Chatbase vs Fin by Intercom (2026)
Comparing Chatbase and Fin by Intercom? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
At a glance
| Attribute |
|
 Fin by Intercom
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Build a custom AI support agent trained on your data and embed it on your site in minutes. | Intercom's AI agent resolves customer questions instantly using your support content, and hands off to your team when it can't. |
| Pricing | Paid · $32/mo billed annually | Per resolution · $0.99/outcome; $49/mo minimum (includes 50 outcomes) |
| Est. monthly cost | $32/mo $32/mo; Hobby plan, annual billing; $40 month-to-month; 7-day trial, no free plan | $2,970/mo $0.99 per resolution; Resolutions, procedure handoffs, disqualifications $0.99; qualifications $9.99; minimum applies on standalone helpdesks |
| Founded | 2023 | 2011 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Knowledge Base & Self-Service | AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | — | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Social | ✓ | ✓ |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | — |
| ISO 27001 | — | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | US (AWS us-east-1) | US, EU, Australia |
| Languages | 95+ languages | Dozens of languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | ✓ | — |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | 7-day trial on paid plans | 14-day free trial |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | — | 50 outcomes/mo minimum |
| Company | Independent, bootstrapped | Acquired by Salesforce (September 2026) |
| Works with | Zendesk Slack Stripe Salesforce WhatsApp Intercom | Intercom Salesforce HubSpot Freshdesk Zoho Front Dixa Gorgias Sprinklr Statuspage Stripe |
| Key features |
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| Next step |
Full listing Visit site → |
Full listing Visit site → |
Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.
Choose Chatbase or Fin by Intercom?
Choose Chatbase if
Best for: Small teams and side projects that want an AI agent trained on their site and docs live in an afternoon, with a 7-day trial, a $32 a month entry price on annual billing, 95+ languages, actions through Zendesk, Stripe and Slack, and no sales call anywhere in the process.
- you need a knowledge base and self-service
- you need a vendor that publicly claims GDPR
- you want the lower list-price bill (about $32/mo vs $2,970/mo at 5,000 conversations a month)
- you prefer a flat subscription to usage-based billing
Look elsewhere if you run a large or regulated support operation: Chatbase is bootstrapped and self-serve by design, with no stated data residency, and its message-credit pricing gets expensive at high volume compared with per-resolution vendors.
Choose Fin by Intercom if
Best for: Teams that want to pay only for resolved questions, at $0.99 per outcome with a 14-day trial and a self-serve start, whether they run Intercom or keep Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot or another help desk underneath, with US, EU or Australian hosting and SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 coverage.
- you need a full help desk and ticketing suite
- you need SMS coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 27001 and ISO 42001
- you would rather pay per resolved ticket than per seat
Look elsewhere if you want a predictable flat bill: the per-outcome model with a 50-outcome monthly minimum means a good month costs more. Also weigh the September 2026 Salesforce acquisition when you need roadmap certainty.
About Chatbase
Chatbase might be the most impressive solo act in this directory. Founder Yasser Elsaid built the first version in about six weeks during his final university semester in Canada, riding the earliest wave of "chat with your data" excitement, and then kept building. Bootstrapped in Toronto with zero outside funding, Chatbase has passed $9 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 10,000 businesses, with testimonials from names like Bridgestone, IHG, and Miele, all without a sales team in sight.
The product is the self-serve ideal: point it at your website, docs, and files, tune the agent's behavior and appearance, and embed it with a script tag. What began as a question-answering widget has grown real support muscle, with actions through integrations like Zendesk, Slack, Stripe, and Calendly, smart escalation to humans, WhatsApp and Slack as channels, and 80+ languages. It remains the fastest path in this directory from "we should have an AI agent" to one live on your site.
Pricing runs on message credits: $32 a month for Hobby, $120 for Standard, and $400 for Pro on annual billing, 20 percent more month to month, each with a 7-day trial. The old free plan is gone, and removing the Chatbase branding is a paid add-on.
Chatbase is the right starting point for small teams and side projects, and honest about what it is not: there is no ticketing depth or enterprise deployment team. Start with the trial, see whether an AI agent moves your numbers, and graduate to a heavier platform only if you actually outgrow it.
Read the full Chatbase listing → · See Chatbase alternatives →
About Fin by Intercom
Fin is Intercom's AI agent, and it has quietly become the product the whole company rallies around. It runs on the same platform as Intercom's inbox, help center, and messenger, so it already knows your customers before it says a word. Point it at your help articles and past conversations and it starts answering questions instantly across chat, email, SMS, and WhatsApp, taking real actions through your integrations and escalating to a human with full context when a question genuinely needs one.
The thing that made Fin famous is how it is billed. Instead of charging per seat or per conversation, Intercom charges roughly a dollar for every question Fin actually resolves, so you only pay when the robot earns its keep. That pay-for-outcomes model was unusual when Fin launched and has since become the template half the industry copies.
Intercom was founded in 2011 by four friends from Dublin, and it spent a decade building the messaging tools Fin now sits on top of. Fin does not insist you live inside Intercom, either. Its platform version bolts the same agent onto other help desks like Zendesk and Salesforce, so teams can keep their existing ticketing setup and still hand the easy questions to AI. It ships with simulation testing, analytics, and tunable tone controls so you can rehearse answers on historical tickets before flipping the switch on real customers.
In 2026 the company renamed itself Fin after this agent, and Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin, formerly Intercom, on September 10, 2026. Fin keeps selling on its own and on top of other help desks, but buyers on a competing CRM should ask how the roadmap changes under Salesforce.
For buyers, Fin is the safe, well-documented default: enormous scale, a public per-resolution price you can model on a spreadsheet, and a product that resolves millions of conversations every week for companies of every size. If you want an AI agent that is proven, measurable, quick to pilot, and easy to justify to a finance team that wants a number, Fin is usually the first name on the shortlist and rarely a regrettable one.
Read the full Fin by Intercom listing → · See Fin by Intercom alternatives →
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