Intercom vs Unthread
A side-by-side comparison of Intercom and Unthread 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. Intercom starts at $29/seat/mo, Unthread at $50/seat/mo.
| Measure | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $29/seat/mo | $50/seat/mo |
| Charged per | Each agent seat | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.99 per AI resolution | conversations/month allowance, no rate published |
| Included, where the other says no | 0 capabilities | 0 capabilities |
Capability by capability
1 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both products differs.
Channels
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| IncludedAll plans | IncludedEmail inboxes feed the same conversation model, and a Slack thread reply with /unthread send appended is delivered to the customer by email. | |
| Live chat | IncludedAll plans | IncludedIn-app chat widget that routes into Slack, plus an embedded customer portal. |
| 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. | IncludedThe core motion. A shared Slack Connect channel maps to a Customer record; anyone outside your email domain posting in it is classified a customer and opens a tracked conversation, anyone in your Slack workspace is an agent. Role overrides per channel are available. Threads are one conversation each; top-level messages group by a configurable time gap defaulting to one hour; conversations can be merged and split afterwards. |
| Microsoft Teams | Not published | IncludedNot stated on the pricing page. The vendor labels the integration beta: "This feature is currently in beta and actively being developed." |
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | IncludedAll plans. Multiple team inboxes arrive at Advanced, so the entry plan is a single shared inbox. | IncludedA Slack inbox and a web inbox with a Kanban board over the same conversations. |
| Ticket queues | IncludedAll plans carry the ticketing system. The customer-facing tickets portal is Advanced and above. | Not published |
| SLA policies | IncludedExpert | IncludedSLA policies and instances have full CRUD in the API, unlike automations. Policy writes need a workspace owner or admin service account. |
| 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 | IncludedTemplates under Outbound, inserted with a slash command, supporting rich formatting, images, buttons and embedded surveys. No API endpoint, so they do not export. |
| Merge & split | Not published | IncludedConversations can be merged or split after tracking, which is what makes grouped top-level Slack messages recoverable when the grouping guesses wrong. |
| Custom fields | Not published | IncludedTicket types carry custom fields, and both have API endpoints. |
| Ticket forms | Not published | IncludedTicket types with checklists and input fields, which AI can pre-fill when the intake setting is "Engage AI Agent". |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Included"AI automation builder" is listed only on Enterprise. The docs add that automations must be enabled for trial accounts and that custom actions must be enabled for the tenant. |
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | IncludedAll plans, metered | Not published |
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Auto-tagging | Not published | IncludedAI applies tags at conversation creation only, and manual changes override. AI also sets ticket type, generates titles and posts a two to three sentence summary into the triage channel on close. |
| Sentiment analysis | Not publishedNot published as a product feature. The Pro add-on analyses conversations for quality; sentiment is not named as an output. | IncludedNumerical sentiment score per conversation. |
AI voice
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedAll plans | IncludedUnthread's own documentation site runs on it and carries a "This site is powered by Unthread. Get your own support portal" footer. |
| 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. | IncludedNo AI feature is named on the Basic card. Pro is described as having "AI automation at the core"; the "AI automation builder" and "Self-learning documentation" lines appear only on Enterprise. |
Self-service
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | API onlyCursor-paginated JSON over the API for conversations, messages, attachments, customers, users, tags, ticket types, surveys and knowledge base articles, plus a CSV download from the analytics dashboard. No single-click account export and no archive file. |
| 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. | IncludedA Snowflake integration exists and connects with a dedicated service user, scopable read-only or read-write per table or schema. The documentation covers authentication and RBAC scoping and does not enumerate which Unthread objects are written, on what cadence, so this is not a documented full egress path the way a published warehouse schema would be. |
| 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"NPS & CSAT surveys" is listed on Pro, not Basic. |
| Real-time reporting | IncludedExpert only. The real-time dashboard sits with SSO, HIPAA and SLAs behind the top tier. | Not published |
Collaboration
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Approvals | Not published | IncludedApproval requests are a first-class object with create and list endpoints, assignable to a user or a group. |
Enterprise
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | IncludedExpert | Included"Single sign-on (SSO)" is listed only on the Enterprise card. |
| SCIM provisioning | IncludedExpert in effect | Included"HRIS integration & directory sync" is listed only on Enterprise. |
| 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. | IncludedRole-based access control is described on the security page with no gate; "Custom RBAC permissions" is an Enterprise line on the pricing card. |
| Custom roles | IncludedTeammate roles, mappable from identity-provider groups. The plan gate is not published. | Not published |
| Audit logs | IncludedTeammate Activity Logs exist as a feature. Intercom does not publish which plan they require, and they have no documented export path. | IncludedEnterprise only. Verbatim: "Note: this feature is only available on the Enterprise plan." |
| 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 | Included"HIPAA & BAAs" appears only on the Enterprise card. The security page states BAAs are available without naming a tier, so the pricing page is the stricter and more specific source. |
| SOC 2 | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedNo gate stated. SOC 2 Type II, report available under NDA through the trust centre. |
| ISO 27001 | IncludedNot plan-gated | Not publishedAbsent from the security page's certification list, which does name SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA. Absence from a closed enumeration is the finding. |
| GDPR | IncludedNot plan-gated | IncludedNo gate stated. |
| Data residency | IncludedNot published | IncludedNot stated. "Dedicated hosting" is an Enterprise line on the pricing card and the security page describes residency as "isolated, dedicated database instances", which reads like the same product, but the vendor does not join them. |
| 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 publishedNo configurable retention period is documented and no post-cancellation retrieval window is published. The privacy policy states only that personal data is kept "as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy". |
| Right-to-erasure tooling | IncludedDocumented as a GDPR workflow, covering both export and deletion of a contact's data on request. | IncludedBy email request: "In order to request a copy or deletion of your personal data, please contact support+data@unthread.io". No self-serve deletion control is documented. |
Developer
| Capability | Intercom | Unthread |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedAll plans | Included"Basic integrations & API" is listed on Basic, the cheapest paid plan. |
| 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. | IncludedHMAC-SHA256 signed, four event types: conversation_created, conversation_updated, conversation_deleted and message_created. Retried up to four times, auto-disabled after 100 consecutive failures or a 410. |
| 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 | Not publishedNo rate limit anywhere in the API reference. The only ceiling stated is a 100-record page limit on list endpoints. |
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 Unthread costs
$50/seat/month
2 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
$50 per agent / month on the annual toggle - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
Not published - Vendor calls it
conversations/month - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Not offered
4 of 9 not published by Unthread, checked