Short answer: if you want a bill that does not change when your team, your volume or your AI resolution rate grows, look at Corebee ($99/month flat), Crisp ($45–$295/month per workspace) or Re:amaze Starter ($59/month flat). If you want the deepest platform and can absorb a bill that moves with usage, Zendesk and Intercom are the incumbents. If you want to own the software outright, Chatwoot is open source and self-hostable and nothing else on this list is.
That is the real fork in this market, and it is why this list is ranked by pricing model rather than by feature count. Feature lists across these fourteen products have converged: they all do retrieval over your help centre, they all escalate to a human, they all sit in a widget. What has not converged is how they charge you — and in 2026 that is the variable that decides whether a support tool costs $99 or $2,400 a month at the same ticket volume.
The comparison table
| # | Tool | How it charges | Entry price (published) | AI metered separately? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Corebee | Flat, per account | $99/month, unlimited AI conversations and team members | No | Teams that need the bill to stop moving |
| 2 | Crisp | Flat, per workspace | $0 / $45 / $95 / $295 per month (4 / 10 / 20+ seats included) | Yes — bundled AI credits ($5 / $25 / $75), then metered | Small teams that want a flat base with a modest AI allowance |
| 3 | Re:amaze | Per team member, or one flat tier | $29 / $49 / $69 per member/mo; Starter $59/mo flat (500 responded conversations) | Yes — $0.85 per resolution past the included allowance | E-commerce teams with many light users |
| 4 | Chatwoot | Per agent (cloud) or self-hosted | $0 (2 agents) / $19 / $39 / $99 per agent/mo billed annually | Yes — Captain AI credits, $20 per 1,000 | Teams that want to self-host and own the data |
| 5 | Help Scout | Per user + per AI resolution | $25 / $45 / $75 per user/mo | Yes — AI Answers $0.75 per resolution | Email-first teams that like the writing experience |
| 6 | Front | Per seat + per AI conversation | $25 / $65 / $105 per seat/mo billed annually | Yes — AI agent from $0.05 per conversation | Shared-inbox teams doing collaborative triage |
| 7 | Freshdesk | Per agent + two separate AI meters | $19 / $55 / $89 per agent/mo billed annually | Yes — Freddy Copilot $29/agent/mo and AI Agent sessions $49 per 100 (first 500 included) | Teams already inside the Freshworks stack |
| 8 | Zendesk | Per agent + per automated resolution | $19 (Support Team) / $55 / $115 per agent/mo paid yearly | Yes — AI agents billed per automated resolution; the per-unit rate is not published | Large teams that need the ecosystem |
| 9 | Intercom (Fin) | Per seat + per outcome | $29 / $85 / $132 per seat/mo | Yes — $0.99 per Fin outcome | Teams that want the strongest out-of-box AI and will pay per result |
| 10 | HubSpot Service Hub | Per seat + credits + onboarding fee | Free (2 users); Starter from $20/seat/mo; Professional from $90/seat/mo plus a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee | Yes — Customer Agent burns 50 credits per resolved conversation; credits $9 per 1,000 annually | Teams already running HubSpot CRM |
| 11 | Gorgias | Bundled allowance + overage + per interaction | $40 / $90 / $550 / $1,430 per month, each with an included ticket allowance | Yes — $1.00 → $0.85 per automated interaction by plan, $1.50 past the plan limit | Shopify and D2C brands |
| 12 | Richpanel | Per user (note the headline) | Free / $29 / $99 per user per month ($85/user billed annually), plus a separate order-volume self-service product at $0 / $120 / $360 per month | Varies by product | E-commerce teams wanting deep order self-service |
| 13 | Tidio | Two separate conversation meters | Starter $24.17/mo (100 billable conversations); Growth from $49.17/mo | Yes — Lyro AI conversations are a second meter, from $32.50/mo for 50 | Small sites that want a cheap entry point |
| 14 | eesel.ai | Pure usage, no subscription | $0.40 per support ticket or chat session; $50 free to start | It is the meter | Teams that want to pay only for what the AI touches |
A note on two identical headline numbers. Corebee and Richpanel both publish "$99". Corebee's $99 is per account, per month, for the whole team, with unlimited AI conversations. Richpanel's $99 is per user per month on its Pro help-desk tier ($85/user billed annually). Five agents on Richpanel Pro is $495/month before anything else; five agents on Corebee is $99/month. Read the unit, not the number — it is the single most common mistake in this category.
1. Corebee — best for teams that need the bill to stop moving
Price: $99/month flat. Unlimited AI conversations, unlimited team members, all features. 14-day free trial, no credit card required. 30-day money-back guarantee. No annual contract. (pricing)
Corebee is an AI-native support platform: a chat widget and shared inbox with a three-tier AI that answers from your own documentation using retrieval, routes what it cannot answer, and hands off to a human with the conversation intact. It connects to WhatsApp through the official Meta Cloud API, and to Slack, Shopify, HubSpot, Stripe and around thirty other tools.
