An honest look at Intercom Product Tours in 2025: Is it worth it?

Getting user onboarding right is a huge deal for any SaaS company. When it works, new users get that "aha!" moment, stick around, and even tell their friends about you. When it doesn't, you're left watching your churn rate creep up, wondering where things went wrong. For a long time, the go-to solution has been tools that create guided tours to walk new users through the first few critical steps.

One of the big names you'll hear in this space is Intercom Product Tours. It’s designed to help you build in-app guides to show people the ropes. But here's a question worth asking: is a traditional, step-by-step tour still the best way to get users up to speed in today's world?

In this post, we’re going to dig into Intercom Product Tours. We'll look at what it does, where it falls short, and what it actually costs. By the end, you'll have a much clearer picture of whether it's the right fit for your team, or if there are better, more modern ways to help your users succeed.

What are Intercom Product Tours?

First things first, Intercom Product Tours isn't a separate tool. It's an add-on you can buy for the main Intercom customer communication platform. Its whole purpose is to let you build multi-step, in-app guides using a mix of pointers, tooltips, and pop-up messages. The idea is to visually guide users around your product's interface or point out cool new features you've just launched.

It’s mostly built for product managers, customer success teams, and marketers who want to give users a helping hand without waiting for them to ask. The hope is that these guided experiences can improve adoption and reduce the number of simple, repetitive questions that land in your support queue after someone signs up.

One key thing to remember is that Product Tours is part of Intercom's "Outbound" messaging suite and only works on desktop web apps. If your product has a mobile app, this tool won't be able to help you there.

Key Intercom Product Tours features and how people use them

To get a feel for what Intercom Product Tours can do, it helps to look at its main components and the common ways teams put them to use.

The building blocks of Intercom Product Tours

You essentially string together a few different message types to create a guided sequence for your users.

• Posts and Pointers: These are your go-to tools. A "Post" is basically a modal window that pops up in the middle of the screen, which is good for a welcome message or a big announcement. "Pointers" are the little tooltips that attach to specific things on your page, like a button or a menu, to explain what it does.

• Video and Media: You can drop videos from places like Loom, YouTube, and Wistia right into your tours, along with images and GIFs. This can be a great way to show a process in action instead of just trying to explain it with text.

• Multi-Page Tours: If you need to explain a more involved workflow, you can build tours that continue across multiple pages. For instance, you can set a tour to move to the next step only after a user clicks a specific link, taking them to a new page where the guide picks back up.

Common ways to use Intercom Product Tours

Teams usually use these features for a few classic scenarios:

• New User Onboarding: This is the bread and butter of the feature. You can create a tour to walk a new user through the first few essential actions, helping them understand your product's value right away.

• Feature Announcements: Rolled out a new feature? You can use a tour to let existing users know it's there and show them exactly how to use it, which helps drive adoption from day one.

• Targeted Guidance: Not all users are the same, so you can create different tours for different groups. A brand-new user might get a basic "getting started" guide, while a seasoned pro could get a tour that highlights a new, advanced feature.

The catches with Intercom Product Tours: Pricing and missing features

While the feature list sounds pretty decent, once you start digging into user reviews and the technical details, you find some real-world challenges that might make Intercom Product Tours a tough sell.

Intercom Product Tours costs more than you think

This is probably the biggest surprise for a lot of teams. Product Tours isn't just included with your Intercom subscription; it’s a pretty expensive add-on.

Here’s how it works: you need a base Intercom plan, which starts at $74/month for the smallest startups. Then, you have to add the Product Tours feature, which is another $199/month. That means you're looking at a starting price of $273/month just to get in the door. And that price goes up fast as your team or user base grows, making it a serious investment, especially for younger companies.

Some key features just aren't there in Intercom Product Tours

For a tool that’s all about onboarding, it’s missing a few things that are now standard in other tools focused on user adoption.

• No Onboarding Checklists: Checklists are a simple but powerful way to motivate users to finish key setup steps. This feature doesn't exist here.

• No Help Widget: Users can't pull up guides when they need them. The tours are "pushed" to users when you decide, but if someone closes a tour, they can't easily find it again on their own.

• No Mobile Support: As we mentioned, this is a desktop-only feature. With so many products having mobile apps, this is a pretty significant blind spot.

