Top 10 Intercom AI Agent Alternatives to Replace Fin (2025)

Created time

Oct 20, 2025 04:32 PM

Ready for draft

Author

Mike Heap

Ecomm?

I can use AI in Intercom without using Fin…?

You heard right.

While impressive, Intercom’s Fin is expensive and not for everyone.

Intercom does however have its own app marketplace that allows 3rd party companies (like ours) to create their own apps or integrations to connect to your Intercom helpdesk.

A screenshot of the Intercom app store, with a search query of “My AskAI” entered and the My AskAI app circled, with an arrow pointing to it.

While their capabilities vary, 3rd party apps can replicate almost all of Fin’s features (and sometimes more), including things like:

Using AI to reply directly to customers

Creating AI draft notes on responses

Adding an AI copilot to your Intercom to generate responses

Automatically tagging conversations and tickets using AI

So don’t worry if you can’t afford Fin, you have lots of options!

In fact, I’m going to go over 10 for you right now.

Overall Comparison

I know most of you will just want to see the scores on the doors, so I’m going to start off by showing you my ratings, before showing you my working and how I got here:

(scores out of 10)	My AskAI	eesel	Aissist	Fini	Ada	Duckie	Quickchat	Desku	Front	Bot9
Intercom integration	10	9	9	6	5	7	5	5	3	5
Ease of setup	9	8	7	6	4	7	6	6	3	6
Training sources	8	8	7	7	6	6	5	6	3	4
Features	9	9	9	9	10	7	6	4	5	6
Improving	9	8	7	7	8	5	6	5	5	3
Security	7	7	4	9	10	7	4	2	10	2
Maturity	6	7	5	7	10	4	8	6	10	3
Cost	9	3	8	5	2	2	5	10	3	4
Overall (out of 80)	67 (84%)	59 (74%)	56 (70%)	56 (70%)	55 (69%)	45 (56%)	45 (56%)	44 (55%)	42 (53%)	33 (41%)

How I selected the AI agents

There are hundreds of apps on the Intercom app store, I narrowed these down to a shortlist of 10 AI customer service agent integrations based on:

Being a founder in the space for nearly 3 years, the names of apps that I hear come up in calls often

Reviewing the AI & Automation section of the Intercom app store

Going to each app’s site, reviewing their documentation and trying to figure out the best options available.

As part of this selection process I focused the shortlist on AI agents that are actually agentic (not just a simple chatbot or basic RAG set-up).

This meant I was looking for AI agents that could feasibly come close to replacing a human agent (with the right configuration and time invested), not just answering questions but also performing actions (looking up orders, initiating refunds etc).

I also wanted to only include integrations that would largely work without you having to purchase and use an entirely new platform, i.e. you can just plug in your AI customer service agent into your existing Intercom helpdesk.

This criteria narrowed it down to:

My AskAI

Duckie

Fini

eesel

Desku

Aissist

Quickchat

Bot9

Front

How I compared them

I am one of the founders of My AskAI, so I obviously can’t be completely impartial in this assessment, but I have tried to be as fair as possible, which is why we don’t win every category/test.

I’ve tried to stick to facts and hope that after reading you will have come to the same conclusion I did.

I broke the comparison down into the areas that I have found, from doing countless demo calls, are the most important aspects of an AI agent for most customers:

Intercom integration

Not all Intercom apps and integrations are born equal.

Some are simple “click to connect” integrations, whereas others require you to essentially connect to their APIs via a number of setup and configuration steps.

They may get to a similar result in the end, and you will likely only have to do this once, but it can be a blocker for some, especially if you don’t have technical expertise on your team.

Once connected, there are then multiple ways you can use an AI agent within Intercom, from having it directly reply to customers, generate internal notes or draft copilot replies, so I have looked to see which apps can do which.

A screenshot of the My AskAI agent within Intercom replying in notes mode to a user question.

And finally, beyond AI agent replies, there are other AI features that integrations or apps may enable in Intercom.

Things like tagging and translation and so I have said when these are or aren’t possible.

Ease of setup

Nowadays most AI customer service agents follow pretty much the same pattern: sign up, add content and integrate.

Sure there are different ways you can add content (covered in “Training sources” and methods of integration (covered in “Intercom integration”), but there is also how you get it set up to work how you need it.

This can include everything from potentially having to write your own prompts, deciding when it should handover conversations and everything in between.

On this I looked at how much you can configure in your AI agent, along with how easy it would be to do this for the layperson.

Training sources

The first thing you need to do with an AI customer service agent (much like with a human) is train it - give it the information and content so it can answer questions.

If you use Intercom as your helpdesk platform, you’ll likely also use their help articles so will need to be able add these as knowledge to your AI agent at a minimum.

As long as they are public, they can always be crawled and scraped, however crawling webpages is rarely the best way to get information as it:

Includes other bits of the webpage you likely don’t want added to your AI agent (buttons, adverts, other listings etc)

Isn’t complete - due to how a crawl works, most crawls will only ‘find’ 95% of pages, so there will be a number of articles missed.

Both of these will result in a worse performance for your AI agent.

