Comparing Fin by Intercom and Parloa? They sit in different corners of the AI support market, which is exactly why buyers ask how the two stack up. 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. | AI Agent Management Platform focused on natural, human-sounding phone automation for contact centers. |
| Pricing | Per resolution · $0.99/outcome; $49/mo minimum (includes 50 outcomes) | Paid · Custom (per-minute) |
| Est. monthly cost | $2,970/mo $0.99 per resolution; Resolutions, procedure handoffs, disqualifications $0.99; qualifications $9.99; minimum applies on standalone helpdesks | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2011 | 2018 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | — | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | ✓ | — |
| ✓ | — | |
| Social | ✓ | — |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | — | ✓ |
| ISO 27001 | ✓ | ✓ |
| PCI DSS | — | ✓ |
| ISO 42001 | ✓ | — |
| EU AI Act | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | US, EU, Australia | North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific |
| Languages | Dozens of languages | 130+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | — | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | 14-day free trial | Not verified |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Sales-led (demo first) |
| Minimum commitment | 50 outcomes/mo minimum | Volume package commitment (custom) |
| Company | Acquired by Salesforce (September 2026) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Intercom Salesforce HubSpot Freshdesk Zoho Front Dixa Gorgias Sprinklr Statuspage Stripe | Genesys Amazon Connect Twilio Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow |
| 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: High-volume enterprise contact centers whose hardest channel is the phone and want natural-sounding voice agents in 130+ languages, with tooling to simulate, test and release agent fleets, consumption-based pricing, hosting in North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific and SOC 2, GDPR and ISO 27001 coverage.
Look elsewhere if you are a small team or want published pricing: Parloa is enterprise-only and quote-priced with a volume commitment, and its verified channels are voice and chat, not email.
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 →
Parloa is an enterprise platform built for the hardest support channel of them all: the phone. It focuses on natural-sounding, low-latency voice agents that can actually hold a conversation, and it wraps them in what it calls an AI Agent Management Platform, tooling to build, simulate, test, and safely release fleets of agents at contact-center scale. Though voice is its heart, Parloa has grown multimodal, extending the same agents to chat, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams, always aimed at high-volume enterprise contact centers rather than small teams.
The founders come by their voice obsession honestly. Parloa was started in 2018 in Berlin by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald, who had previously built voice experiences and were among the first developers in Germany to create applications for Amazon's Alexa. That head start on talking machines shows up in a product designed to make phone automation feel human instead of robotic.
Investors have noticed in a big way. Parloa became one of Germany's newest unicorns in 2025 and then roughly tripled its valuation to around three billion dollars in early 2026, all while surpassing fifty million dollars in annual recurring revenue, a remarkable clip for a company automating something as unglamorous as inbound calls. Its commercial model is consumption-based: voice is billed per minute and chat per interaction, at rates scoped to each use case under one volume commitment, with outcome-based pricing available where it fits.
Enterprises like Allianz, Booking.com, HealthEquity, SAP, and Decathlon trust it with serious call volumes across insurance, travel, and well beyond. Pricing is sales-led and geared toward large organizations handling hundreds of thousands of calls a year. If your support pain is concentrated squarely on the phone and you want AI that sounds genuinely natural even at massive scale, Parloa is a specialist built precisely for that particular fight.
Read the full Parloa listing → · See Parloa alternatives →
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