A Practical Guide to the Intercom HubSpot Integration (2025)

Let me guess: your support team practically lives in Intercom, handling live chats and making sure customers are happy. At the same time, your sales and marketing folks are running their entire world out of HubSpot. The problem? These two systems don't always play nicely together. This gap creates frustrating data silos, endless manual copy-pasting, and a fractured picture of your customer.

If that sounds a little too familiar, you're in the right place. We're going to walk through the different ways you can set up an Intercom HubSpot integration, from the standard built-in options to more powerful, AI-driven solutions. You'll learn how to connect the platforms, understand the snags you might hit with a basic setup, and see how you can automate your workflows for a much smoother customer experience.

What are Intercom and HubSpot?

Before we dive into connecting them, let's do a quick recap of what each platform does best.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is all about customer communication and real-time engagement. It's the engine behind those live chat bubbles you see everywhere, but it also handles targeted emails, in-app messages, and AI chatbots. Most teams use it for three key jobs: capturing and qualifying leads, delivering speedy customer support, and onboarding new users.

A screenshot of the Intercom Messenger, showcasing its modern design.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a full-blown Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Think of it as the central nervous system for all your customer data. It’s designed to bring marketing, sales, and customer service teams under one roof, helping you track every touchpoint a person has with your company, from their first click on your website to becoming a long-term fan.

How the native Intercom HubSpot integration works

When you decide it's time to get these two talking, you'll find there are two main "official" ways to do it. One is built by Intercom, the other by HubSpot. They do different things, which is a pretty common point of confusion. Let's clear that up.

The HubSpot app (built by Intercom)

This integration is focused on one thing: getting your valuable conversation data out of Intercom and into HubSpot. It’s a one-way street, where data flows from Intercom to HubSpot.

Here’s what it can do for you:

• Create new contacts: You can automatically or manually create HubSpot contacts from your Intercom chats. This is perfect for grabbing new leads who pop up on your website chat.

• Log your chats: The integration saves the full transcript of an Intercom conversation as an activity on the contact's timeline in HubSpot. This gives your sales team the full story of what a lead has already talked about with support.

• Kick off workflows: You can trigger HubSpot workflows based on keywords in a conversation. For example, if a user types the word "pricing," you could automatically create a task for a sales rep to give them a call.

The biggest downside? It’s a one-way sync. No information from HubSpot ever makes its way back into Intercom. Some users in community forums also mention that transcripts for longer chats can get messy and become tough to read in the HubSpot timeline.

Data sync (built by HubSpot)

This app has a much more specific job: keeping your contact and company databases perfectly in sync. Unlike the first option, this one allows for a two-way data flow.

Here’s what it handles:

• Keeps your records aligned: When a contact or company is created or updated in one system, the change is automatically mirrored in the other.

• Offers flexible syncing: You can set it up as a one-way or two-way sync, depending on which platform you consider your main source of truth.

The major catch is what it doesn't do. The Data Sync app won't sync any conversation transcripts or support tickets. So, while your contact lists will match up, your sales team will still be missing that rich, contextual history from support chats.

Key limitations of a standard Intercom HubSpot integration

While connecting these tools is a great start, teams often find themselves hitting a wall that the native integrations just can't break through. These issues can stop you from building a workflow that’s actually efficient and automated.

Poor marketing attribution

One of the biggest headaches is seeing leads from Intercom pop up in HubSpot with their source listed as "Offline" or "Integration." For marketing teams, this is a total black hole. You know the lead came from a chat, but you have no idea which marketing campaign, Google Ad, or blog post actually brought them to your site. Without that data, you can't properly attribute revenue or figure out where to best spend your marketing budget.

No real automation

The native integrations are good at moving data around, but they don't do anything with it. Your agents are still doing all the heavy lifting. The integrations can’t answer simple questions, route new chats to the right team, or look up a customer's order status. They just pass information from one system to another, leaving your team to handle the rest by hand.