In addition, if you can’t get your knowledge from where it lives into your AI agent it will also result in worse answers, as the agent is less knowledgeable.

A screenshot from My AskAI’s knowledge integration page.

So I have rewarded apps in this comparison that integrate with Intercom help articles directly and have more knowledge source integrations.

Features

Each AI agent will have its own set of unique features, but I have tried to boil them down to a consistent (common) set to compare against (that aren’t considered elsewhere in the comparison), namely whether they have or allow:

Human handover: escalating the ticket or conversation to a human member of the team when the AI can’t assist

Multilingual responses: the ability to reply to users all in languages

Multiple agents: to be used for different brands, products or tasks

Guidance: modifying the behavior of the AI agent or giving it instructions to align with your brand’s guidelines or tone of voice.

Actions/tools: connecting your AI customer service agent to 3rd party or back end data sources to either read or write data

Tasks: automation of complex, multi-step processes that may involve multiple tool calls or actions.

A screenshot showing My AskAI’s Tasks feature.

Answer quality

While answer quality and accuracy is probably one of the most important aspects of your AI agent’s performance it is very difficult to judge subjectively and compare fairly.

Each vendor will quote their own resolution stats (ours are on our homepage), none of which are verifiable and most of which will be cherry-picked (although ours are updated every 24hrs on our site, live).

A screenshot from My AskAI’s website showing their total customer support tickets resolve by AI agents (1,170,303), along with their AI resolution rate for the last 30 days of 74.9%

Performance can be down to the set-up and configuration of the AI, the quality of the documentation you provide, the prompts you choose to use (where applicable) and more.

While there will likely be large gulfs between some of these AI agents in terms of the answering abilities due to how they are constructed behind the scenes (varying from simple one prompt retrievals to multi-stage agentic set-ups), truly the only way to compare fairly is to test for yourself, on your own data.

So, my suggestion would be to pick the 2 or 3 vendors that feel like the best fit for you, test them out yourself and see how you like their responses.

Improving

Training your AI customer service agent is only the first step in the process.

To improve your AI resolution (deflection) rate (aside from overall model improvements by your chose AI agent vendor), you need to monitor how your agent is responding, identify areas it can’t answer and update your knowledge base to address these gaps.

A screenshot of the Improve - Knowledge Gaps section of the My AskAI dashboard, showing an example identified knowledge gap and an AI draft from past tickets.

Minimum capabilities you should expect to see here are stats on handover and escalation rate, along with overall usage.

But you should also be able to view all the AI agent’s conversations and ideally be shown logs explaining why the AI answered in the way that it did.

On top of the that you will want your AI to have some way of ‘learning’ from your human agent responses, identifying when questions couldn’t be answered and ways of correcting these.

Security

The main security, quality and privacy certifications you would expect to see from AI customer service agents are likely to be:

GDPR

CCPA

SOC-2 Type II

ISO 27001

So I have rated apps that have more of these certifications more highly.

Maturity

AI (as we know it today) is a new space, with companies springing up all the time.

Not all of them stick around.

You can often tell by: how long they have been around already, how many customers they have, how they are funded and how often they have or are updating or maintaining their product.

I have therefore rated apps as higher where they have been around longer, have lots of customers, are bootstrapped (or highly funded) or have a detailed changelog.

Cost

While all of the agents in this comparison price based on usage, some also price based on the outcome of that usage (also know as resolution-based pricing).

This means that you only pay when the AI resolves a ticket (i.e. it doesn’t have to be handed over to a human member of your team).

In order to compare like-with-like, I have assumed that all AI agents have an average of 50% resolution and will reply twice per ticket to get to this resolution.

Also I have taken annual pricing where available and used the most relevant pricing plans.

Note that this isn’t a perfect methodology as it assumes:

Answer quality and performance is the same across all AI customer service agents

Price is static (when actually the overall monthly cost increases if you have resolution-based pricing and stays the same with pure usage based).

No additional add-ons.

As this is such a critical consideration for most companies, I have put together these tables below so you can see what your monthly cost would be if you had 1,000, 10,000 and 50,000 tickets per month at both 50% and 75% resolution respectively:

50% resolution	My AskAI	eesel	Aissist	Fini	Ada	Duckie	Quickchat	Desku	Front	Bot9
1,000 tickets/mo	$99	$639	$240	$345	$1,000	$1,500	$350	$106	$445	$998
10,000 tickets/mo	$999	$3,189	$2,400	$3,450	$10,000	$7,000	$3,500	$1,060	$4,450	$9,980
50,000 tickets/mo	$4,999	$15,189	$12,000	$17,250	$50,000	$35,000	$17,500	$5,300	$22,250	$49,900

75% resolution	My AskAI	eesel	Aissist	Fini	Ada	Duckie	Quickchat	Desku	Front	Bot9
1,000 tickets/mo	$99	$639	$240	$518	$1,500	$1,500	$525	$106	$668	$998
10,000 tickets/mo	$999	$3,189	$2,400	$5,175	$15,000	$7,000	$5,250	$1,060	$6,675	$9,980
50,000 tickets/mo	$4,999	$15,189	$12,000	$25,875	$75,000	$35,000	$26,250	$5,300	$33,375	$49,900

Now that’s all clear, onto the comparison:

My AskAI

My AskAI was founded in 2023 and (fun fact) we were one of the first companies in the world to utilize RAG technology (the technology that underlies all AI customer service agents today) in a production capacity.

