The short version. Tidio is where a very small team should start. Crisp charges per workspace rather than per seat, which makes it the best value once you have three or four people answering. Help Scout has the cheapest AI in the category at $0.75 a resolution. Intercom has the best AI agent and charges $0.99 an outcome for it. Zendesk is what you buy when procurement is involved.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 15 August 2026.
Running a small business rather than a support team? Our directory keeps shortlists for small business owners, including the agents that answer customers out of hours.
The thing nobody tells you about this category
Customer service software has quietly changed how it charges you, and if you compare these tools the way you would have two years ago you will get the wrong answer.
It used to be simple. You paid per agent, per month. Now the AI is metered separately, usually per resolution, and the price per resolution varies by more than you would expect. Help Scout charges $0.75. Intercom charges $0.99. Zendesk bills per automated resolution without publishing the rate. Crisp bundles a credit allowance into a flat workspace fee. Tidio counts conversations.
Which model is cheaper depends entirely on your volume and how much of it the AI can actually close. So we ranked on:
- What the bill looks like at your volume, not what the seat price says.
- Whether the AI answers from your content or improvises, because the second kind creates work rather than removing it.
- How much of it you can use before paying, since the free tiers here vary enormously.
- Whether adding a part-time person costs a full seat. Support teams are lumpy and per-seat pricing punishes that.
1. Tidio: the smallest sensible starting point
Free tier with 50 conversations and 50 one-off Lyro AI conversations. Starter $24.17/month for 100 billable conversations. Growth from $49.17/month for 250 or more. Plus from $300/month. Verified 15 August 2026.
If one or two people handle support alongside other work, this is the right size. Setup is a form and some content rather than a project, and Lyro answers from your own pages and FAQs instead of making things up, which is the line between a bot that helps and a bot that ends up in a screenshot on social media.
The number to watch is not the monthly price, it is the Lyro allowance. The free and Starter tiers include a one-off block of AI conversations rather than a monthly refill, so treat the free tier as a way to find out whether the AI can actually handle your questions rather than as a permanent plan.
Who it is wrong for: teams whose enquiries need a quote, a diagnosis or a judgement call. A bot in front of that conversation costs you the sale and annoys the customer on the way.
2. Crisp: the one that does not charge per person
Free tier. Mini $45/month per workspace, including 4 seats and $5 of AI credits, roughly 90 automated conversations. Essentials $95/month with 10 seats and $25 of credits, roughly 450 conversations. Plus $295/month with 20 or more seats and $75 of credits, roughly 1,350 conversations. Extra seats are $10. Conversations are unlimited on all plans. Verified 15 August 2026.
This is the entry most people have not considered and it deserves a look, because the pricing shape is different from everything else here. You pay for a workspace, and seats come with it.
Do the arithmetic against a per-seat competitor. Four people on Crisp Mini is $45 a month. Four people on Help Scout Standard is $100. Four people on Intercom Essential is $116. If your support is spread across several people who each do a bit of it, which is how most small companies actually work, that difference is the whole decision.
The AI is credit-based rather than per resolution, and the page translates credits into a rough conversation count, which is unusually honest of them.
Who it is wrong for: teams needing deep reporting or a mature integration ecosystem. Crisp is lean, and lean means you will occasionally find a gap that the bigger platforms filled years ago.
3. Help Scout: email-first, and the cheapest AI here
Free plan for up to 5 users and 100 contacts a month. Standard $25/user/month for up to 25 users. Plus $45/user/month for up to 50. Pro $75/user/month with a 10-user minimum. AI Answers is $0.75 per resolution on every tier, with a three-month free trial on new accounts. Verified 15 August 2026.
Help Scout has always been the option for teams who want support to feel like email rather than like a ticketing system, and customers notice the difference. Replies look like a person wrote them because a person did, in a shared inbox rather than a portal.
The reason it ranks here is that $0.75 per resolution is the cheapest published AI rate in the category, and resolution pricing is the fair version of this. You pay when the AI actually finished the job, not when it had a go. Against Intercom’s $0.99 that is a 24% difference on the part of the bill that scales, which over a year of real volume is not trivial.
Watch the Pro tier’s 10-user minimum if you were planning to jump to it for a team of six.
Who it is wrong for: businesses whose support happens in live chat on a website rather than over email. Help Scout does chat, and it is not what the product is for.
4. Intercom: the best AI agent, priced accordingly
Essential $29 per seat per month. Advanced $85 per seat. Expert $132 per seat. Fin, the AI agent, is $0.99 per outcome on every tier. An outcome counts when the customer confirms the issue is resolved, stops asking for help after Fin responds, or Fin completes a workflow. Verified 15 August 2026.
