Comparing Fin by Intercom and Hiver? Both are 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 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.
| Attribute |
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|---|---|---|
| What it is | Intercom's AI agent resolves customer questions instantly using your support content, and hands off to your team when it can't. | NLP for context identification, and intelligent template suggestions. Intuitive interface. |
| Pricing | Per resolution · $0.99/outcome; $49/mo minimum (includes 50 outcomes) | Paid · $25/user/mo billed annually |
| Est. monthly cost | $2,970/mo $0.99 per resolution; Resolutions, procedure handoffs, disqualifications $0.99; qualifications $9.99; minimum applies on standalone helpdesks | $250/mo $25 per seat/mo; Growth plan, annual billing; $35 month-to-month; 7-day free trial |
| Founded | 2011 | 2011 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing | Agent Assist & Copilots Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Social | ✓ | ✓ |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | — | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | ✓ | — |
| Data residency | US, EU, Australia | US |
| Languages | Dozens of languages | Not verified |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | — | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | 14-day free trial | 7-day free trial |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | 50 outcomes/mo minimum | 2 seats minimum |
| Company | Acquired by Salesforce (September 2026) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Intercom Salesforce HubSpot Freshdesk Zoho Front Dixa Gorgias Sprinklr Statuspage Stripe | Gmail Slack Salesforce Jira Shopify Asana |
| 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.
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.
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.
Best for: Teams that want to keep working in Gmail or Outlook and turn it into a help desk with shared inboxes, SLAs, an AI copilot and AI QA, at a published $25 per user billed annually with a 7-day trial, SOC 2, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage and Salesforce, Jira and Shopify integrations.
Look elsewhere if you want a standalone ticketing system or hosting outside the US: Hiver is a layer on your mail client and its verified residency is US only. The AI QA and insights features sit in the top tier.
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 →
Hiver's founding insight was that plenty of teams never wanted a ticketing system at all: they wanted to keep working in Gmail, just without the chaos of forwarded emails and reply-all collisions. It turns Gmail and Outlook into a genuine help desk, with shared inboxes, assignments, SLAs, and analytics layered onto the mail client your team already lives in. Its AI handles the modern expectations: a copilot drafts responses, bots deflect common questions, AI QA scores conversations, and a knowledge base powers self-service, and the newer Hiver Omni adds chat, voice, and WhatsApp for teams that outgrow email alone.
The company has one of the longer backstories in this directory. It began in 2011 as GrexIt, founded by Niraj Ranjan Rout and Nitesh Nandy out of India's Morpheus accelerator, and was renamed Hiver in 2015. Today it runs from San Jose and Bengaluru, took a $22 million Series B led by K1 Capital in 2022, and serves thousands of teams that quietly manage support@ addresses without ever adopting a traditional help desk.
Hiver is also refreshingly transparent commercially, which is rarer in this category than it should be. There is a free-forever plan, paid tiers start at $25 per user per month, and the price of every plan is on the website, though the fancier AI QA and insights features sit in the top Elite tier.
Choose Hiver if your support genuinely runs on email and you want AI leverage without retraining the team on new software. It will not out-muscle a dedicated enterprise platform on autonomous resolution, but for Gmail-first teams it removes almost all the friction of getting started, and the free plan makes trying it a zero-risk exercise.
Read the full Hiver listing → · See Hiver alternatives →
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