Cresta vs Intercom: A 2025 breakdown for support teams

Picking the right AI platform for your support team feels like a huge decision. If you get it wrong, you’re stuck with a tool that frustrates your agents, a hole in your budget, and a contract that’s a pain to get out of. It’s the classic "square peg in a round hole" problem, just with more software.

Cresta and Intercom are both big names in the AI support world, but they tackle the problem from completely different angles and for very different teams. One is a heavyweight champion built for huge, complicated operations, while the other is a neat all-in-one package that works best inside its own universe.

This guide will break down the Cresta vs Intercom debate, but we’re going to focus on what really matters: their core features, how much of a headache it is to get started, and what it’ll actually cost you. We'll also look at a third option for teams that don't want to be locked into either approach.

What is Cresta?

Cresta is a generative AI platform built for large, complex contact centers. Think of it as the industrial-strength tool for companies that handle thousands of calls and chats every single day.

Its goal isn't just to answer simple questions. It’s designed to change how support operations fundamentally work by helping human agents in real-time and automating entire conversations. It’s built for scale and is most comfortable in high-volume places where chats and calls are long and detailed.

Cresta’s platform is built around three main ideas:

1. Cresta AI agent: An AI that can handle customer conversations on its own, over both voice and chat.

2. Cresta agent assist: A co-pilot that gives live coaching and tips to human agents while they're talking to customers.

3. Conversation intelligence: An analytics tool that digs through all of your conversations to find trends and insights.

It's a powerful set of tools, but it's really aimed at large companies in finance, retail, and telecom, the kind of businesses ready to spend serious time and money rethinking their support from the ground up.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is probably best known as an all-in-one customer service platform. It packages a help desk, messaging tools, and its own AI chatbot, Fin, into one system.

The idea behind Intercom is to create a tightly-knit ecosystem where everything just works together. Its AI, Fin, is at its best when it's pulling answers from help articles and other content living right there on the Intercom platform. It’s less of a standalone AI and more like a feature upgrade within a bigger customer communication tool.

Intercom’s main parts include:

1. Fin AI agent: The chatbot that answers questions based on your Intercom knowledge base.

2. Intercom helpdesk: The inbox where your team manages all customer conversations.

3. Proactive support: Tools for sending messages to customers before they even know they have a problem.

It’s a popular choice for small to medium-sized businesses, especially those already using Intercom for live chat and who just want to add AI without adding another tool to their stack.

Cresta vs Intercom: Key features compared

While both Cresta and Intercom promise AI-powered support, what they actually do is pretty different. Let’s compare them on the three things that matter most: automation, agent help, and analytics.

Cresta vs Intercom: AI agents and automation

Cresta's AI agent is designed to handle complicated back-and-forth conversations over phone and chat. It really tries to keep track of the customer across different channels, so someone who starts on chat and then calls in doesn't have to explain everything all over again. It's powerful, for sure, but getting it to that point takes a lot of setup and training.

Intercom's Fin is great at giving accurate answers based on the help center articles you’ve already written. It’s designed to be an expert on a specific set of knowledge, but it can get a bit stuck if your company’s information lives outside of Intercom. Some users mention they wish they had more control over what Fin does when it can't find an answer.

Both of these approaches have a catch. Cresta's power is locked behind a door of complexity and high costs. Intercom's simplicity means it's stuck within its own walls. This leaves a gap for teams whose knowledge is scattered across places like Confluence, Google Docs, or even just old support tickets, and who need something that works right away.

Cresta vs Intercom: Agent assist and co-pilots

This is an area where Cresta really goes all-in. Its Agent Assist is a main feature, giving real-time, on-screen advice to agents while they're on a live call or chat. It suggests what to say, gives reminders, and automates annoying after-call work like writing up summaries. It’s meant to be an active coach in the agent's ear.

Intercom has co-pilot features too, which help agents write replies, summarize chats, and find help articles faster. It’s definitely helpful, but it feels more like a useful tool inside the help desk, not an proactive coach that’s shaping agent behavior in the moment.

Feature	Cresta Agent Assist	Intercom Copilot
Real-Time Coaching	Yes (A core feature with live guidance)	No (More focused on drafts and summaries)
Response Drafting	Yes (Smart Compose suggestions)	Yes (Drafts replies from help content)
Knowledge Access	Yes (Surfaces specific answers instantly)	Yes (Pulls from the Intercom knowledge base)
Auto-Summarization	Yes (Cuts down on after-call work)	Yes (Summarizes conversations)

Cresta vs Intercom: Analytics and reporting

Cresta offers some seriously deep conversation analytics. It looks at 100% of your customer interactions, and its "AI Analyst" lets managers ask normal questions like, "What are the top three reasons people asked for refunds last week?" and get back real answers based on data. For a huge operation trying to spot trends, this is a big deal.

