Intercom vs Helply (2026)

TL;DR

• Pick Intercom if you need a messaging platform that spans support, onboarding, and proactive engagement — and you want best-in-class AI deflection via Fin.
• Pick Helply if you want a help desk where AI agents and humans share one inbox, with no per-seat fee and AI work billed in credits.

Pricing

Helply: Starter at $49/mo, Pro at $199/mo, Scale at $449/mo, Enterprise on custom pricing. Every plan has unlimited users, so seats cost nothing. AI work is billed in credits: 1 for a draft or summary, 4 for a task touching one or two systems, 12 for a multi-system investigation. Plans include 500 to 32,000 credits depending on tier. There is a 14-day trial with 1,000 credits and no card, and annual billing is 15% cheaper.

Intercom: Essential at roughly $39/seat/mo, Advanced at $99, Expert at ~$139. Fin AI agent resolutions are priced separately ($0.99/resolution) or bundled at higher tiers. A 10-agent Advanced team starts at ~$990/mo, plus Fin usage. Pricing is not always transparent — enterprise deals are negotiated. Treat published rates as a floor.

The two scale differently. Intercom's bill grows with every agent you add. Helply's plan price does not, but its bill grows with AI usage: at 12 credits per full investigation, 1,000 such tasks use 12,000 credits. Helply is not a fixed monthly cost, so run your conversation volume through its pricing estimator before comparing totals.

Shared inbox and ticketing

Helply's inbox is built so AI agents and human agents work in the same place. Starter includes the shared inbox and basic reporting. CSAT surveys, SLAs and custom reports come with Pro, and skills-based routing, audit logs and HIPAA compliance with Scale. An Assist Agent helps human agents investigate a ticket and draft replies.

Intercom's inbox handles the same operations but is conversation-centric rather than email-centric. Every customer interaction — chat, email, WhatsApp — lives as a conversation with a contact record attached. The inbox is richer but also more complex: multiple inboxes, team routing, custom attributes, snooze and re-open flows. New agents take longer to learn.

AI

Both products now put an autonomous agent in front of the queue. Intercom's Fin AI agent is one of the most capable in the category — it handles conversations autonomously, reasons across your knowledge base and custom answers, and escalates gracefully. Teams routinely report 40–60% deflection within the first month. Fin doesn't just suggest replies; it resolves conversations.

Helply's Support Agent talks to customers directly. Behind it, background agents — Churn, Knowledge, Revenue, Feature Request and Insights — watch conversations and act without an agent opening the ticket. The difference is in billing: Fin is priced per resolution, Helply per unit of work in credits. If you want to pay only for resolved conversations, Intercom's model is simpler. If you want AI doing investigative and background work too, Helply's credit model covers it.

Live chat and messaging

Intercom was built for live chat. The Messenger widget is highly customizable, supports proactive triggers (send a message when a user visits the pricing page), in-app banners, product tours, and NPS surveys. It's not just support — it's a customer engagement platform.

Helply treats chat as one support channel among eight: email, chat, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram and Discord all share one inbox. That breadth suits teams that talk to customers in many places. If your product needs a chat widget that doubles as a marketing channel, Intercom is the one built for it.

Knowledge base

Both include a hosted knowledge base. Intercom's Articles supports multi-language content, teammate contribution workflows, and AI-powered article suggestions in the Messenger before a customer opens a conversation. It's the more polished product.

Helply includes unlimited knowledge base articles on every plan, and its Knowledge Agent flags gaps based on what customers ask. For a team publishing 50–200 articles that is enough.

Integrations

Intercom integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Segment, GitHub, and hundreds of others. Its webhooks and API are developer-friendly and well-documented — important if you're building a data-enriched support workflow.

Helply integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Linear, Jira, Notion, Snowflake and BigQuery, and connects to Slack and Microsoft Teams as channels. The list is shorter than Intercom's but covers CRM, engineering trackers and data warehouses.

Verdict

Intercom and Helply now overlap more than they used to, since both put an AI agent in front of the queue. Intercom is for SaaS companies that want a unified engagement and support platform, AI deflection at scale, and proactive customer messaging — and are willing to pay per seat for it. Helply is for support teams that want AI agents and humans in one inbox, no per-seat fee, and are comfortable with a bill that moves with AI usage. If you have a large team and your goal is AI-assisted support, Helply's unlimited users are a real saving, provided you check the credit tier you land in. If you're building a product-led growth motion where in-app messaging and AI resolution are part of the retention strategy, Intercom is hard to replace.