portal is Advanced and above. |
| SLA policies | Not published | IncludedExpert |
| Business hours | Not published | IncludedExpert only, as team office hours, alongside team reply time settings. Neither is available on Essential or Advanced. |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Round-robin assignment | Not published | IncludedAdvanced |
| Load balancing | Not published | IncludedExpert only, as workload management. Advanced gets round-robin assignment but not capacity-aware distribution. |
| Triggers | Not published | IncludedSimple automations are on every plan; the Workflows automation builder starts at Advanced. |
| Workflow builder | Not published | IncludedAdvanced |
| Escalation rules | Not published | IncludedAll plans, and they carry billing consequences that are published: an escalation triggered by workspace-level guidance or escalation rules is not charged as an outcome, while a handoff written into a Procedure is. |
AI resolution
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedUnknown. No plans are published. | IncludedAll plans, metered |
| Resolution over knowledge base | IncludedKnowledge is ingested from the customer's existing systems rather than migrated: Zendesk Guide, Salesforce Knowledge, Genesys, GuruKB, Helpjuice, Paligo, Contentful, Docusaurus and GitHub are all listed as content sources. | IncludedAll plans. Fin answers from the help centre and the Procedures a team writes, and the vendor is explicit about the boundary: "Fin trains only on your knowledge and Procedures, never on data you haven't approved". |
| Action-taking (API calls) | IncludedAPI tools, code tools and MCP tools are documented, and tool invocations appear in the conversation export as used_mcp with an outcome_status. | IncludedAll plans, through Procedures, which Fin executes and which can end in a configured handoff to a workflow, a team or a teammate. A successful Procedure handoff is itself a billable outcome at $0.99. |
| Handoff to human | IncludedEscalation is a first-class contractual concept: an Automated Resolution is defined as a conversation that is not escalated, and the export carries is_escalated. Handoff blocks are documented separately. | IncludedAll plans |
| Guardrails & citations | IncludedCitations only. Each conversation records used_articles with article id, name, url and source. Guardrails are not published as a named feature, so the guardrail half of this attribute is Unknown. | IncludedAll plans. Fin can be tested before it reaches anyone: "Before Fin ever talks to a real customer, run realistic Simulations against edge cases, including vulnerable-customer and compliance scenarios." Fine-tuning is opt-out, with data deleted within 30 days. |
| Multilingual AI | IncludedMultilingual support, language switching and manual translations are documented, and the conversation export carries an ISO-639-1 language field. Ada publishes no supported-language count, so the number is Unknown. | IncludedAll plans |
AI assist
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Reply drafting | Not published | Paid add-onCopilot, sold per seat on any plan at $29 per agent per month billed annually or $35 billed monthly. Every full seat gets 10 conversations a month included; unlimited use is the paid add-on. |
| Summarization | IncludedThe conversation export carries inquiry_summary and a machine-written automated_resolution_classification_reason. | Not publishedNot published. Copilot is described as an assistant for agent efficiency without an itemised feature list, so which of drafting, summarising and rewriting it covers cannot be read off a published page. |
| Translation | Not published | IncludedAll plans, metered: 10 AI auto-translation conversations per agent per month are included free, matching the 10 free Copilot conversations. |
| Auto-tagging | IncludedThe conversation object carries classifications, topics and intents alongside the Ada-generated automated_resolution_classification. | Not published |
AI voice
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | IncludedVoice Services are governed by their own Service Specific Terms with a separate billed unit and unpublished Fair Use Limits. | IncludedFin Voice exists and is the one part of Fin with no published price: "To use Fin Voice and for pricing details, please contact Sales." Outcome pricing at $0.99 is stated to cover chat and email only. |
Knowledge base
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
| Multi-brand | Not published | IncludedExpert |
| Localization | Not published | IncludedAdvanced |
| In-product widget | Not published | IncludedAll plans. The Messenger is included everywhere, and the pricing page bundles "free, unlimited live chat, support email, in-app chats, banners, and tooltips" into every tier. |
| AI answers over KB | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Fin is included on every tier and answers from help centre content; only the outcomes it produces are charged. |
Self-service
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot flows | Not published | IncludedAdvanced and above, as the Workflows automation builder. Essential is limited to simple automations, so scripted multi-step flows are the main reason to leave the entry plan. |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation QA scoring | Not published | Paid add-onThe Pro add-on, from $99 a month, covering analysis of 1,000 conversations a month plus 2,000 credits, with extra credits at $0.01. Sold on any plan. |
| Automated QA coverage | Not published | Paid add-onSame Pro add-on, pitched at full coverage rather than sampling: "see and continuously improve 100% of your customer conversations" and "check if quality meets your standards". |
| Forecasting | Not published | NoNo workforce management product. Workload management at Expert distributes conversations against capacity; it does not forecast contact volume or build a staffing plan. |
| Scheduling | Not published | NoNo shift scheduling. Team office hours at Expert set when a team is open, which is not the same as rostering people against a forecast. |