What makes it different is not the AI. It is the invoice. There is no per-seat charge, no per-resolution charge and no overage line. Adding your fourth agent does not change the price. Doubling your ticket volume does not change the price. The AI resolving more of your queue — the thing every other vendor on this list bills you more for — does not change the price.
Be honest about the trade-offs. Corebee is not open source and cannot be self-hosted; if that is your requirement, go to Chatwoot. It is a younger product than Zendesk or Intercom and does not carry their marketplace depth or their enterprise contact-centre stack. SOC 2 compliance and certification are in progress, not complete; it is GDPR compliant with data encrypted at rest and in transit, and audit logs and approval workflows are included on the one plan.
Best for: SaaS and service teams of roughly 1–50 people who want a support bill they can forecast a year out. Look elsewhere if: you need self-hosting, a completed SOC 2 report today, or a voice contact centre.
2. Crisp — best flat base for a small team
Price: $0 / $45 / $95 / $295 per month, per workspace. Seats are included in the plan — 4, 10 and 20+ respectively — with additional agents at $10/month. Each paid tier bundles AI credits ($5 / $25 / $75), which Crisp's own page equates to roughly 90, 450 and 1,350 automated conversations. (pricing)
Crisp is the other genuinely flat option here, and it deserves credit for it: the base price is per workspace, not per person, and the marketing says "unlimited conversations." The distinction from Corebee is the AI meter — Crisp's automated conversations run off a credit allowance that you can exhaust, so the bill can still move if the AI does more work.
Best for: small teams that want a low flat base and only modest AI volume.
3. Re:amaze — best for e-commerce teams with many light users
Price: $29 / $49 / $69 per team member/month, or a Starter tier at $59/month flat with unlimited team members capped at 500 responded conversations. The AI Agent includes 5 / 10 / 20 resolutions per user per month by tier, then $0.85 per additional resolution. (pricing)
That flat Starter tier is unusual and underrated: for a shop with a lot of occasional responders and a predictable conversation count, unlimited seats at $59 is a genuinely good deal. Above 500 conversations you are back on per-member pricing.
Best for: Shopify and marketplace sellers with a wide, part-time support bench.
4. Chatwoot — best if you want to own the software
Price: Hacker $0 (2 agents, 500 conversations/month); Startups $19; Business $39; Enterprise $99 — all per agent per month, billed annually. Captain AI credits are $20 per 1,000. Self-hosted plans are offered separately. (pricing)
Chatwoot describes itself as "the modern, open source, self-hosted customer support platform," and the repository has over 36,000 GitHub stars. If your requirement is that the software runs on your infrastructure and your customer data never leaves it — a regulated industry, a data-residency mandate, a security review you cannot pass any other way — Chatwoot is the correct answer and no hosted product on this list can substitute for it.
The honest counterweight: self-hosting is not free. You are buying infrastructure, upgrades, backups and someone's time. Chatwoot does not publish that number and neither will we.
Best for: teams with a self-hosting or data-residency requirement, and teams that want to read the source.
5. Help Scout — best writing experience for email-first teams
Price: Standard $25 / Plus $45 / Pro $75 per user/month. AI Answers is an add-on at $0.75 per resolution. Additional inboxes are $10/month; additional Docs sites $20/month. (pricing)
Help Scout has the most pleasant agent experience in this group and a genuinely good knowledge base product. The model is per user plus per AI resolution, so a five-person team on Plus resolving 1,000 conversations a month with AI is $225 in seats plus $750 in AI resolutions.
Best for: small B2B teams whose support is mostly email and who care about tone.
6. Front — best for collaborative shared-inbox triage
Price: Starter $25 / Professional $65 / Enterprise $105 per seat/month, billed annually. The AI agent starts at $0.05 per conversation. Smart QA is $20/seat/month and Smart CSAT $10/seat/month as add-ons. (pricing)
Front's per-conversation AI price is the lowest published usage rate on this list by a wide margin. The cost lives in the seats: ten people on Professional is $650/month before any AI.
Best for: teams where several people work the same inbox and internal discussion matters as much as the reply.
7. Freshdesk — best if you are already in the Freshworks stack
Price: Growth $19 / Pro $55 / Enterprise $89 per agent/month, billed annually. AI is two separate meters on top: Freddy AI Copilot at $29 per agent/month, and additional AI Agent sessions at $49 per 100 with the first 500 sessions included. Day passes are $2 / $7 / $12; connector app tasks $80 per 5,000. (pricing)
Freshdesk is the clearest example of a pattern worth naming: the headline per-agent price is competitive, and the AI you actually came for is billed twice more.
Best for: teams already running Freshsales or Freshservice.
