Chatwoot vs Intercom
A side-by-side comparison of Chatwoot and Intercom on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
2 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both differ. Chatwoot starts at Free, then $19/seat/mo, Intercom at $29/seat/mo.
| Measure | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Free, then $19/seat/mo | $29/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Each agent seat | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.02 per credit | $0.99 per AI resolution |
| Included, where the other says no | 0 capabilities | 1 capability |
Capability by capability
2 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedStartups $19 and above. The free Hacker plan is live chat only. | IncludedAll plans | |
| Live chat | IncludedAll plans including the free Hacker tier. | IncludedAll plans |
| In-app messenger | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
| Voice | IncludedBusiness $39 and above on cloud. Self-hosted it needs a Premium Support licence at $19 per agent; the Community Edition excludes it. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| SMS | IncludedStartups $19 and above, through Twilio. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| IncludedDelivered through the Twilio channel. The per-plan gate for WhatsApp specifically is Unknown: the compare table gates SMS at Startups and voice at Business without naming WhatsApp. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | |
| Instagram / Facebook | IncludedStartups $19 and above, as part of the social channels. | Not published |
| 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 | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | IncludedAll plans. | 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 | IncludedBusiness $39 on cloud, Enterprise Edition $99 self-hosted. The compare table's "Service Level Agreement" row is this ticket SLA feature, not an uptime commitment. | IncludedExpert |
| Business hours | Not published | IncludedExpert only, as team office hours, alongside team reply time settings. Neither is available on Essential or Advanced. |
| Macros / saved replies | IncludedUnknown. Macros and canned responses exist as objects but are not a line item in the published compare table. | Not published |
| Custom fields | IncludedPublished as "Custom attributes", with pre-chat forms. Business $39 and above. | Not published |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Chatwoot | 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 | IncludedPublished as "Automation rules". Business $39 and above. | 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 | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedCaptain AI. Cloud paid plans, metered at one credit per message. Excluded from the Community Edition; on a paid self-hosted licence it runs Bring Your Own Key against your own OpenAI account. | IncludedAll plans, metered |
| Resolution over knowledge base | Not published | 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) | Not published | 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 | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
| Guardrails & citations | Not published | 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 | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
AI assist
| Capability | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Reply drafting | IncludedCaptain editor actions (suggest a reply). Consumes one AI credit per message on cloud. | 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 | IncludedCaptain editor actions (summarise). Consumes one AI credit per message on cloud. | 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 | IncludedPublished as "Label Suggestions". Consumes one AI credit per message on cloud. | Not published |
AI voice
| Capability | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | Not published | 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 | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedStartups $19 and above. Not on the free Hacker plan. | 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 | Chatwoot | 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 | Chatwoot | 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 | Chatwoot | 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 | Not published | 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. |
| Real-time reporting | Not published | IncludedExpert only. The real-time dashboard sits with SSO, HIPAA and SLAs behind the top tier. |
Collaboration
| Capability | Chatwoot | 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 | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedCloud Enterprise $99, or self-hosted Enterprise Edition $99. Excluded from the Community Edition and from the $19 self-hosted Premium Support licence. | IncludedExpert |
| SCIM provisioning | Not publishedNot claimed on the security page, the pricing page or the self-hosted plans page. | IncludedExpert in effect |
| Role-based access control | Not published | 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 | IncludedPublished as "Roles & Permissions". Self-hosted Premium Support $19 and above. The cloud gate is Unknown: it is not a line item in the cloud compare table. | IncludedTeammate roles, mappable from identity-provider groups. The plan gate is not published. |
| Audit logs | IncludedCloud Enterprise $99, or self-hosted Enterprise Edition. Not in the Community Edition. | 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 publishedNot claimed on the security page and no Business Associate Agreement is referenced anywhere. | IncludedExpert |
| SOC 2 | IncludedType II, on the vendor-operated cloud. Structurally N/A for an install you run yourself. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| ISO 27001 | Not publishedNot claimed on the security page. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated. "GDPR Compliant... data processing agreements available". | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| Data residency | IncludedSelf-hosting only. Chatwoot Cloud runs on AWS with servers located in the United States and publishes no region choice or EU option. | IncludedNot published |
| Data retention policy | Not published | 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 | Not published | IncludedDocumented as a GDPR workflow, covering both export and deletion of a contact's data on request. |
Developer
| Capability | Chatwoot | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedApplication and Client APIs on every plan including the free Hacker tier. Platform APIs are self-hosted or managed-hosting only. | IncludedAll plans |
| Webhooks | IncludedUnknown. Listed as an integration; the compare table does not gate it by plan. | 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 | NoThe API introduction documents authentication and endpoints and publishes no rate limit, so an API-only export cannot be planned against a known ceiling. | IncludedAll plans |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Chatwoot costs
$19/seat/month
7 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
Per agent per month - Free tier
Yes - AI pricing
$0.02 per credit - Vendor calls it
AI credit - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Not published
4 of 9 not published by Chatwoot, 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