Comparing Fin by Intercom and Gladly Sidekick? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots and Help Desk & Ticketing tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Fin by Intercom | Gladly Sidekick |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Per resolution · $0.99/resolution | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo |
| Founded | 2011 | 2014 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Integrations | Zendesk Salesforce HubSpot Freshdesk Statuspage Stripe | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack |
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.
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 →
Gladly organizes support around people instead of tickets, and that one decision changes everything about how it feels. Every customer gets a single lifelong conversation thread that follows them across voice, chat, SMS, email, and social, so they never have to repeat themselves and your agents always see the full story. Sidekick, its AI agent, lives inside that thread, resolving requests using real customer context and taking genuine actions like tracking an order, starting a return, or making a change, then handing off to a human with everything already in view.
A recent standout is Sidekick on Voice, which Gladly bills as the industry's only AI voice agent powered by that lifelong, multichannel history, so a phone conversation picks up right where a chat left off. The company has kept expanding the family with Sidekick Sales for product recommendations, Sidekick Email, and versions that extend the agent onto Zendesk and Salesforce, so teams on other platforms can borrow its brain.
Gladly was founded in 2014 by Joseph Ansanelli and his co-founders, and it has leaned cheerfully into its theme, naming its pricing tiers Hero and Superhero. It is very much an enterprise product, sold largely by quote with seat minimums, and its Sidekick AI is billed per conversation or resolution on top. That positioning fits its customer base of consumer brands that treat support as a loyalty channel, including Crate and Barrel, Ulta Beauty, and Breeze Airways.
The through-line here is emotional as much as it is technical: Gladly wants every interaction to feel like talking to a company that genuinely remembers you and your history. If you sell to consumers who expect a personal, continuous relationship rather than a cold, fresh ticket every single time they reach out, Gladly and its Sidekick agent are built from top to bottom around exactly that promise.
Read the full Gladly Sidekick listing → · See Gladly Sidekick alternatives →
Submit your AI customer support software to get listed alongside these tools and show up in head-to-head comparisons.