8. Zendesk — best ecosystem, least predictable AI bill
Price: Support Team $19 / Suite Team $55 / Suite Professional $115 per agent/month, paid yearly. Suite Enterprise is sales-only. Copilot is a $50 per agent/month add-on. (pricing)
Zendesk's own pricing page states that AI agents are included in every Suite and Support plan "with pricing based on the successful outcomes they deliver," and defines Automated Resolutions as the billing unit. It does not publish the per-resolution rate. That is worth stating plainly rather than guessing at: if you are evaluating Zendesk, the AI line of your bill is a number you have to get from a salesperson.
Best for: organisations that need the marketplace, the contact centre and the compliance surface.
9. Intercom (Fin) — best out-of-box AI, priced per result
Price: Essential $29 / Advanced $85 / Expert $132 per seat/month, plus $0.99 per Fin outcome. Fin can also run on top of another help desk with no seats required, still at $0.99 per outcome with a minimum monthly commitment. Copilot is $29 per agent/month annually. (pricing)
Fin is the strongest general-purpose support AI you can buy without an implementation project, and $0.99 per outcome is at least an honest unit — you pay when it works. The arithmetic is the issue. Five agents on Advanced is $425/month; add 2,000 resolved outcomes and you are at $2,405.
Best for: teams with real budget who want the best resolution quality now and can live with a variable bill. Note: Intercom/Fin is being acquired by Salesforce, which is a fair thing to factor into a multi-year decision.
10. HubSpot Service Hub — best if HubSpot is already your CRM
Price: Free for 2 users; Starter from $20/seat/month; Professional from $90/seat/month; Enterprise from $150/seat/month. Professional carries a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee and Enterprise $3,500. AI runs on HubSpot Credits: the Customer Agent consumes 50 credits per resolved conversation, and credits cost $9 per 1,000 when paid annually. (pricing)
The mandatory onboarding fee is the line most comparisons omit, and it is the largest single number a small team will meet in year one.
Best for: companies whose sales and marketing already live in HubSpot.
11. Gorgias — best for Shopify and D2C
Price: $40 / $90 ($77 annual) / $550 ($471) / $1,430 ($1,227) per month, each including a ticket allowance (50 / 300 / 2,000 / 5,000) and an automated-interaction allowance. Past the plan limit Gorgias's page states a $0.40 per-ticket fee on the lower tiers and $0.36 on the higher ones. The AI Agent is billed per automated interaction at $1.00 down to $0.85 by plan, and $1.50 past the plan limit. (pricing)
Gorgias is the default for Shopify stores and the e-commerce integrations are the deepest here. The structure is the most complex on this list: a base fee, a ticket allowance, a ticket overage, an automated-interaction allowance and an automated-interaction overage — five variables, all of which move in your peak season.
Best for: Shopify brands where order lookup, returns and WISMO are most of the queue.
12. Richpanel — deep e-commerce self-service, per-user pricing
Price: help-desk seats at Free / $29 / $99 per user per month ($20 / $85 billed annually), plus a separate self-service product priced by order volume at $0 / $120 / $360 per month. (pricing)
Richpanel's self-service and order-management flows are genuinely strong. See the note above the table about its $99 tier being per user.
Best for: e-commerce teams that want customers to self-serve order changes.
13. Tidio — cheapest entry point, two meters to watch
Price: Starter $24.17/month including 100 billable conversations; Growth from $49.17/month from 250; Plus $300/month. Lyro, the AI agent, is a separate meter starting at $32.50/month for 50 Lyro AI conversations. (pricing)
Tidio is the cheapest way onto this list, and the reason to read carefully is that "billable conversations" and "Lyro AI conversations" are two different counters that both bill.
Best for: small sites and solo operators testing whether AI support helps at all.
14. eesel.ai — pure usage, no subscription
Price: $0.40 per support ticket or chat session. No monthly platform fee on the standard plan; $50 of free usage to start; spend caps you set yourself (default $250). Enterprise adds a $1,000/month flat platform fee on top of usage. (pricing)
The cleanest unit economics here: you route what you want to the AI and pay for exactly that. At 100 tickets a month it is $40. At 2,500 it is $1,000. Whether that is cheap depends entirely on your volume, which is the point.
Best for: teams with low or spiky volume who want zero fixed cost.
How to choose in fifteen minutes
- Count your seats and your monthly AI-eligible conversations. Almost every disagreement about which tool is cheapest disappears once both numbers are on the table.
- Multiply out the second meter. Take the per-seat price, then add the per-resolution or per-conversation price times your realistic AI volume. That total is the number to compare, not the headline.
- Ask what happens when the AI gets better. Under per-resolution pricing, a smarter AI is a bigger bill. Under flat pricing it is not. This is the structural question, and it is the one most evaluations skip.
- Check the unit on every "$99". Per account, per workspace, per seat and per user are four different products.
- Decide the self-hosting question first. It eliminates thirteen of the fourteen options in one move.
We have written the arithmetic out at 500, 5,000 and 20,000 tickets a month, with every input shown, in the 2026 guide to support automation pricing models.