How does My AskAI integrate into Intercom?

We wanted to make sure My AskAI is as tightly-integrated with Intercom as possible so we can offer direct replies, internal note replies, as well as a copilot extension, live translate feature and auto-tagging using your Intercom tag values.

Our AI agent also works with your Intercom emails, as well as chat.

You can also choose to trigger your AI agent as part of an existing workflow, rather than having it “on” all the time and control which messages your AI agent replies to using tags.

How easy is it to setup My AskAI?

Our setup is fully no-code and our Intercom connection is through an approved Intercom app (no API or other tricky configuration required - just click to connect).

It’s just a case of signing up, connecting some knowledge and (in our case), selecting Intercom as your helpdesk provider.

By default we only ever send AI replies in “internal notes” mode, so you’ll see how they look before you let your AI agent respond to your customers.

What knowledge sources can I train My AskAI on?

We have one of the most comprehensive collection of knowledge integrations going, including a direct integration with your Intercom help articles for accurate daily syncs of knowledge.

In addition we can also connect to: Zendesk and Freshdesk help articles, websites, Google Drive, Notion, Dropbox, SharePoint, OneDrive, Confluence and Salesforce knowledge articles.

But we don’t only train on static knowledge sources.

You can also connect dynamic data and live user data about your customers, either with one click from Shopify or via our user data API, meaning your AI agent can provide personalized responses to each customer.

Plus, all sources are automatically re-synced either on update, daily or fortnightly.

What features does My AskAI have?

We have worked to ensure that My AskAI has one of the most advanced AI agent feature sets for Intercom on the market, but without introducing too much complexity.

Some of our headline features include:

Tools/actions: these allow you to call APIs in your backend systems to take action. They could be read-only tools to look up products or accounts, or ‘write’ tools that actually update something e.g. initiate a refund or change an address.

Tasks: these are automated, complex, multi-step processes that require logic and potentially multiple tool calls. They could, for example, be used for a refund process, a warranty claim or an identity verification process.

Guidance: this can be used to control exactly how your AI agent responds to users in different scenarios, and allows you to apply your brand’s tone of voice to responses.

Tagging: your AI agent can use your existing Intercom tags to automatically apply them to incoming tickets to improve the consistency and coverage of your reporting.

All of these features can be set up with no or little development expertise.

How do I improve my My AskAI responses?

Improving your AI’s responses is one of our big product focus areas, so we provide multiple tools and features to help you in getting those AI resolution rates as high as possible.

Firstly, we identify your knowledge gaps - things your AI agent is unable to answer as it doesn’t have the available information.

We then use your historic Intercom tickets (human replies) to generate suggested custom answers (that you approve) so it will answer next time someone asks.

You can also add these custom answers at any time if you don’t want to add more help articles.

We provide a deep “inspect and debug” feature that allows you to see exactly why the AI answered in the way that it did, and what knowledge sources, guidance and user data it used to generate its response.

This means you have complete transparency and traceability in how your AI agent is working.

Finally we have our Test feature, which generates test questions from your historic tickets and then shows you how your AI agent is replying to them, so you can batch test after making updates to your knowledge or guidance.

How secure is My AskAI?

My AskAI complies with GDPR and CCPA and we are in the process of completing our SOC-2 Type II certification.

Who is using My AskAI?

We are used by 100’s of businesses, you can see a selection of our reviews and case studies here, including ones from Zinc, Swytch and Freecash.

We cater to: B2B, B2C, SaaS, eCommerce, Rewards, Travel, Crypto, and Marketplace businesses.

How much does My AskAI cost?

My AskAI is one of the most affordable AI customer service agents for Intercom available today.

We charge $0.10 per ticket, with no resolution-based pricing, this means, as you improve your AI and we improve our product, you pay the same amount.

Using our pricing comparison methodology, this works out as the equivalent of $0.20 per resolution.

You will however be charged based on usage for features like tasks, tools and tagging.

✅

Choose My AskAI if: you want the most integrated, affordable and easy to set-up Fin AI agent alternative.

❌

Don’t choose My AskAI if: you need a HIPAA compliant AI agent or don’t have any form of help articles to begin with.

Duckie

Duckie is a Y-Combinator (YC) backed startup founded in 2024.

How does Duckie integrate into Intercom?

It integrates into Intercom via their Intercom app and their AI agent can reply either directly to customers, or it can leave an internal note reply instead.

How easy is it to setup Duckie?

Initial set up is simple, as they have an approved app, consisting of just connecting your Intercom account, configuring your AI agent and then adding your chosen knowledge.

Once you are past initial set-up can be where things get trickier as for even basic actions like initiating a human handover, you are going to have to create workflows, meaning there is a steeper learning curve (albeit, this does allow for a high-degree of flexibility and customization along the line).