Fin is the most capable AI agent in mainstream customer service software, and if your support volume is large and repetitive it will resolve a genuinely surprising share of it. That is the argument, and it is a strong one.
The pricing needs care in two places. Seats climb steeply, from $29 to $85 to $132, so a small team on Advanced costs real money before any AI. And read the outcome definition, because “they don’t ask for more help after Fin responds” counts as an outcome. Most of the time that means solved. Sometimes it means the customer gave up, and you are billed the same either way.
None of that makes it a bad buy at volume. It does mean you should model the bill on your actual conversation counts rather than on the seat price, which is the mistake this category invites.
Who it is wrong for: small teams with modest volume. You are buying the most expensive seats here to run an AI that needs scale to pay for itself.
5. Zendesk: the one you buy when procurement is in the room
Suite Team $55 per agent per month billed annually. Suite Professional $115 per agent. Suite Enterprise with Copilot is contact sales. AI agents are included on all plans and billed per automated resolution, with the rate not published. Verified 15 August 2026.
Zendesk is the incumbent, and it is usually chosen for reasons that have little to do with the AI: it integrates with everything, it satisfies a security review, and there is a large pool of people who already know how to administer it.
Those are legitimate reasons. If you have a compliance requirement, a complex routing model, or a support org large enough to need workforce management, this is where you end up and the rest of this list will not serve you.
The one thing we will flag is that the automated resolution rate is not published, which makes it the only tool here you cannot budget from the website. Get that number in writing during the sales process, because it is the part of the bill that grows.
Who it is wrong for: anyone under about twenty agents. You will pay for governance you do not need and administration you cannot spare.
Teams this list will not suit
Ecommerce stores with heavy order volume. Order lookup and returns are a specific shape and there are helpdesks built around them. We have a separate list for Shopify store owners.
Support inside a product. If most of your questions come from logged-in users mid-task, in-product messaging matters more than the inbox, which pushes you toward Intercom regardless of the price.
Companies with one support person. A shared inbox and a good FAQ page will do. Every tool here is built to coordinate more than one person.
Anyone hoping AI fixes a product problem. If people are contacting you because something is confusing or broken, deflecting those conversations is a way of not hearing about it. The tickets were the information.
Considered, and left off
Gorgias. Genuinely the right answer for ecommerce support at volume, and priced per AI resolution. We could not read its pricing at source on 15 August 2026 because the table did not render for us, so we have not ranked it.
Freshdesk. A reasonable Zendesk alternative at a lower price point. Left out on depth rather than quality, and worth a look if Zendesk’s per-agent pricing is the blocker.
Front. Excellent for teams where support and sales share an inbox and conversations are relationship-led. A narrower shape than this list assumes.
Building a bot on a general assistant. Cheap, and it will confidently invent a refund policy. The tools here answer from your content, which is the entire difference and worth paying for.
Questions support teams ask us
Is per-resolution pricing better than per-seat?
It is better aligned, because you pay when the AI finished something. Whether it is cheaper depends on volume. A team with few conversations and several part-time responders does better on a flat workspace fee like Crisp. A team with high repetitive volume does better paying per resolution and running fewer seats.
What does an AI resolution actually cost?
Help Scout publishes $0.75 and Intercom publishes $0.99. Zendesk bills per automated resolution and does not publish the rate, so ask for it before signing. Crisp and Tidio bundle allowances instead, which makes them easier to budget and harder to compare.
Will an AI agent annoy my customers?
Only if it cannot answer. The complaint people have is not that they got a bot, it is that they got a bot that could not help and would not hand over. Check how each tool escalates before you check how it answers.
How much of our volume can AI actually handle?
Depends on how repetitive your questions are and how good your written content is, and the second one matters more than people expect. These tools answer from your help centre, so a thin help centre produces a thin bot. Improving your documentation is the cheapest thing you can do before buying any of this.
What should a five-person company buy?
Crisp Mini at $45 a month if several people share support, because four seats are included. Tidio’s free tier first if it is really one person and some chat. Help Scout if your support is email and you want it to feel personal.
Will AI replace support agents?
It is absorbing the repetitive tier, which is most of the volume and the least interesting part of the job. What it leaves behind is harder, because the easy conversations are gone and every remaining one is an exception. Teams that plan for that keep their good people. Teams that treat deflection as a headcount number tend to lose them.
See our maintained directory shortlists for small business owners for the tools that answer customers when nobody is there.
Last reviewed: 15 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Zendesk’s automated resolution rate and Gorgias’s pricing are not published or did not render, and both are noted as such rather than estimated. We review this page quarterly.
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