Chatwoot vs Intercom

Chatwoot vs Intercom is open-source self-hosting against proprietary AI-first SaaS — and as of August 2026 the decision carries a variable most comparisons have not caught up with: Intercom is being acquired. On 15 June 2026 Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to buy the company, now trading as Fin, for approximately $3.6 billion (Salesforce newsroom). The deal is signed, not closed — Salesforce expects completion in Q4 of its fiscal 2027.

On price, checked against both vendors' live pages on 27 August 2026: Chatwoot Cloud runs $19 to $99 per agent per month, with a free self-hosted Community Edition. Intercom runs $29 to $132 per seat per month on annual billing, plus $0.99 for every Fin AI outcome. A 5-agent team on Chatwoot Business pays $195/month; the same team on Intercom Essential with 500 Fin outcomes pays about $640. That gap is what pushes most small teams into this comparison — but the licence terms and the fair-use caps underneath both numbers matter more than the headline. Teams surveying the wider field can start from our Intercom alternatives page.

Chatwoot wins on deployment control and channel breadth; Intercom wins on autonomous AI and in-app engagement. Both ship a shared inbox, canned responses, private notes, automation rules, a help centre, and CSAT. The real separation is in what each company treats as the product, and in the licence and ownership terms sitting underneath.

Is Chatwoot actually open source, or only partly?

Partly — and the distinction is written into the repository, not the marketing page. Reading the two licence files directly on 27 August 2026: the root LICENSE grants MIT Expat terms to everything except the enterprise/ directory, and that directory carries its own Enterprise License: production use requires a valid paid subscription for the correct seat count, and copying, publishing, sublicensing, or selling it is forbidden. You may modify and patch it for development and testing, but Chatwoot retains title to your modifications.

So the honest framing is open-core, not open source outright. The MIT portion is genuinely permissive and covers the inbox, channels, and agent workflow — enough to run real support. What sits behind the enterprise carve-out is the tier of features a growing team eventually wants. The project itself is unambiguously alive: 36,300 stars, 8,700 forks, 387 contributors, and release v4.17.1 shipped on 27 August 2026 (github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot).

How do Chatwoot and Intercom compare feature by feature?

Chatwoot carries twelve native channels to Intercom's seven, while Intercom carries an AI agent and an in-app engagement suite that Chatwoot has no equivalent for. Both vendor feature tables were read on 27 August 2026. Two rows deserve reading twice. The channel row is the clearest functional gap in Chatwoot's favour — TikTok, LINE, X, and an open API channel have no Intercom counterpart, native or otherwise, and Intercom's Messenger is a web and in-app widget rather than a social inbox. The ownership row is the one no feature table normally carries, and in this pairing it is the newest fact on the page.

How do the two AI products actually bill?

They bill on opposite events, which is the single most consequential difference for a support budget. Intercom charges $0.99 when Fin produces an outcome — a confirmed resolution, a completed procedure ending in handoff, or a lead qualification or disqualification. You are not charged when a customer asks for a human, when Fin escalates, or when Fin detects frustration and hands off (Intercom pricing FAQs, checked 27 August 2026). One outcome per conversation, no matter how many questions Fin answers.

Chatwoot meters inputs instead. Every AI action costs one credit — assistant replies, Copilot lookups, rephrase and summarise, label suggestions, audio transcription, and any automation that triggers a model call. Plans include 300, 500, or 800 credits a month and additional credits cost $20 per 1,000 (Chatwoot's credit guide). Overage is deducted from your balance at renewal, and when credits run out the assistant stops and the conversation transfers to a human. Intercom's meter scales with success; Chatwoot's scales with usage and fails closed.

Chatwoot Business for 5 agents is $195/month; Intercom Essential for the same team is $145/month base but roughly $640 once you add 500 Fin outcomes. Self-hosted Chatwoot Community Edition has no licence fee, plus roughly $30/month of infrastructure. Every figure below was read from the vendors' own pages on 27 August 2026.