What knowledge sources can I train Duckie on?

Training-wise, Duckie integrates with 25 different knowledge sources, and therefore is one of the most highly integrated products on this list, although notably it does not ingest Intercom articles as a knowledge source, so these will have to be added via a web crawl.

It will also keep all knowledge in-sync pretty much live too as it listens for changes in docs via webhooks.

What features does Duckie have?

Some of Duckie’s more advanced features include its tool calling (actions) and workflow capabilities (tasks equivalent) which allow you to set up integrations with 3rd party systems to read or write data.

Duckie also offers the ability to create multiple agents and set guidelines (guidance) for your AI agent, controlling how it responds in certain scenarios (including telling it not to reply if it can’t answer).

How do I improve my Duckie responses?

It lacks features to help you improve responses, only sharing escalation rate statistics, raw message logs and the ability to “Thumbs up/down” a response, meaning you will have to do most of your own detective work to figure out how to improve responses.

How secure is Duckie?

On a security front, they say they are working on their SOC-2 Type II certification and are already GDPR and CCPA compliant, they also have a self-hosting option for the very conservative.

Who is using Duckie?

Customers for Duckie include Vellum, Snaptrade, and Highlight (although these are notably all YC companies…).

How much does Duckie cost?

Pricing is where things start to fall down, Duckie doesn’t come cheap at $725/mo for 1,000 messages on their cheapest plan.

This means that, if we take our 50% resolution rate (the same we are using to evaluate across all companies), and 2 messages per ticket, you’ll be paying around $2.90 per resolved ticket.

✅

Choose Duckie if: you are familiar (and like) building with workflows.

❌

Don’t choose Duckie if: you want an established product and care about money!

Fini

Easily confused with Intercom’s own Fin, Fini is another YC-backed startup, this time slightly older than Duckie, it was founded in 2022.

How does Fini integrate into Intercom?

Fini can be integrated into your Intercom widget to directly reply to user questions BUT only if you are on their Enterprise plan, otherwise you will have to settle for using their own widget.

How easy is it to setup Fini?

Once you are on their Enterprise plan, integrating Fini into Intercom is easy and it can be added to both chat and email channels.

Setting up their AI agent isn’t too hard, however you will need to create your own sample prompt, including for initiating a human handover, and there are quite a few areas of configuration to get to grips with first.

What knowledge sources can I train Fini on?

Fini can be trained on your Notion, Confluence, Zendesk articles, Google Drive, links or PDFs, but doesn’t have a native integration with Intercom for ingesting help articles, so these will have to be added as a web crawl.

One thing worth noting though is that to update your knowledge you will have to manually request a re-sync.

You can also create knowledge items (custom answers) to give knowledge directly to the AI agent.

On the Enterprise plan they also offer the option to train your AI agent on your historic tickets.

What features does Fini have?

Fini has a multi-agent architecture and has features allowing AI actions, tagging (it is unclear if these are tags applied in Intercom or just on Fini’s own platform) and tasks (flows), which, again, are only accessible to Enterprise users.

One potentially neat feature Fini does offer is the choice to let your AI customer service agent to answer from an internet search as well as your knowledge base (however, this usually results in more issues than it is worth as it is unverified information).

How do I improve my Fini responses?

There are a number of features that help you improve your AI agent’s responses, from reporting, product insights, an AI evaluator and resolution rate feedback, however, you guessed it, most of these are only available if you are on their Enterprise plan.

You will still have access though to their analytics features, the ability to inspect responses in your chat history and have auto-categorization of topics.

How secure is Fini?

Fini is already SOC-2 Type II certified and ISO27001 and GDPR compliant, so should tick the security boxes of most businesses.

Who is using Fini?

Distrokid, Qogita and Column Tax all use Fini today, according to their case studies.

How much does Fini cost?

Much like its (almost) namesake, Fin, Fini charges per resolution, at a slightly cheaper than Fin $0.69 per resolution rate, but there’s a catch…

Their minimum plan is $1,799/mo, so at our 50% resolution rate, unless you have over 5,204 tickets per month then you won’t be getting that rate!

✅

Choose Fini if: you want a modern, polish, agentic AI customer service agent with strong security credentials.

❌

Don’t choose Fini if: your ticket volumes are below ~5,500 per month (as you won’t be able to use their Intercom integration).

eesel AI

eesel was founded in 2020 out of Sydney, Australia.

We’ve got a full rundown of all of eesel’s features and a comparison to My AskAI here, but read on for the abbreviated version:

How does eesel integrate into Intercom?

eesel has the full-suite of options to integrate with Intercom, including direct replies, internal note replies and their own copilot.

How easy is it to setup eesel?

It’s very easy to get your eesel AI agent set up within Intercom initially.

The only quirk however, is that pretty much all behavioral control (e.g response styles, how reference links are displayed and internal note/tagging) is completed through the use of actions and prompts that you have to manually set up (this includes having to set up a human handover prompt).

The upside of this is that you can have granular control over the behavior of your AI agent.