| Adherence tracking | Not published | NoNo adherence tracking. Nothing in the plan comparison measures agents against a schedule, because there is no schedule to measure against. |
Reporting
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Prebuilt dashboards | Not published | IncludedAll plans, as pre-built reports. |
| Custom reports | Not published | IncludedAdvanced and above. Essential is limited to the pre-built set. |
| Raw data export | IncludedBulk, cursor-paginated conversation and message export endpoints returning JSON, on a self-serve API key. | IncludedAll plans, and self-serve, but split by object: contacts export to CSV from the UI, while conversations are reachable only through the API or the S3 export. |
| Data warehouse sync | Not published | IncludedBulk conversation export to Amazon S3 as JSON is documented with no plan condition, which is a stronger position than the UI export it sits beside. |
| CSAT / NPS | IncludedCSAT score, style and free-text feedback plus CES and NPS all sit on the conversation object. There is no separate analytics or report export endpoint. | Not publishedNot published in the plan comparison. Conversation ratings are widely used in the product but appear on no reachable pricing or plan page, so the tier gate cannot be established. |
| Real-time reporting | Not published | IncludedExpert only. The real-time dashboard sits with SSO, HIPAA and SLAs behind the top tier. |
Collaboration
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Assignment | Not published | IncludedAll plans have assignment; the automation around it is gated. Round-robin arrives at Advanced with multiple team inboxes, and capacity-aware workload management at Expert. |
Enterprise
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | Not published | IncludedExpert |
| SCIM provisioning | Not published | IncludedExpert in effect |
| Role-based access control | IncludedUnknown. No plans are published, so no role is known to be tier-gated. | IncludedTeammate roles exist and can be mapped from identity provider groups, which ties the useful version of this to SCIM and therefore to Expert. |
| Custom roles | Not publishedThe team-access docs describe four fixed roles and a 25-row matrix. No mechanism for defining a custom role appears there. | IncludedTeammate roles, mappable from identity-provider groups. The plan gate is not published. |
| Audit logs | IncludedUnknown. No plans are published. | IncludedTeammate Activity Logs exist as a feature. Intercom does not publish which plan they require, and they have no documented export path. |
| IP allowlist | Not published | IncludedIP restrictions are listed on the security page alongside SSO, 2FA and SCIM. No plan gate is published. |
| Multi-brand | Not published | IncludedExpert |
| HIPAA / BAA | Not publishedAda publishes a HIPAA attestation dated 2024-09-30 in its trust center. Whether it will sign a BAA, and on what terms, is not published. | IncludedExpert |
| SOC 2 | IncludedUnknown. No plans are published. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| ISO 27001 | NoNot listed in the trust center. Ada states its security program follows CIS Controls v8.0 rather than ISO. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| Data residency | IncludedUnknown. Europe is an opt-in enrollment rather than a default; whether enrollment carries a price is not published. | IncludedNot published |
| Data retention policy | Not publishedDeletion mechanisms are published but no default retention period is. Checked the API reference and the terms. | IncludedPublished for AI data specifically rather than as a general policy: fine-tuning is opt-out "with data deleted within 30 days", and third-party model providers are "contractually barred from training on your data, with zero retention once a response is generated". |
| Right-to-erasure tooling | IncludedA bulk end-user deletion API with a pollable deletion job, plus a Data Compliance API for deleting chatter data that the docs now mark deprecated. | IncludedDocumented as a GDPR workflow, covering both export and deletion of a contact's data on request. |
Developer
| Capability | Ada | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedREST with JSON, rotatable API keys, opt-in versioning for breaking changes, cursor-based pagination and a downloadable OpenAPI 3.1 spec. | IncludedAll plans |
| Webhooks | IncludedWebhook endpoints are listable via the API, plus documented end-user created, end-user updated and audit log event webhooks. | Not publishedNot published on the pricing page or in the plan comparison. The REST API is documented with generous limits; webhooks are not named. |
| SDKs | Not published | IncludedAll plans. The Messenger ships as a web and in-app component, and "in-app chats" are bundled free into every tier alongside banners and tooltips. |
| App framework | Not published | IncludedAn app store exists and apps can be built against it. Intercom does not publish an app count on any page that renders, so the size of the ecosystem is unverified. |
| Published rate limits | Not publishedThe API Overview states that global rate limits apply and that certain API families apply their own local limits, but publishes no figure. /reference/rate-limits and /reference/limits both return 404. | IncludedAll plans |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Ada costs
- Billing unit
Per conversation - Free tier
Not published - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
Conversation - Human handoff
Still billed - Reopened chat
Billed again - AI billing window
1d of inactivity - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Full
2 of 9 not published by Ada, checked
What Intercom costs
$29/seat/month
4 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
Seat + usage hybrid - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
$0.99 per AI resolution - Vendor calls it
Outcome - Human handoff
Still billed - Reopened chat
Refunded - AI billing window
1d of inactivity - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Not offered