Chatwoot Cloud, annual billing (chatwoot.com/pricing):

• Hacker — $0: 2 agents, 500 conversations/month, live chat only, 30-day retention. Evaluation only.
• Startups — $19/agent/month: all channels, 300 Captain credits, help centre, 1-year retention. No teams, no automation, no voice.
• Business — $39/agent/month: 500 credits, teams, automation rules, voice, SLA, custom attributes, pre-chat forms, 2-year retention.
• Enterprise — $99/agent/month: 800 credits, SSO/SAML, audit logs, agent capacity, branding removal, 3-year retention.

Intercom, annual billing (Intercom's plans article):

• Essential — $29/seat/month ($39 monthly): shared inbox, ticketing, Fin access, public help centre.
• Advanced — $85/seat/month ($99 monthly): Workflows, round robin, multilingual help centre, 20 free Lite seats.
• Expert — $132/seat/month ($139 monthly): SSO, HIPAA, SLAs, multibrand, 50 free Lite seats.
• Add-ons: Fin $0.99/outcome; Copilot $29/agent/month annual; Pro $99/month for 1,000 analysed conversations and 2,000 Operator credits; Proactive Support Plus $99/month including 500 messages.

Why is Intercom's seat price so hard to find?

Because Intercom's public pricing page no longer prints one. Loading intercom.com/pricing on 27 August 2026, each plan's seat price renders as an animated digit reel rather than static text — the only figure stated plainly is "From $0.99 per Fin outcome". To get a number you have to open the help-centre plans table or the calculator.

Doing both surfaces a discrepancy worth knowing before you negotiate. The help-centre table lists Essential at $29/seat/month on annual billing. Intercom's own pricing calculator, same day, quotes Essential at $19/seat/month, showing the annual total as $348 struck through and $228 charged — a 34% discount off list that appears nowhere on the pricing page. Advanced and Expert match across both at $85 and $132. If you are buying Essential, quote the calculator figure back to sales; if a comparison article gives you a single confident Intercom price, it read one page and not the other.

What does Chatwoot's "unlimited conversations" mean in practice?

It means uncapped until it isn't, and the actual numbers are published — though not on the pricing page. Every paid Chatwoot tier advertises unlimited conversations with an asterisk pointing at the fair use policy, read 27 August 2026. The guidelines scale per agent: roughly 10,000 messages per agent per month on Startups, 20,000 on Business, 50,000 on Enterprise. Contacts follow the same shape at 10,000, 25,000, and 50,000 per agent.

Two further limits catch teams out. Inboxes are capped at 10 per account by default, extended by 5, 8, or 10 additional inboxes per agent depending on tier — a 5-agent Startups account gets 35. And any workspace with no login for six months is scheduled for deletion, with a single email notice and a seven-day grace period before the data is unrecoverable. Chatwoot calls these guidelines rather than hard limits, and says it will recommend a higher plan rather than cut you off. That is a friendlier posture than a metered overage, but it is still a ceiling you should size against before committing annually.

What does each platform cost at 5 and 15 agents?

Chatwoot stays flat per agent; Intercom's total moves with AI volume as well as headcount. Both columns use annual-billing rates.

One discount changes this table completely for early-stage companies. Intercom's Early Stage programme puts eligible startups on Advanced at $33/month total — 93% off, with 2 full seats, 2 Copilot seats, Proactive Support Plus, the Pro add-on, and 300 free Fin outcomes a month in year one, then 50% off in year two and 25% in year three. Eligibility is under $10M raised, fewer than 15 employees, and new to Intercom. If you qualify, Intercom is cheaper than Chatwoot Cloud for two years. Our Intercom pricing breakdown carries the per-line detail.