The downside of this is that, while their docs do help with a number of use cases, it will mostly be left to you to play around with your AI agent to try and get the best responses.

This is probably best demonstrated by the fact that eesel offers 8 hours of prompting assistance for $999 per month in addition to their usage-based plans.

What knowledge sources can I train eesel on?

eesel is one of the more impressive AI agents in this list from a connections standpoint, with the ability to train on internal knowledge sources like: Google Drive, Notion, and Confluence, but also on external sources like websites, YouTube videos, Shopify stores, and, most notably, tickets (although no direct Intercom help article integration, so adding these will have to be via a webcrawl).

Very few products allow for direct training on tickets, and when they do, the process is often rudimentary.

With eesel however instead of just ingesting your tickets and using them as a reference source, you first filter/query your tickets to narrow them down to the tickets you want to train on.

This ensures you only use specific agents, or over a specific time period.

Then they use this sample of your tickets to generate articles that you review and approve before adding to your AI agent’s knowledge base.

This works very well if you have no, or very outdated help articles to begin with.

Where it becomes less useful is if you don’t apply good filtering in the first place or if you already have articles - as these may then duplicate or add contradictory information to your existing articles.

You can also connect dynamic data, live user data about your customers, either with one click from Shopify or via their actions connectors, meaning your AI agent can provide personalized responses to each customer.

What features does eesel have?

One of the more comprehensive and well-developed products on this list (helped by the founder being an ex-Intercom employee), eesel has a number of strong features worth pointing out:

Train on historic tickets: as mentioned above, you can use your historic tickets as a knowledge source

Complete control via actions/tools: while more complex to set up, it will give you a granular level of control over your AI agent

Tagging: so you can improve your reporting or triage of conversation workflows

Batch testing/simulation: to see how your AI agent is performing you can simulate historic tickets.

For a full rundown of eesel’s features, check out our comparison post here.

How do I improve my eesel responses?

eesel has a good set of ‘improve’ features too, from stats on escalation and deflection rates to knowledge gap identification, answer inspection, improvement from historic tickets and the aforementioned batch testing.

All of which should mean that you should find it pretty easy to get those AI resolution rates up.

How secure is eesel?

eesel doesn’t disclose GDPR or CCPA compliance, however it is likely to have GDPR at a minimum.

They are also currently undergoing their SOC-2 Type II certification.

Who is using eesel?

They have over 1,000 customers and have published a wide selection of customer stories on their site, including from Stereo Labs, Hivemapper and Years.

How much does eesel cost?

Not the cheapest provider, pricing per “interaction”, however these do include action/tool calls.

Interaction prices go from $0.30 down to $0.21 per interaction on non-Enterprise plans.

Comparing using 2 messages per ticket and a 50% resolution rate, and using their lowest rates we get a price of $0.84 per resolution.

✅

Choose eesel if: you want a highly configurable AI agent that can be trained on your historic tickets and you may move helpdesks in the near future.

❌

Don’t choose eesel if: you are looking for an affordable alternative to Fin (prices are pretty comparable at the end of the day) with direct training on your Intercom articles.

Desku

Desku was founded in 2022 and offers its own helpdesk (if you did end up wanting to switch from Intercom) in addition to its AI agent - Eva AI.

How does Desku integrate into Intercom?

It isn’t completely clear but it *looks* like you can add Desku to your Intercom and have it directly reply to conversations.

There doesn’t appear to be an internal note reply option though.

How easy is it to setup Desku?

Setting up your AI agent looks pretty simple but I couldn’t see anywhere where it shows exactly how you link it to your Intercom, apart from a few screenshots here.

Beyond this it is hard to judge the difficulty of setup as their docs aren’t super detailed.

What knowledge sources can I train Desku on?

You can train your Desku AI agent on most of the basic sources: websites, PDFs and a Desku help center, if you want to add Zendesk or Intercom help center articles, these will have to be added as a web crawl.

It does however appear to have Shopify and WooCommerce integrations for eCommerce users and the ability to add your own custom answers.

They also mention training on tickets, but it is unclear if this is only for Desku tickets or not.

There is a 10m character limit on training data (the equivalent of around 40 books, and more than enough for most businesses).

What features does Desku have?

Desku is pretty light on functionality compared to most of the other options in this list.

They do allow multi-agent set-up and their own copilot (albeit this looks to be in their own helpdesk platform).

How do I improve my Desku responses?

Improve features are limited too, with just some simple resolution rate stats and a basic dashboard available.

How secure is Desku?

From looking around their site and asking their own Eva AI, I couldn’t find any details or mention of security, so it’s probably reasonable to assume they don’t have a SOC-2 Type II certification or ISO27001.

Who is using Desku?

They quote having over 500 brands using their services, from KoinX to YumAsia and EventDay.

How much does Desku cost?

One of the bonuses of Desku is that it is definitely on the cheaper end of the spectrum with prices of $53 per month per 1,000 responses.

Using our standard methodology, this works out at $0.21 per resolution.

✅

Choose Desku if: you want a very (but cheap) basic AI experience with good eCommerce integrations.

