Intercom vs Chatwoot
Both products give you a messenger, a shared inbox and an AI agent, and both charge for seats and for AI. The difference is who holds the dial. Intercom's second meter is a per-outcome charge you cannot switch off if you want Fin; Chatwoot's is a credit bundle on a product whose core is MIT and can run on your own server, with the AI turned off entirely if you want. This page turns on one question: how much of your support bill do you want to be able to change without asking a vendor.
Pick Chatwoot if you want the option to self-host, if $19 per agent per month annual beats what you pay per seat today, or if you want an AI meter you can cap or disable. Stay on Intercom if Fin's quality is doing real work for you, if nobody on the team wants to run a Rails app with Postgres and Redis, or if you need the proactive messaging and product tour suite that Chatwoot does not try to match.
Side by side
Intercom vs Chatwoot at a glance
| Intercom | Chatwoot | |
|---|---|---|
| What it bills | Seats, plus every AI outcome, plus add-ons | Agents, plus AI credits above the included bundle |
| Free plan | ✗ none published | ✓ Hacker: $0, 2 agents, 500 conversations/mo |
| Entry paid seat | $29/seat/mo, annual (Essential) | ✓ $19/agent/mo annual (Startups) |
| Mid tier | $85/seat/mo, annual (Advanced) | $39/agent/mo (Business) |
| Top published tier | $132/seat/mo, annual (Expert) | $99/agent/mo (Enterprise) |
| AI unit | Fin outcome, from $0.99 | Captain AI credit, $20 per 1,000 |
| AI included in plan | ✗ billed separately from seat one | ✓ 300 / 500 / 800 credits by plan |
| Can you turn the AI meter off? | ✗ not without giving up Fin | ✓ Captain AI is optional |
| Self-host | ✗ no | ✓ yes, separate self-hosted plans exist |
| Licence | Proprietary SaaS | MIT Expat, except enterprise/ |
| Project activity | Closed source, no public repo | Pushed 13 August 2026, roughly 35.8k stars |
| Add-ons | ✗ Copilot $29/agent/mo annual, Pro $99/mo, Proactive Support Plus $99/mo | ✓ features sit in the plan tiers |
| Best for | Teams buying Fin's quality and the full suite | Teams that want to own the pricing model |
Sources: Intercom pricing · Chatwoot pricing · Chatwoot repository and licence. Compiled August 2026.
Where Chatwoot wins
The AI meter is optional, and priced in the open
Fin is the reason to buy Intercom and the reason the invoice moves: from $0.99 per outcome, with no plan that bundles a fixed number of them. Chatwoot ships Captain AI credits inside the plan, 300 on Startups, 500 on Business and 800 on Enterprise, and sells more at $20 per 1,000 credits. The rate is published, the included bundle is published, and if you decide the AI is not earning its keep you can leave it off and go back to one meter. That last option does not exist on the other side of this table.
Seats cost a fraction as much
Chatwoot Cloud is $19 per agent per month billed annually on Startups, $39 on Business and $99 on Enterprise. Intercom is $29, $85 and $132 per seat per month, also at the annual rate, so the two ladders are comparable. For five agents that is the difference between $95 and $425 a month before either product has answered a single conversation with AI. The free Hacker plan, 2 agents and 500 conversations a month, is also a real starting point rather than a trial.
You can take the whole thing in-house
The core is MIT Expat, so a self-hosted install is yours: your database, your retention rules, your integrations, and no per-agent invoice at all. Chatwoot maintains separate self-hosted plans for teams that want support alongside it. Read the licence file before you assume everything is MIT, though. It states that all content under the enterprise/ directory of the repository, if that directory exists, is licensed under the licence defined in enterprise/LICENSE. That is a narrower carve-out than most source-available licences, but it is not nothing.
It is genuinely maintained
An open-source help desk is only useful if somebody is still shipping it. Chatwoot's repository was pushed to on 13 August 2026 and carries roughly 35.8k stars, which puts it among the most active projects in this category rather than among the archived ones.
Where Intercom still wins
Chatwoot has not rebuilt Intercom's product surface and does not claim to. Fin's answer quality, the Copilot assistant for agents, product tours, proactive messaging and the campaign tooling are a suite, and replacing them usually means adopting two or three tools instead of one. Intercom also publishes its outcome definition in plain language, and states that you are only charged once per conversation even if multiple questions are answered, which is more transparency than several vendors in this category offer.
There is a real pricing case for staying, too. If your conversation volume is low relative to headcount, the outcome meter is the cheap meter: you pay for the handful of conversations Fin actually closes and nothing more, while a per-agent competitor charges the same whether the inbox is busy or empty. Outcome pricing hurts high-volume, low-headcount teams and helps low-volume, high-headcount ones, and it is worth working out which one you are before you migrate.
And self-hosting is not free. It is a Rails application with Postgres, Redis and file storage behind it, plus upgrades, backups and someone reachable when the inbox goes down during a product incident. Chatwoot Cloud exists for teams who want the pricing model without that job, and comparing $0 self-hosted against $425 a month of Intercom is only honest if you also price the hours.
Migrating Intercom to Chatwoot
The path most teams take:
1. Inventory first. List what you actually use: inboxes and channels, help centre articles, macros and saved replies, routing and assignment rules, Fin's knowledge sources, and every integration that writes into Intercom. The channels and articles have equivalents; the automation usually has to be rebuilt rather than moved.
2. Stand up the target. Decide cloud or self-hosted before anything else, because it changes who owns the rest of the project. Recreate inboxes per channel, import the help centre content, and rebuild the knowledge base that Captain AI will read.
3. Run both for one cycle. Point new conversations at Chatwoot while Intercom still handles open threads, and compare resolution times and AI behaviour on live traffic rather than on a demo. Expect to pay both bills for that month; that overlap is the honest cost of the move.
4. What does not move. Historical conversation threads, per-agent performance history and Fin's tuning all stay behind. Export what you need for compliance before you cancel, and accept that reporting continuity starts again on cutover day.
Common questions
FAQ: Intercom vs Chatwoot
Is Chatwoot really open source?
The core is MIT Expat, which is as permissive as licences get, but the repository's own licence file adds one condition worth reading: all content that resides under the enterprise directory of the repository, if that directory exists, is licensed under the licence defined in enterprise/LICENSE. In practice that means a self-hosted Chatwoot built from the community code is genuinely yours to run and modify, while a handful of commercial features live under a separate grant in the same repository. The project is actively developed, with commits on 13 August 2026 and roughly 35.8k GitHub stars.
How does Captain AI pricing compare to Fin?
They are sold in different units, so compare them carefully. Intercom charges from $0.99 per Fin outcome, an outcome being a conversation Fin closed, and it is charged once per conversation. Chatwoot includes 300, 500 or 800 Captain AI credits with the Startups, Business and Enterprise plans and then sells more at $20 per 1,000 credits. Credits are consumed by AI activity rather than by resolutions, so a like-for-like comparison depends on how many credits your conversations consume. What is different in kind is that the Chatwoot meter is optional: a self-hosted install with Captain AI switched off has no second meter at all.
Is self-hosting Chatwoot actually cheaper than Intercom?
For the licence, yes, the community edition is free. For the total, it depends on what your time costs. You take on a Rails application, a database, Redis, object storage for attachments, upgrades, backups and uptime, and if support conversations stop, that is your on-call rotation now. The honest comparison for a five-agent team is $425 a month on Intercom Advanced, five seats at the $85 annual rate, plus AI outcomes against a server plus the hours somebody spends maintaining it. Chatwoot Cloud at $19 per agent per month billed annually exists precisely for teams that want the pricing model without the operations.