Intercom gives you solid, easy-to-understand reports on your team’s performance, how fast you're resolving issues, and customer satisfaction. It covers the core metrics you need. However, some have found it tricky to get detailed reports specifically on the conversations Fin handles, which makes it harder to know how well it’s really doing.

Basically, Cresta’s analytics are powerful but have a steep learning curve. Intercom’s are user-friendly but might not give you the depth you need to spot knowledge gaps across your whole company.

Cresta vs Intercom: Implementation and usability

An AI tool is pretty useless if you can't get it set up and convince your team to use it. The setup process for Cresta and Intercom couldn't be more different.

The Cresta onboarding experience

Getting started with Cresta is a very traditional enterprise sales process. It means sitting through multiple demos, hopping on sales calls, and then kicking off a dedicated implementation project that can easily take weeks, if not months.

It requires a lot of work from your IT and ops teams to connect it with your contact center software, CRM, and phone systems. You can't just sign up and try it. The biggest problem here is the barrier to entry. It's a major commitment from day one.

The Intercom onboarding experience

The process with Intercom is much simpler, especially if you're already a customer. You can turn on Fin pretty quickly and even get a free trial to test it out.

The main work on your end is making sure your Intercom help center is in good shape, because that's the only brain Fin has to work with. While it’s easier to set up, that’s also its biggest weakness: you’re locked into the Intercom world. Your AI can't learn from that really helpful troubleshooting guide your engineers wrote in Confluence.

The hidden cost of "rip and replace" tools

In their own ways, both platforms ask you to change how you work to fit them. Cresta demands a massive implementation project, and Intercom works best when your whole support operation is inside its platform.

But what if you don't want to change your entire workflow just to get some AI help? The alternative is to use a tool that fits into your current setup. For example, eesel AI is designed to connect to help desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and even Intercom in just a few minutes. It's built to be self-serve, so you can get it working in an afternoon, not a whole quarter. This gets rid of the need for a painful "rip and replace" project and lets you see if it's working right away.

Cresta vs Intercom: Pricing and value

A company's pricing model tells you a lot about who they're trying to sell to. Cresta and Intercom think about cost in completely different ways.

Cresta’s enterprise pricing model

You won't find a pricing page on Cresta's website. They use a custom, quote-based model that’s different for every customer. The final price usually depends on how many agents you have and which features you need. This nearly always means signing an annual contract and paying a lot of money upfront.

This model works for big companies with big, predictable budgets. It's just not an option for smaller teams or for businesses that want to start small and prove the tool's value before going all-in.

Intercom’s pricing: A mix of seats and resolutions

Intercom uses a hybrid model. You pay a monthly fee for each of your human agents, plus an extra fee for every ticket that Fin successfully resolves on its own. Their pricing page mentions a fee of $0.99 per Fin resolution.

While this makes it seem easy to get started, that per-resolution fee can lead to unpredictable bills that are tough to budget for. If you have a busy month, you could end up with a surprisingly high bill. In a way, this model punishes you for successfully automating support, the more tickets your AI deflects, the more you pay.

A third way: Unifying your tools without replacing them

So, where does that leave you? Cresta is powerful but it's slow, complicated, and expensive to set up. Intercom is easier to get started with but it locks you into its platform and has a pricing model that can get expensive as you grow. What if you need the power of a big enterprise tool but the simplicity of a modern one?

This is where eesel AI offers a pretty interesting alternative. It’s built on a simple idea: work with the tools you already use.

• Go live in minutes: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your help desk with one click, and see it working on your real tickets without ever having to talk to a salesperson.

• Unify your knowledge: It connects to all the places your team keeps information, not just one help center. It can pull from Confluence, Google Docs, your past ticket history, and more. This gives your AI the full picture it needs to be genuinely helpful.

• Test with confidence: Before you let the AI talk to a single customer, you can run it in a simulation mode. It will look at thousands of your past tickets and show you exactly how it would have answered, giving you a real forecast of how it will perform.

• Transparent & predictable pricing: eesel AI has simple monthly or annual plans based on usage, with no per-resolution fees. Your costs are predictable, and you aren’t penalized for deflecting more tickets.

This video discusses the realities of building an AI startup, featuring insights relevant to companies like Cresta and Intercom.

Cresta vs Intercom: Which platform is right for you?

So, back to Cresta vs Intercom. The right answer really depends on your team.

Cresta is the choice for huge, Fortune 500-type contact centers that have a big budget, a dedicated IT team, and are ready to spend a few months on a major implementation project.

Intercom is a great pick for teams that are already all-in on the Intercom platform and just want to add an AI layer to what they're already doing, as long as they're okay with the per-resolution pricing.

But for all the teams stuck in the middle, the ones who want powerful AI without the cost, complexity, or being locked into one vendor, eesel AI is the obvious choice. It works with your existing tools, learns from all your scattered knowledge, and lets you get started today, not next quarter.

You can sign up for a free trial and see how it works on your own data in just a few minutes.