❌

Don’t choose Desku if: you need anything more than basic features, such as tools, tasks, guidance (the list goes on).

Aissist

Aissist was founded in 2024 and is one of the more powerful AI agents in this list.

How does Aissist integrate into Intercom?

Aissist appears to offer all integration options for Intercom - direct reply, internal note replies and even draft notes (although it is unclear if this last option is a draft within Intercom or in the Aissist platform).

How easy is it to setup Aissist?

It’s as easy as any of the other platforms to get started and setup with Aissist.

Like most of the other AI agents, it does however require you to set up your own prompts and instructions initially, so you’ll definitely want some prompting skills.

And the integration with Intercom does require a decent amount of configuration.

What knowledge sources can I train Aissist on?

As with most AI agent platforms, you can train on websites and PDFs.

A few more integrations that set Aissist apart though are: Google Docs, Sheets, Shopify, WooCommerce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, PostgreSQL and Calendly.

They don’t appear to have helpdesk knowledge integrations (i.e. with Intercom and Zendesk), so you’ll have to add yours as a public URL (and it won’t work if your help articles are private).

What features does Aissist have?

Aissist’s most impressive features are that it allows the creation of large, multi-agent systems where each agent can have a separate role and task.

It’s probably the most comprehensive agent setup of all the options on the list and will give you a very high level of control over your AI customer service agent.

However, it is also therefore one of the more complex to set up.

Another neat feature it has is the ability for the (human) agent to run commands/initiate agents from internal notes, probably more of an advanced feature for most but cool nonetheless.

Because of Aissist’s multi-agent set up, you can also create things like tagging agents and summarization agents within your Intercom.

How do I improve my Aissist responses?

It gives you a few ways to help you improve your AI agent’s responses from:

Testing with their ‘simulator’

‘Teaching’ the AI agent with examples

Investigating success metrics like containment and escalation rates

Along with an overall reporting and insights dashboard.

How secure is Aissist?

Again, from looking around their site and asking their own AI, I couldn’t find any details or mention of security, so it’s probably reasonable to assume they don’t have a SOC-2 Type II certification or ISO27001.

However they do mention they are GDPR compliant.

Who is using Aissist?

Aissist’s homepage lists a number of customer stories including those from Holafly, Sunroom and Coros.

How much does Aissist cost?

They price per reply, with the amount you pay dependent on your volume.

At its cheapest (on their Enterprise plan) it is $0.08 per reply, and $0.12 per reply on their lower tier plans.

They quote this as being $0.43 per resolution assuming 4 replies and a 75% resolution.

For our comparison, to keep things fair, we will assume 2 replies and 50% resolution, meaning a cost of $0.32 per resolution.

✅

Choose Aissist if: you want a fully featured agent with a true multi-agent set-up, where each agent is capable of completing different tasks.

❌

Don’t choose Aissist if: you aren’t technical/familiar with prompting or are looking for something SOC-2 Type II compliant.

Quickchat

Quickchat has been around since 2018 and is another YC-backed startup and full helpdesk solution.

How does Quickchat integrate into Intercom?

The only way you can use Quickchat in Intercom appears to be via direct replies, unlike other integrations, instead of using via an app, it looks like your Quickchat AI agent replaces a human agent in a workflow (but I can’t say this was super clear).

How easy is it to setup Quickchat?

Quick by name, quick to set up by nature!

Slightly more complex to set up than some others here due to it not being a simple app, it also requires you to specify “guidelines” as part of the set up process.

What knowledge sources can I train Quickchat on?

One of the more limited options on this list from a training perspective, you can only add: websites, PDF and Word documents.

Worth noting here though that knowledge refreshes don’t happen automatically, so you will need to request a manual refresh to keep your content (and AI agent) up to date.

There *may* be an Intercom help article connector, but it is hard to tell from their documentation, so likely you will need to add your help center articles via a web crawl.

What features does Quickchat have?

Quickchat has some more advanced features, like their custom actions (tools), which allow you to connect your AI agent to other platforms and data sources.

They also have a “smart data gathering” capability, which allows you to use your AI agent as a more intelligent lead capture tool.

You can customize the tone of voice and behavior of your AI agent and generate AI summaries on human hand-offs.

Interestingly, the option for human-handoff also isn’t available on all plans (only their professional and above), although it is unclear if this still relates to the Intercom integration or their own chat widget.

How do I improve my Quickchat responses?

Quickchat has some useful AI agent improvement tools, mostly centered around stats and analytics, letting you see sentiment of conversations, outcome and deflection rates.

One unique feature they do have is the ability to control the topic grouping for your insights, so you can define your topics and then have the tickets auto-categorized into these as they are processed.

Not so useful if you don’t already know categories of what your customers are asking about.

How secure is Quickchat?

They are GDPR compliant, but there is no mention of SOC-2 Type II or ISO270001 certification.

Who is using Quickchat?

They have a selection of case studies on their site and quote serving everyone from start-up to Fortune 500 companies.

The three businesses quoted on their site are Contact North, Novuskills and Maybe (although the latter appears to have switched to their own AI since).

How much does Quickchat cost?

