Intercom vs Parloa (2026)
Comparing 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.
At a glance
| Attribute |
 Intercom
|
 Parloa
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AI-first helpdesk with an omnichannel inbox, ticketing, help center and Copilot, built natively around Intercom's Fin AI agent. | AI Agent Management Platform focused on natural, human-sounding phone automation for contact centers. |
| Pricing | Paid · $19/seat/mo billed annually + $0.99/Fin outcome | Paid · Custom (per-minute) |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | No published price to estimate |
| Founded | 2011 | 2018 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing Knowledge Base & Self-Service | 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 or Australia | North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific |
| Languages | 45 languages (Help Center) | 130+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | 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 (Fin on an existing help desk) | Volume package commitment (custom) |
| Company | Acquired by Salesforce (September 2026) | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Slack Shopify GitHub Linear Notion Salesforce WhatsApp Instagram Facebook Discord Okta Microsoft Entra ID OneLogin | 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.
Choose Intercom or Parloa?
Choose Intercom if
Best for: SaaS, fintech and ecommerce support teams that want an AI-first helpdesk with Copilot in the inbox and the Fin agent built in, starting at $19 per seat a month billed annually plus $0.99 per Fin outcome, with US, EU or Australian hosting and SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 42001 coverage.
- you need agent-assist copilots for human reps
- you need autonomous AI agents
- you need Email, SMS, and WhatsApp coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims ISO 42001
Look elsewhere if you want a flat, predictable bill or an independent vendor: seats, Fin outcomes, Copilot and channel usage are metered separately, and the company is now owned by Salesforce.
Choose Parloa if
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.
- you need enterprise scale, security, and compliance
- you need voice and phone AI
- you need a vendor that publicly claims PCI DSS and EU AI Act
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.
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 →
About Parloa
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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