Choose Chatwoot if data residency, EU hosting, or air-gapped deployment is a hard requirement, and you have engineers who will own PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3-compatible storage. Nothing Intercom sells solves that at any price. Chatwoot also reaches TikTok, LINE, X, and SMS natively — channels Intercom does not offer at all.

Choose Intercom if autonomous deflection is the point of the purchase. Fin resolves end-to-end and bills only on outcomes, and no Chatwoot feature is aimed at the same job; Captain AI is agent assistance with a credit meter attached.

Who should not buy Chatwoot: a team without an on-call engineer choosing Community Edition to save money. You are not buying a free helpdesk, you are hiring yourself as its sysadmin — and the free tier omits AI, SSO, SLAs, and roles anyway.

Who should not buy Intercom right now: a small team signing an annual contract in the window between a signed acquisition and its close, whose deciding factor is today's price list. Seat pricing, packaging, and the Early Stage discount all sit with an owner that is changing. If neither profile fits, a messaging-first inbox like Converge is $49/month flat for up to 15 agents, with no per-seat or per-outcome meter.

The trade is concrete. Chatwoot gives you deployment control, wider channel coverage, and predictable per-agent pricing, in exchange for either operational work or an open-core licence you should read before you depend on it. Intercom gives you a genuinely autonomous AI agent and a polished in-app suite, in exchange for a bill that moves with both headcount and AI success — under an owner that is changing.

Is Chatwoot really free?

The Community Edition has no licence fee, but "free" oversells what you get. Verified against Chatwoot's self-hosted plans page on 27 August 2026, Community Edition excludes Captain AI, voice calls, custom branding, agent capacity, roles and permissions, SSO/SAML, and SLA policies. Those require a paid self-hosted licence — Premium Support at $19/agent/month, or Enterprise Edition at $99/agent/month for SSO and SLAs.

You also carry the infrastructure: Chatwoot's own requirement is a Linux server with PostgreSQL, Redis, and S3-compatible storage, starting at 4GB RAM and 2 CPU cores for production. That is $20–$50/month on a VPS, plus the hours for patching, upgrades, and incident response. Community Edition is genuinely free of licence cost and genuinely capable as an inbox; it is not a free version of the paid product.

Which is cheaper for a 5-person support team?

Chatwoot, in every scenario except one. Five agents on Chatwoot Business is $195/month with automation, teams, voice, SLA, and 500 Captain credits included. Five seats on Intercom Essential is $145/month base, but reaches about $640 once 500 Fin outcomes are added at $0.99 each — and $920 on Advanced. Self-hosted Community Edition costs only infrastructure if you can operate it.

The exception is the Early Stage programme: an eligible startup gets Intercom Advanced for $33/month with 300 Fin outcomes included, which beats Chatwoot Cloud outright for the first year. Check eligibility before you assume the open-source option is cheaper. For teams that want neither per-seat maths nor a server to maintain, see our Intercom replacement switching guide and the broader list of Chatwoot alternatives.

Should the Salesforce acquisition change your decision?

It should change your contract length, not necessarily your shortlist. Salesforce signed to acquire Intercom — now Fin — for approximately $3.6 billion on 15 June 2026, with closing expected in Q4 of Salesforce's fiscal 2027, subject to regulatory clearance. Salesforce's stated plan is to fold Fin's agent technology into Agentforce, positioning the packaged product at SMB and commercial customers.

Nothing about that is inherently bad for a buyer, and Intercom keeps operating normally in the meantime. But the pricing page you evaluate today is set by a company that will not own the product for the length of a three-year commitment, and post-acquisition repackaging is common. If you are choosing Intercom in this window, prefer monthly or single-year terms over multi-year, and price the Early Stage discount as a year-one benefit rather than a permanent rate. Chatwoot, independent and open-core, carries the opposite risk profile: no acquirer, but a smaller company behind the licence.

For teams that want messaging-first support across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and Zalo without per-seat or per-outcome meters, Converge is $49/month flat for up to 15 agents, with every channel and AI reply suggestions included.