Incomplete knowledge and data conflicts

As some teams have unfortunately discovered, trying to run both native integrations at once can lead to duplicate contacts and messy data. Even worse, neither integration can tap into knowledge that lives outside of Intercom or HubSpot. Your company's actual brain is probably spread across a Confluence wiki, countless Google Docs, and past support tickets. Without access to all that information, the context in both platforms will always be incomplete.

Going beyond the basics with an AI agent

This is where adding an AI layer on top of your existing tools can make a huge difference. It’s not about ripping and replacing anything, but about making your current setup smarter and more connected. A platform like eesel AI plugs directly into your Intercom and HubSpot accounts, acting as an intelligent engine that automates the manual work your team is stuck doing today.

Unify all your knowledge sources

The first thing eesel AI does is connect to all your knowledge sources, not just Intercom and HubSpot. With simple, one-click integrations, it can pull information from your Confluence pages, Google Docs, and even analyze thousands of your past tickets to learn your brand's voice and common solutions. This gives the AI a complete picture, so when a customer asks a question, it can find the right answer no matter where it's buried.

This workflow compares limited knowledge sources with the extensive sources of an agnostic AI, improving the Intercom HubSpot integration.

Automate workflows, don't just move data

Once it has access to this unified knowledge base, eesel's AI Agent can do a lot more than just log conversations. It can handle frontline support questions on its own, right inside Intercom.

Here’s what that looks like in the real world:

• A customer asks about their order status in an Intercom chat. The AI agent uses a custom action to look up the data in Shopify, gives the customer an update, and logs the entire conversation in HubSpot. A human agent never even had to see the ticket.

• A user asks a technical question about setting up a specific feature. The AI agent finds the step-by-step guide in your Confluence docs, answers the question, and closes the ticket.

This is the key difference between just syncing data and having true automation. The AI does the work, which frees up your team to focus on the tricky issues that actually need a human touch.

Get started in minutes and test with confidence

The thought of setting up enterprise-level AI can be intimidating, but eesel AI is built to be radically self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk with a single click and build your first AI agent in just a few minutes, without sitting through long sales calls or mandatory demos.

Best of all, you can take the guesswork out of launching a new system. The platform has a powerful simulation mode that can run on thousands of your historical tickets in a safe environment. It shows you exactly how the AI would have responded and gives you a forecast of your resolution rate. You can fine-tune its behavior and see the potential impact before it ever talks to a single live customer.

A quick look at pricing: Intercom vs. HubSpot vs. eesel AI

When you're building out your tool stack, it's important to know what the total cost will be. Here’s a quick breakdown.

Intercom pricing

Intercom's pricing is mostly based on plans with a set number of seats. For their AI Agent, Fin, they also charge a pay-as-you-go fee of $0.99 per resolution. This model can make costs unpredictable, since your bill will jump during busy months.

HubSpot pricing

HubSpot also uses a tiered model based on seats and marketing contacts. Their plans often require a one-time onboarding fee that can run into the thousands of dollars.

eesel AI pricing

eesel AI offers a much more predictable approach. Our plans are based on feature tiers and include a generous monthly allowance of AI interactions. The big difference? There are no per-resolution fees. Your bill stays the same whether you have a quiet month or a huge spike in support requests. You can also start on a flexible month-to-month plan and cancel anytime, so you're always in control.

It's time to move beyond just syncing data

A basic Intercom HubSpot integration is a decent first step for centralizing your customer data. It helps break down some silos and gives your teams a little more context.

But the real wins, the kind that save your team hours every week and genuinely improve the customer experience, come from adding an intelligent automation layer. Modern support and sales teams need tools that not only connect data but also act on it. By giving your existing tools an AI boost, you can finally move past simple data syncing and unlock real, end-to-end automation.

Get started with an AI-powered Intercom HubSpot integration today

Ready to see what an AI-powered Intercom HubSpot integration can really do? Sign up for a free trial of eesel AI and get your first AI agent live in minutes.