Front vs Intercom
A side-by-side comparison of Front and Intercom on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
3 of the 25 capabilities tracked on both differ. Front starts at $25/seat/mo, Intercom at $29/seat/mo.
| Measure | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $25/seat/mo | $29/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Each agent seat | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.05 per conversation | $0.99 per AI resolution |
| Included, where the other says no | 0 capabilities | 0 capabilities |
Capability by capability
3 of the 25 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedAll plans, with OAuth for Office 365 and Gmail. On Starter, only if email is the single channel type you choose. | IncludedAll plans | |
| Live chat | IncludedAll plans in principle, but Starter supports one channel type only, so chat there means no email or SMS alongside it. Omnichannel starts at Professional. | IncludedAll plans |
| In-app messenger | Not published | IncludedAll plans |
| Voice | IncludedProfessional and above. Voice and telephony run through Aircall or Dialpad rather than a Front-operated network. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| SMS | IncludedThrough Twilio on all plans, subject to the Starter single-channel-type limit. Dialpad also carries SMS. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go |
| Paid add-onNative WhatsApp is a paid add-on on Professional and Enterprise, priced as Meta's WhatsApp costs plus a 20% admin fee. Third-party WhatsApp through Twilio or Number AI is available otherwise. | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | |
| Instagram / Facebook | IncludedProfessional and above. Social channels are not on Starter. | Not published |
| X / Twitter | IncludedProfessional and above, listed with the other 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | IncludedAll plans. 1 workspace on Starter, up to 5 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise. | 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. |
| Macros / saved replies | IncludedProfessional and above. Starter has no macros at all; Enterprise removes the cap. | Not published |
| Ticket forms | IncludedUnknown. A customer portal with ticket forms is named in the product navigation, but no plan gate is published for it. | Not published |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Front | 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 | IncludedRules are capped: up to 10 on Starter, up to 20 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise. Smart rules are Enterprise only. | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | Paid add-onAutopilot, the omnichannel AI agent, is an add-on on all three plans starting at $0.05 per conversation. No included allowance on any plan, and Front bills the conversation rather than the resolution. | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Reply drafting | IncludedAI Compose is included on all plans and capped at 200 actions per teammate per day. | 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 | IncludedAI Summarize is included on all plans and capped at 200 actions per teammate per day. | 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 | IncludedAI Translate is included on all plans and capped at 200 requests per teammate per day. | IncludedAll plans, metered: 10 AI auto-translation conversations per agent per month are included free, matching the 10 free Copilot conversations. |
AI voice
| Capability | Front | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedBasic knowledge base on Starter, customisable on Professional, multi-language on Enterprise. | IncludedAll plans |
| Multi-brand | Not published | IncludedExpert |
| Localization | IncludedEnterprise only. The multi-language knowledge base is one of the three named Enterprise unlocks. | 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 | Front | 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 | Front | 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 | Paid add-onSmart QA is $20 per seat per month on Starter and Professional, included on Enterprise. | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Prebuilt dashboards | IncludedBasic analytics on Starter, advanced analytics on Professional. | IncludedAll plans, as pre-built reports. |
| Custom reports | IncludedEnterprise only. | IncludedAdvanced and above. Essential is limited to the pre-built set. |
| Raw data export | IncludedNo plan gate, but not self-serve on any plan: "You will need to contact Front's Support team in order to export your team's Front account data. You cannot do this on your own in the app at this time." | 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 | Paid add-onSmart CSAT infers satisfaction rather than surveying for it. $10 per seat per month on Starter and Professional, included on Enterprise. | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Internal notes | IncludedAll plans. Comments and discussions sit alongside the message thread, and free guests can comment without a license. | Not publishedNot published as a plan-matrix row. Lite seats are included at 20 and 50 on Advanced and Expert, which implies a collaborator class, but Intercom does not state what a Lite seat can do on any page reached here. |
| @mentions | IncludedAll plans. Guests may @mention participants already in the conversation but cannot invite new ones. | Not published |
| 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedProfessional and above, any SAML-based IdP, plus OAuth for Office 365 and Gmail. Not on Starter. | IncludedExpert |
| SCIM provisioning | IncludedProfessional and above. Not on Starter. | 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 | IncludedEnterprise only. Starter gets basic user management, Professional adds SSO and SCIM. | IncludedTeammate roles, mappable from identity-provider groups. The plan gate is not published. |
| Audit logs | Not publishedNo audit-log row appears in the pricing compare sections and the security page does not mention audit logging, so the feature itself is undocumented rather than plan-gated. | 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 publishedHIPAA is not mentioned on the security page, so neither a BAA nor its absence is published. | IncludedExpert |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNot plan-gated. SOC 2 Type II, report on request. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNot plan-gated. Certified, certificate on request. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated. A DPA is published. | IncludedNot plan-gated |
| Data residency | IncludedUnited States or European Union, on Amazon Web Services. No plan gate and no price are stated for the choice. | 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 | Front | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedAll plans. The Core API covers conversations, messages, contacts, tags and comments, and a separate analytics export endpoint exists. | IncludedAll plans |
| 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 | IncludedPublished per plan: Starter 50 req/min, Professional 100, Enterprise 200, enforced per company. Burst limits are 5 req/s per resource type and 1 req/s for exports. | IncludedAll plans |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Front costs
$25/seat/month
3 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
Per seat per month at the annual-prepay rate - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
$0.05 per conversation - Vendor calls it
conversation - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Support ticket required - Automation export
Not offered
3 of 9 not published by Front, 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