Confusingly, Quickchat has two different pricing models, either reply-based on resolution based.

They either charge $99/mo for 15,000 replies or $0.70 per resolution.

At that reply pricing, the agent is highly unlikely to be truly agentic, so we will be comparing based on their resolution based pricing.

✅

Choose Quickchat if: you want to be able to choose your pricing model and would be happy with a very basic AI setup.

❌

Don’t choose Quickchat if: you need deep Intercom integration or want to go down a resolution-pricing route (just choose Intercom Fin).

Bot9

Bot9 was founded in 2024, and looks to be a spin-off/out from a larger eCommerce SaaS called Dukaan, it is a full helpdesk in its own right.

How does Bot9 integrate into Intercom?

It integrates directly into Intercom via an app and enables your AI agent to reply directly to users (no note replies though).

How easy is it to setup Bot9?

Relatively simple to get going and live, but you will find quickly that you need to create your own instructions/prompts to control the bot (but are limited to 5 instructions only).

What knowledge sources can I train Bot9 on?

Bot9’s training capabilities are very limited.

From their documentation, it appears like you can only train on URLs/links and PDFs (so no Intercom help article integration, but you could add via a web crawl).

Inexplicably they have named their train on website feature “God’s Eye”…

What features does Bot9 have?

While not rich in functionality, Bot9 does let you create rudimentary actions and handily shares a list of example actions and their requests to get you started.

This means your AI agent will be able to call other tools or services and make changes, updates or read information.

How do I improve my Bot9 responses?

It looks like improving your AI agent’s performance will be mostly down to you here, with the only data or metric being shared is your agent’s resolution rate.

How secure is Bot9?

I couldn’t find any information of Bot9’s security certifications, so reasonable to assume it probably doesn’t have a SOC-2 Type II certification.

Who is using Bot9?

Their site doesn’t mention any customers in particular so hard to say!

How much does Bot9 cost?

Bot9 charges based on “support responses” although doesn’t define these explicitly anywhere, so likely these mean replies.

It is $199 for 500 responses, which results in a $0.79 per resolution effective rate.

✅

Choose Bot9 if: …I don’t really have a good answer here…maybe if you already work with their parent company Dukaan?

❌

Don’t choose Bot9 if: you want a cheap, quality, fully-featured AI agent for your Intercom.

Ada

Ada has been around since 2016 and has grown to revenues of $71m ARR, it’s one of the biggest AI vendors on this list.

It has its own AI agent widget and helpdesk but can also be added to Intercom.

How does Ada integrate into Intercom?

While primarily Ada focuses its efforts on its own widget, they do have a direct integration with Intercom to allow their AI agent to respond directly to tickets there.

There is no internal note or copilot option though.

How easy is it to setup Ada?

Being a full Enterprise product, it isn’t the easiest thing to set up, judging by their documentation.

Nor is the integration with Intercom particularly straightforward to set up via their “Ada Glass” feature.

But as it is unlikely you’ll be doing the set-up alone (you’ll probably have an account manager to assist you), it might not be that bad.

What knowledge sources can I train Ada?

Ada has a number of native knowledge integrations with: Salesforce, Zendesk, Contentful, Dixa, Gladly, and do offer custom integrations too, but there is no native Intercom help article integration.

You can also crawl websites for training and add your own custom knowledge articles directly into your Ada AI agent.

What features does Ada have?

Being one of the more established (and well-funded) options in this list, Ada’s feature set is pretty comprehensive with the ability for their AI agent to:

Create scripted bots

Add processes (tasks)

Use actions or tools

Utilize SOPs or ‘playbooks’

(So pretty much any set-up for the agent you could hope for).

You can also provide it with up to 10 custom instructions (guidance) to control behaviors.

Oh, and their agents can handle voice, too!

How do I improve my Ada responses?

They have some strong improvement features too, from stats in their dashboard for resolution rate, performance and usage reports to topic-based insights.

You can also analyze and improve upon your AI agents responses with their inspect and ‘coaching’ features.

How secure is Ada?

Ada has pretty much all security certification under the sun including: SOC-2 Type II, ISO27001, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliance.

Who is using Ada?

Ada has a number of high-profile clients as customers (although these are likely mostly using their own agent widget), including: Pinterest, Canva and Monday.com.

You can read their customer stories here.

How much does Ada cost?

All this functionality doesn’t come cheap, although Ada doesn’t publish their prices anywhere, the word-on-the-street is that they only do annual contracts and they start from $30k per annum ($2,500/mo).

While their exact pricing model is unknown it is thought to be in the $2-3 per resolution range.

✅

Choose Ada if: you want a polished, fully featured AI agent, with heavy Enterprise credentials.

❌

Don’t choose Ada if: you want a simple Intercom integration or you are looking for something cheaper than Fin (Ada is 2-3x the cost).

Front

The biggest and most mature company on this list, Front has been around for over 12 years (since 2023) and has recently crossed $100m ARR.

They are a full service omnichannel helpdesk platform and their Intercom integration is likely a very small part of their business and product.

How does Front integrate into Intercom?

