Intercom vs Richpanel
A side-by-side comparison of Intercom and Richpanel on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
4 of the 26 capabilities tracked on both differ. Intercom starts at $29/seat/mo, Richpanel at $99/seat/mo.
| Measure | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $29/seat/mo | $99/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Each agent seat | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.99 per AI resolution | $0.20 per conversation |
| Included, where the other says no | 1 capability | 0 capabilities |
Capability by capability
4 of the 26 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedAll plans | Included | |
| Live chat | IncludedAll plans | Included |
| In-app messenger | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
| Voice | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | Via partner"There is no native voice or phone. Richpanel integrates with Aircall, Dialpad, and JustCall. It does not host VoIP." |
| SMS | IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | IncludedTwilio is the named sub-processor for SMS connectivity. |
| IncludedAll plans, pay-as-you-go | IncludedConnectivity runs through 360dialog GmbH, the one sub-processor hosting customer data outside the United States. | |
| Instagram / Facebook | Not published | Included |
| 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. | Not published |
Ticketing
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | IncludedAll plans. Multiple team inboxes arrive at Advanced, so the entry plan is a single shared inbox. | Included |
| Ticket queues | IncludedAll plans carry the ticketing system. The customer-facing tickets portal is Advanced and above. | Not published |
| SLA policies | IncludedExpert | IncludedProduct SLA policies are ungated and count time against configured business hours. Richpanel's own response targets are contractual only on Enterprise. |
| Business hours | IncludedExpert only, as team office hours, alongside team reply time settings. Neither is available on Essential or Advanced. | Not published |
| Macros / saved replies | Not published | Included |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Round-robin assignment | IncludedAdvanced | IncludedPublished as "Round Robin & Balanced Assignment". |
| 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 | IncludedPublished as Workflows: "Design custom workflows using rules and triggers to automate actions like ticket routing, response templates, and customer notifications." |
| 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. | Not published |
AI resolution
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedAll plans, metered | IncludedMetered on the AI line rather than gated by plan. Not optional either: the helpdesk is never sold without the AI. |
| 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. | Included"Order lookups, tracking, address edits, exchanges, store credit, subscription skips, pauses and swaps, cancellations and returns run as real tool calls against Shopify, Recharge, Loop, Skio and the rest of your stack. Each action carries its own permission." |
| Handoff to human | IncludedAll plans | Included"Missing instructions escalate. Always. Where your policy is silent it hands over, every time." |
| 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. | IncludedFive published layers: pre-ship evals, a second model reviewing drafts that state a dollar amount or touch an order, mandatory escalation on missing instructions, per-tool permissions, and QA review of every closed conversation. |
| Multilingual AI | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
AI assist
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | IncludedCollaborative mode: "AI drafts, your team approves. Nothing sends without a person." |
| 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 | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedAll plans | Not published |
| 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 | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Order lookup | Not published | IncludedThe self-service portal is free on every plan with no per-order fee and no volume tier. |
| Returns / RMA | Not published | Paid add-onSeparately billed from $99 a month, ecommerce brands only, never sold standalone. |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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". | Included"The QA Agent reviews closed conversations and reports the knowledge gaps, missing tool calls, and instruction fixes." No per-seat or per-conversation charge of its own, though the conversations it touches still meter. |
| 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 | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | No"Analytics-derived data is not subject to portability." Conversation CSV export is unaffected; the reporting layer is what cannot leave. |
| 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 |
| CSAT / NPS | 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. | Included |
| Real-time reporting | IncludedExpert only. The real-time dashboard sits with SSO, HIPAA and SLAs behind the top tier. | Not published |
Collaboration
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | Included |
Enterprise
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedExpert | Included"SAML Single Sign-on (SSO) and 2-factor authentication (2FA) supported." No plan gate is stated and Richpanel publishes no plan ladder. |
| SCIM provisioning | IncludedExpert in effect | Not publishedNamed nowhere on the trust portal, the app security page or the API reference. |
| 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. | Included"Permission levels cover app settings, billing, user data, read/send messages." |
| 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 publishedAudit logging is documented as an internal control ("logs shipped to ELK and Cloudwatch; S3 for archival"), not as a log a customer can read or export. |
| 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 | Included"One inbox for every channel and every brand." |
| HIPAA / BAA | IncludedExpert | IncludedThird-party audited by Scrut Automation in December 2025. BAA available on request for customers processing PHI. |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedType II, audited annually. Report on request through the DPO. |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNot plan-gated | Not publishedNot claimed. The compliance section lists CASA and HIPAA; the trust portal adds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR. ISO 27001 appears only as a bar Richpanel holds its own sub-processors to. |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedDPA covering GDPR, SCCs and the UK IDTA, plus a named DPO and a 15-business-day sub-processor objection window. |
| Data residency | IncludedNot published | Not publishedHosting is AWS us-west-2 in Oregon and every sub-processor bar the WhatsApp connector sits in the United States. EU-only processing is directed to sales before signing rather than published as an option. |
| 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. | IncludedDeletion runs 60 days to "Up For Deletion" then 15 more to purge, and can be accelerated to within a few hours on request. |
Developer
| Capability | Intercom | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedAll plans | Includedv1.1, covering conversations, customers, orders, subscriptions, users, teams, tasks, tags, channels, files and reports, plus a separate Returns API. |
| 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. | IncludedPublished as "Webhooks: HTTP Targets". |
| 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 | Included50 requests per 30 seconds, uniform. No per-plan tier is published because there are no plans. |
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 Richpanel costs
$99/seat/month
1 published plan, billed annually- Billing unit
Two line items and no plan ladder - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
$0.20 per conversation - Vendor calls it
AI-handled conversation - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Refunded - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Not published
3 of 9 not published by Richpanel, checked