Intercom vs Plain
A side-by-side comparison of Intercom and Plain on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
2 of the 14 capabilities tracked on both differ. Intercom starts at $29/seat/mo, Plain at $35/seat/mo.
| Measure | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $29/seat/mo | $35/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Each agent seat | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.99 per AI resolution | Sidekick credit allowance, no rate published |
| Included, where the other says no | 1 capability | 1 capability |
Capability by capability
2 of the 14 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedAll plans | Included2 email addresses on Foundation, 10 on Horizon, 25 on Frontier | |
| Live chat | IncludedAll plans | IncludedListed on the integrations page and available from Foundation |
| In-app messenger | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
| Voice | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | Not published |
| SMS | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | Not published |
| IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | Not published | |
| Slack Connect | Not publishedA Slack integration is included on every plan, but Intercom does not say whether it covers Slack Connect shared channels, which is the thing a B2B support team actually needs. Recorded as Unknown rather than credited. | Included25 Slack channels on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon and Frontier. Slack Enterprise Grid is Frontier only. |
| Microsoft Teams | Not published | IncludedHorizon and above. Not available on Foundation. |
| Community forum | 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. | IncludedUnknown. A Discourse integration is listed on the compare table, but the per-plan checkmarks are images and could not be read. Plain ingests an existing forum rather than hosting one. |
Ticketing
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | IncludedAll plans. Multiple team inboxes arrive at Advanced, so the entry plan is a single shared inbox. | Not published |
| Ticket queues | IncludedAll plans carry the ticketing system. The customer-facing tickets portal is Advanced and above. | Not published |
| SLA policies | IncludedExpert | IncludedSLAs and business hours start on Horizon |
| Business hours | IncludedExpert only, as team office hours, alongside team reply time settings. Neither is available on Essential or Advanced. | IncludedHorizon and above |
| Macros / saved replies | Not published | IncludedDocumented as Snippets, with full API read and write on all plans |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Round-robin assignment | IncludedAdvanced | Not published |
| Load balancing | IncludedExpert only, as workload management. Advanced gets round-robin assignment but not capacity-aware distribution. | Not published |
| Triggers | IncludedSimple automations are on every plan; the Workflows automation builder starts at Advanced. | Not published |
| Workflow builder | IncludedAdvanced | IncludedUp to 5 workflows on Foundation, unlimited on Horizon and Frontier |
| Escalation rules | 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. | IncludedEscalation paths start on Horizon |
AI resolution
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedAll plans, metered | IncludedAri, the customer-facing AI agent, is free on all workspaces and consumes no credits. Bring-your-own AI agent is Frontier only. |
| Resolution over knowledge base | 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". | Not published |
| Action-taking (API calls) | 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. | Not published |
| Handoff to human | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
| Guardrails & citations | 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. | Not published |
| Multilingual AI | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
AI assist
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Reply drafting | 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. | Not published |
| Translation | IncludedAll plans, metered: 10 AI auto-translation conversations per agent per month are included free, matching the 10 free Copilot conversations. | Not published |
AI voice
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | 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. | Not published |
Knowledge base
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedAll plans | Not publishedKnowledge bases are plan-limited (1 on Foundation, unlimited above) and a Help center API section is documented, but nothing states whether they are publicly hosted. The headless portal starts on Horizon. |
| Multi-brand | IncludedExpert | Not published |
| Localization | IncludedAdvanced | Not published |
| In-product widget | 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. | Not published |
| AI answers over KB | IncludedAll plans. Fin is included on every tier and answers from help centre content; only the outcomes it produces are charged. | Not published |
Self-service
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot flows | 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. | Not published |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation QA scoring | 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. | Not published |
| Automated QA coverage | 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". | Not published |
| Forecasting | NoNo workforce management product. Workload management at Expert distributes conversations against capacity; it does not forecast contact volume or build a staffing plan. | Not published |
| Scheduling | 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. | Not published |
| Adherence tracking | NoNo adherence tracking. Nothing in the plan comparison measures agents against a schedule, because there is no schedule to measure against. | Not published |
Reporting
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Prebuilt dashboards | IncludedAll plans, as pre-built reports. | Not published |
| Custom reports | IncludedAdvanced and above. Essential is limited to the pre-built set. | Not published |
| Raw data export | 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. | Not published |
| Data warehouse sync | 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. | Not published |
| Real-time reporting | IncludedExpert only. The real-time dashboard sits with SSO, HIPAA and SLAs behind the top tier. | Not published |
Collaboration
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Assignment | 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. | Not published |
Enterprise
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedExpert | IncludedFrontier only. Neither publicly priced plan includes SSO. |
| SCIM provisioning | IncludedExpert in effect | IncludedFrontier only |
| Role-based access control | IncludedTeammate roles exist and can be mapped from identity provider groups, which ties the useful version of this to SCIM and therefore to Expert. | Not published |
| Custom roles | IncludedTeammate roles, mappable from identity-provider groups. The plan gate is not published. | IncludedUnknown. A Custom roles row exists on the compare table but the per-plan checkmarks are images and could not be read. |
| Audit logs | IncludedTeammate Activity Logs exist as a feature. Intercom does not publish which plan they require, and they have no documented export path. | Not publishedNo row on the compare table, no docs page and no API object. |
| IP allowlist | IncludedIP restrictions are listed on the security page alongside SSO, 2FA and SCIM. No plan gate is published. | Not published |
| Multi-brand | IncludedExpert | Not published |
| HIPAA / BAA | IncludedExpert | Not publishedNo claim on /pricing, the trust center notices or the help center. |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedUnknown. A SOC2 Type II Report row sits under Services and compliance; per-plan gating is not readable. A live trust center is published with dated subprocessor notifications. |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNot plan-gated | Not publishedNot claimed on the pricing page, the trust center notices or the help center. |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedNot plan-gated. A DPA is published at /legal/dpa, and the terms forbid training AI models on Subscriber Data without written consent. |
| Data residency | IncludedNot published | Not publishedNo published policy. The documented endpoint is core-api.uk.plain.com, which points to UK hosting, but no multi-region option is published and the data-residency help article returns 404. |
| Data retention policy | 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". | Not published |
| Right-to-erasure tooling | IncludedDocumented as a GDPR workflow, covering both export and deletion of a contact's data on request. | Not published |
Developer
| Capability | Intercom | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedAll plans | Not publishedOnly a GraphQL API is documented. No REST surface appears in the docs navigation. |
| GraphQL API | Not published | IncludedAll three plans. Plain is built on the same GraphQL API it exposes. |
| 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. | IncludedWebhooks and Events are shown on all three plans |
| SDKs | 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. | Not published |
| App framework | 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. | Not published |
| Published rate limits | IncludedAll plans | NoNo rate-limit figure on the GraphQL Introduction or Authentication pages, and no rate-limit page in the docs navigation. |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
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
What Plain costs
$35/seat/month
2 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
$35/month - Free tier
No, 7-day trial - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
Sidekick credit - Human handoff
Not billed - Reopened chat
Refunded - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Partial
2 of 9 not published by Plain, checked