Why Intercom Product Tours can be inflexible and a pain to maintain

The tours themselves can feel a bit rigid. Users have pointed out that the triggers for moving a tour forward are limited. It works if a user clicks a button or types in a box, but it often gets tripped up by more complex actions, like picking a date from a calendar or selecting an item from a dropdown menu.

Even more of a headache is how fragile these tours are. They rely on CSS selectors to figure out which element on the page to point to. If your developers push an update to your app's interface, those selectors can easily break, and your tour stops working. This turns into a constant cycle of maintenance, where you have to go back and fix tours every time your app changes. For any team that moves quickly, this can become a real drag.

A different approach than Intercom Product Tours: AI for user onboarding

Guided tours were a good idea, but they represent an older way of thinking about helping users. A more modern and scalable method gets to the heart of the problem: giving users an instant, relevant answer to their specific question, right when they have it. This is where AI assistants are starting to really shine.

From rigid Intercom Product Tours guides to on-demand answers

A product tour is linear. It follows a script and shows a user what you think they need to know. An AI assistant does the opposite: it answers what the user actually wants to know, at the very moment they're stuck.

This is exactly what a platform like eesel AI is built for. Instead of spending your team's time building fragile, step-by-step tours for every possible scenario, you can deploy an AI assistant that learns from all the knowledge you already have. eesel AI’s AI Chatbot can sit right inside your app, offering 24/7 help that feels like talking to a person, not being dragged through a series of pop-ups.

From manual Intercom Product Tours building to automatic learning

Just think about all the hours that go into scripting, building, testing, and maintaining a library of product tours. eesel AI flips that model completely. It connects to your help center, past support conversations, and internal docs in places like Confluence or Google Docs and trains itself automatically.

This means you can get it up and running in minutes, not months. The AI uses the expertise you’ve already documented, so you don't have to manually create new content for every potential question. It just knows the answers.

From pointing at buttons with Intercom Product Tours to actually doing things

Intercom Product Tours are all about showing and telling. An AI assistant can do much more.

The AI Agent from eesel AI doesn't just give answers; it can take action. It can sort incoming support tickets, apply the right tags, or even make API calls to look up a customer's order status or account details. You can even use a powerful simulation mode to see how it would have handled past tickets, letting you roll out automation with total confidence. It creates a genuinely helpful and interactive experience that a simple tooltip just can't match.

Intercom Product Tours pricing, explained

Alright, let's talk numbers. Here's exactly what you'd be paying for Intercom Product Tours. The pricing is split into two parts, and you absolutely need both.

Plan Component	Price	What's Included
Intercom Subscription (Starter)	Starts at $74/month	2 seats, for "very small businesses". Price increases with company size/usage.
Product Tours Add-on	+$199/month	The ability to create and launch product tours.
Total Minimum Cost	$273/month	For a very limited plan. Costs rise sharply for more seats or contacts.

One of the frustrating things about Intercom's pricing is that it isn't very transparent for larger plans. You often have to get on a sales call to get a real quote, which makes it hard for teams who are just trying to budget.

In contrast, platforms like eesel AI offer clear, predictable pricing. The plans include all the core products (AI Agent, Copilot, Chatbot) and are based on usage, so you don't get hit with unpredictable bills based on how many issues are resolved.

The verdict: Is Intercom Product Tours right for you?

So, after all that, should you use Intercom Product Tours? It could be an okay choice if you’re already deep in the Intercom ecosystem, your product is a pretty simple web app, and the high monthly cost isn’t a dealbreaker for you.

For most teams, though, its limitations are tough to overlook, especially if you're looking for something that’s affordable, scalable, and doesn’t require a ton of upkeep. If you want to give your users help on-demand instead of forcing them through rigid guides, and you need something that works everywhere without costing a fortune, modern AI-powered tools are a much more powerful and efficient way to go.

A better way than Intercom Product Tours to onboard and support users

Instead of spending your time building and fixing brittle product tours, what if you could launch an AI agent that learns from your existing knowledge and gives users instant, accurate answers, 24/7?

That's what eesel AI is all about. It connects to your helpdesk and knowledge bases to automate support, guide users, and take a huge load off your team's plate, starting from day one.

Start your free trial