Front vs Intercom: channels, pricing, AI add-ons and fit in 2026

Front is a customer operations platform. It gets every conversation, on every channel, to the right person with the right context, on rules the team writes. Intercom is a support platform rebuilt around Fin, its AI agent. It resolves as much inbound as possible without a person and equips the people who handle the rest. Which one you need depends on what kind of inbound you have.

• Pick Front if a person handles every conversation and the job is getting it to the right person across channels and departments, with rules someone will maintain.
• Pick Intercom if customers are inside your product when they write, the volume is high and repetitive, and you want an AI agent to close the first pass.
• Pick neither if the inbound is named clients whose history and commitments matter more than the question in front of you. Both tools close the conversation and keep no record of what was promised. Sektra keeps that record per client, as the last section shows.

What is the difference between Front and Intercom?

Front replaces the mail client with a shared workspace where email, SMS, social and WhatsApp conversations are assigned, routed, escalated and reported on. Its center of gravity is workflow: rules, SLAs and analytics across teams, all of which someone configures. Intercom's center of gravity is the messenger in your product and the AI agent behind it, with a help desk for what the agent hands off.

Front assumes a human handles every conversation and optimizes who and how. Intercom assumes an AI handles the first pass and optimizes how much it can close.

Which channels does each cover?

Front's Starter plan covers one channel type. Professional and Enterprise are omnichannel, with email, SMS, social and WhatsApp in one inbox and routing across all of them. The native WhatsApp channel is billed at Meta's rates plus a 20 percent admin fee.

Intercom includes live chat, support email and in-app messaging on every plan, and bills SMS, WhatsApp, phone and email campaigns as you use them. Front treats email as a core channel. Intercom supports it, with the platform designed around customers who are logged in when they write.

Front vs Intercom pricing in 2026

• Front: Starter at $25 per seat per month billed annually, capped at 10 seats and one channel type. Professional at $65 per seat, up to 50 seats, omnichannel. Enterprise at $105 per seat, no cap listed. Copilot is a $20 per seat per month add-on on Starter and Professional and included on Enterprise. Autopilot is an add-on on every plan from $0.05 per conversation. Smart QA and Smart CSAT are included on Enterprise with no separate price listed below it.
• Intercom: Essential at $29 per seat per month, Advanced at $85 with 20 lite seats, Expert at $132 with 50 lite seats. Fin costs $0.99 per outcome on every plan and is also sold on its own for teams on other help desks, with a minimum monthly commitment. Copilot for human agents is $29 per agent per month billed annually, $35 monthly, with 10 conversations per agent free each month.

A fifteen-person team on Front Professional with Copilot pays $15,300 a year. The same team on Intercom Advanced with Copilot pays $20,520 a year, plus $0.99 for every conversation Fin closes. A few hundred outcomes a month adds several thousand more.

Intercom's bill is higher because it is priced on the assumption that Fin replaces seats. A team that would otherwise need twenty agents and needs fifteen with Fin comes out ahead. A team whose inbound Fin is not meant to answer pays the seat price without that offset.

Why is Intercom so expensive?

Intercom's seat price sits above Front's at every tier, and the bill has more lines. Copilot is $29 per agent against Front's $20, Fin adds $0.99 per outcome, and SMS, WhatsApp and phone are billed on usage. The platform is priced as a replacement for seats. The model works when Fin closes a large share of repetitive inbound, and it costs more than the alternatives when the inbound needs a person.

How does Intercom consider a chat resolved?

Intercom bills Fin per outcome. It counts one when a customer confirms the issue is resolved, or does not ask for more help after Fin responds. A procedure Fin completes, including a handoff to a person, also counts. The charge is once per conversation even when several questions are answered. Front's Autopilot is metered per conversation it handles, from $0.05, so both meters move with volume and neither moves with headcount.

Which type of company is Intercom best for, and which is Front for?

Front is at home in logistics, financial services, travel and any operation where one customer request touches several departments before it is done. Routing rules, SLA escalation and cross-team analytics are the point, and someone senior configures and maintains them.

Intercom is at home in product-led software companies with a high volume of repetitive questions from logged-in users. There, an AI agent with a good knowledge base closes a large share and the help desk handles exceptions.

Both are queue tools in the end. A conversation arrives, is handled by a rule, an agent or a person, and closes. Neither tool keeps anything about the client after the close.

Which is better: Front vs Intercom?

Pull a month of inbound and sort it. Questions an AI could answer from documentation without embarrassment point to Intercom. Requests that need a person, often in more than one department, point to Front. Conversations with clients whose history and commitments matter more than the question in front of you point away from both. The three-way comparison with Help Scout adds the email-first support desk.

Where Sektra fits

We build Sektra for that last group. It is a shared inbox that syncs two-way with Gmail, Outlook, IMAP and WhatsApp Business. The mail stays where it is, there is no messenger to install in your product, and anyone not yet in Sektra keeps working in Gmail or Outlook.

The basics are there: assignment by rule, round robin or current workload, intent tags on every thread, and notes and mentions on the thread. A typing indicator shows when a teammate is already replying. It does not deflect with an agent. A person always sends.

The memory layer, a record per client of every commitment with its date, every open question, the people and the history, is built from the mailbox on connect. A silence watch with the day count you choose tells you the day a client goes quiet, and the morning digest lists who owes you a reply. The assistant drafts and briefs from that record.

Every AI feature is part of the plan with no per-outcome fee, and plans are on the pricing page. The row-by-row pages are Sektra vs Front and Sektra vs Intercom. Logistics teams shows the operations case where Front and Sektra are both shortlisted, and the product page covers the memory layer.

Front and Intercom answer different questions about the same inbound. Sort the inbound first, and the vendor choice follows.