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Hiver vs Intercom (2026)

Comparing Hiver and Intercom? Both are Agent Assist & Copilots 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 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

Conversations/mo

% handled by AI

Agent seats

Price it at my volume

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 Hiver or Intercom?

About Hiver

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 →

About Intercom

Intercom is the customer service suite that the Fin AI agent was built on: an omnichannel inbox, a ticketing system, a help center, outbound messaging, reporting and a Knowledge Hub that feeds both the AI and the human team. This listing covers that helpdesk. Fin, Intercom's AI agent, has its own listing in this directory, because it is also sold on its own for teams that keep Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot or Freshdesk underneath. The AI piece that belongs to the helpdesk itself is Copilot, an assistant in the inbox that reads the whole thread, internal notes and customer data before a teammate opens the conversation, drafts a reply from the knowledge base and past conversations, and pulls context from GitHub, Linear and Notion. It can update a ticket or log an issue in those tools with the teammate's approval, and it stops to ask if a reply looks like it has the wrong customer details or belongs to another conversation.

The design choice worth understanding is that Fin and the human team share one record, one inbox and one knowledge base. When Fin needs an approval it asks a teammate and then finishes the conversation itself, and managers get suggestions on missing content or data integrations to fix. Tickets come in three shapes: customer issues, back-office collaboration and tracker tickets that tie many reports of one widespread problem together. The inbox handles chat, email and phone as core channels, plus WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Discord, SMS and shared Slack channels, and the help center publishes in 45 languages across multiple brands.

Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett founded Intercom in 2011. In 2026 the company renamed itself Fin after its AI agent, and Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin, formerly Intercom, on September 10, 2026, with Fin placed inside Salesforce AI Labs; intercom.com still sells the helpdesk under the Intercom name. It reports more than 30,000 customers. Neo Financial credits it with replacing a stitched-together stack with one system for AI and human support, and Anthropic reports around 560,000 Fin resolutions a month at about a 79 percent resolution rate. Intercom holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001, with hosting in the US, EU or Australia.

Pricing has two parts: seats and usage. On annual billing the Essential plan is $19 per seat a month ($29 month to month), Advanced $85 and Expert $132, and every plan includes Fin at $0.99 per outcome. Copilot is an add-on at $29 per agent a month billed annually, after 10 free Copilot conversations per agent each month, and WhatsApp, SMS, phone and email campaigns are pay-as-you-go. There is a 14-day free trial with no card. Choose Intercom if you want the helpdesk and the AI agent as one system rather than two vendors stitched together, especially for SaaS, fintech or ecommerce support. Skip it if you want a flat, predictable bill or a vendor outside Salesforce: seats, outcomes, add-ons and channel usage all meter separately.

Read the full Intercom listing →  ·  See Intercom alternatives →

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