I couldn’t confirm this completely, but it does appear to integrate into Intercom for direct replies from their AI, and you can use their copilot when you manage the conversations or tickets in their own helpdesk inbox.

Another quirk of setup is that you have to have “topics” enabled on your tickets, and then you have to opt-in to which topics you want the AI to respond to (not the other way around).

How easy is it to setup Front?

As a another large, Enterprise product, again, setup isn’t easy, and getting it to work in Intercom is even more complex, requiring a lot of upfront configuration.

What knowledge sources can I train Front?

Front is surprisingly limited in terms of training sources.

Not only can you only train from Front articles, or a website, but you have to manually resync content to keep your AI agent up to date.

What features does Front have?

Front’s topic feature does mean you can have granular control over what your AI agent will reply to and is the equivalent of ‘tagging’ in other products, however it is only in Front’s platform that these tags can be seen.

One of the platform’s more advanced features is its ‘workflow’ (actions) feature, which will enable you to call other services in your AI replies.

Strangely, unlike all other AI agents in this list (which are multilingual), their agent only works for replying in English…

How do I improve my Front responses?

They have their own AI CSAT (Smart CSAT) that will rate each conversation automatically, having come up with their own AI Experience Score framework.

Their broader platform has a wide array of metrics they report on (albeit I couldn’t see a large number of AI-specific stats).

Overall though, there didn’t seem to be many ways you could review AI conversations or identify knowledge gaps.

How secure is Front?

Similar to Ada, Front have pretty much the complete set of certifications, like: SOC-2 Type II, ISO27001, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliance.

Who is using Front?

Front has a number of customer stories on their site and used by stellar large businesses like Uber Freight, Bentobox and MongoDB.

How much does Front cost?

Another pricey option (although cheaper than Fin), Front charges $0.89 per resolution with an additional $20 per seat to use their copilot tools.

✅

Choose Front if: you use multiple helpdesks or channels in addition to Intercom and want the full omnichannel experience for your AI.

❌

Don’t choose Front if: you need deep Intercom integration, responses are in any language other than English, are working to a budget or need anything more than basic AI agent functionality (at their price point, if you can afford them, just use Fin).

Conclusion

If you want to stick with your Intercom helpdesk but don’t like Fin’s pricing, there are real options.

For most teams, My AskAI will give the best value–to–integration ratio (click-to-connect, deep Intercom features, ~$0.10/ticket).

But other options can work if you specific requirements: choose eesel if you want granular control and training from historic tickets (but expect prompt fiddling and higher cost).

Fini is polished and secure, yet economically only makes sense only at higher volumes.

Duckie and Aissist suit builders who enjoy workflows/multi-agent setups (steeper learning curves).

Desku is a budget pick with decent ecommerce ties; Front fits omnichannel enterprises; Quickchat and Bot9 are more limited; Ada is enterprise-grade - and enterprise-priced.

Here’s how to make your pick:

Shortlist 2–3 vendors that match your depth of integration + budget.

Run the same 50–100 historic Intercom tickets through each.

Measure: AI resolution rate, handover rate, CX/CSAT proxy, time-to-first-answer, and true cost per resolved ticket.

Check improvement tools (knowledge-gap surfacing, inspect/debug) and multilingual + handover rules.

Pick the tool that hits your target resolution at the lowest predictable cost - then double down on knowledge gaps for the real gains.

FAQs

Can I use AI in Intercom without paying for Fin?

Yes. Intercom’s App Store has third-party AI agents that plug into your existing workspace. Many support direct replies, internal-note drafts, and/or a Copilot sidebar - so you can keep Intercom and swap Fin for another vendor.

Which Fin alternatives integrate most smoothly with Intercom?

Tight, click-to-connect options include My AskAI, eesel, and Duckie. Fini needs the Enterprise plan for Intercom chat/email. Others (e.g., Quickchat, Bot9) integrate but with more limits (often no internal-note mode) or extra configuration.

What do the costs look like versus Fin’s $0.99/resolution?

Benchmarks show a big spread: My AskAI ≈ $0.10 per ticket (~$0.20 per resolution equivalent); eesel interaction-based (around ≈ $0.84/res); Fini $0.69/res but with a high monthly minimum; Front $0.89/res; Desku ≈ $0.21/res; Aissist ≈ $0.32/res (assumptions noted); Duckie is premium-priced.

What should I prioritize in features when looking at a Fin replacement?

Look for: (a) human handover rules, (b) multilingual support, (c) guidance to control tone/behavior, (d) actions/tools to read/write external data (e.g., Shopify, CRMs), (e) tasks/workflows for multi-step processes (refunds, address changes), and (f) improvement tooling (knowledge-gap surfacing, inspect/debug, batch tests).

How do training sources differ by vendor?

Best-case is direct help-center integrations (cleaner than web crawls). My AskAI connects to Intercom/Zendesk/Freshdesk articles plus internal repos (Drive, Notion, SharePoint, etc.) and live customer data; eesel excels at training from historic tickets (plus common sources). Many others rely mainly on sites/PDFs or require manual re-syncs.