Live chat pricing comparison

Every live chat tool we track, side by side on price. Numbers pulled from each vendor's published pricing page and refreshed weekly. No invented benchmarks, no estimated tiers.

3 Tools compared

2 Have a free plan

$29 Lowest paid entry

2026-04-30 Most recent capture

Free tiers

What each tool gives you on the free plan, before any paid upgrade. Tools without a free plan are listed in the next table.

Tool	Plan	Contact limit	Monthly send limit	Source
Crisp	Free	·	·	Vendor
Help Scout	Free	·	·	Vendor

Entry paid plans

The cheapest published paid plan for each tool. This is the upgrade target after a free trial or free tier. Custom / contact-sales plans are excluded; see the per-tool page for those.

Tool	Plan	Monthly price	Contact limit	Send limit	Action
Crisp	Mini	$45 /mo	·	·	View Crisp
Help Scout	Standard	$25 /mo	·	·	View Help Scout
Intercom	Essential	$29 /mo	·	·	View Intercom

Mid-tier paid plans

The plan above entry-tier where most growth-stage publishers land as the contact list scales. Tools without a published mid tier jump straight to enterprise / contact-sales pricing and are omitted here.

Tool	Plan	Monthly price	Contact limit	Send limit
Crisp	Essentials	$95 /mo	·	·
Help Scout	Plus	$45 /mo	·	·
Intercom	Advanced	$85 /mo	·	·

Beyond price

Cost is one dimension. The pages below cover the same live chat set on different axes.

Editorial ranking /best/live-chat Ranks the same tools by editorial fit (free-plan-first, then ascending price, then alphabetical) with verdict tags and best-for / not-for slices per row. Switch guides 5 live chat migration guides Long-form switch guides for the in-category pairs (export mechanics, automation rebuilds, DKIM sequencing, what you lose vs gain). Head-to-head 3 pairs in /compare Two-tool head-to-head matchups with side-by-side plan grids, limits at the entry tier, and best-for splits.

Live chat migration guides

Intercom to Help Scout Cost reduction · Email-first archetype
Intercom to Crisp Per-seat to flat · Cost reduction
Help Scout to Crisp Cost reduction · Per-seat to flat
Crisp to Help Scout Email-first archetype · HIPAA on Pro
Crisp to Intercom Inverse migration · Messenger depth

Featured head-to-head pairs

How this table is built

Every price and limit is captured from the vendor's own published pricing page. We do not estimate, interpolate, or carry over numbers from third-party reviews.
Pricing is refreshed weekly via a cron-driven Playwright scrape with editorial preservation: low-confidence scraped values never overwrite verified prior values.
Ranking inside each table is free-plan-first, then ascending entry price, then alphabetical. Affiliate relationships do not influence ranking.
"Custom" or "contact sales" plans are omitted from the price columns. The per-tool page (/tools/{slug}) shows the full plan ladder including enterprise tiers.
Tools without a published mid tier (free + entry + enterprise only) are omitted from the mid-tier table rather than padded with placeholders.

Vendor pricing-page citations

Every plan in the tables above is sourced from the URLs below. Click through to verify any number; vendors update prices on their own cadence and we capture weekly.

Crisp: https://crisp.chat/en/pricing/ (captured 2026-04-30)
Help Scout: https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/ (captured 2026-04-30)
Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/pricing (captured 2026-04-30)