Fin by Intercom vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.
$25
per month
Pricing
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Editions & Modules
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
The Early Stage program
$65
per month (6 support seats)
Proactive Support Plus add-on
$99
per month
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin resolution
per month per seat
Starter Suite
$25
per month
Pro Suite
$100
per month per user
Enterprise
$165
per month per user
Unlimited
$330
per month per user
Agentforce 1
$550
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works: Use Fin in at least 250 conversations within the first 90 days after trial. If you're not satisfied, you can request a refund of up to $1M. Refund requests must be submitted within 90 days of starting the subscription.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Considered Both Products
Fin by Intercom
Chose Fin by Intercom
We used Intercom in addition to Salesforce (where we provided support for our core business customers), and to Ada (core business customer chat interface). Because we had a separate product with a smaller, more lightweight business base, Intercom was perfect for providing …
Chose Fin by Intercom
We found Intercom's layout to be more user-friendly and the options for integration and setup to be much easier than with other products we looked for.
Chose Fin by Intercom
We've used both Drift and Salesforce chat at Owl Labs in the past, and I didn't find them to meet our needs or customer needs the way Intercom has been able to. Intercom ranks higher for us regarding Integrations offered, customization, AI functionality, and user-friendliness. …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Keep in mind that my day-to-day focuses mainly on Help Center/article content. That's all I'm comparing/evaluating in this specific response. Intercom has come a long way in the two years or so that I've been using it. They've made major strides toward feature parity for …
Chose Fin by Intercom
We have selected Intercom as an affordable alternative to Salesforce Cloud when we were a small startup with smaller operations and volumes. We have gone bigger and now Intercom is much more expensive than Salesforce for us. They have changed their pricing strategy many times …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Service Cloud is more robust from a reporting standpoint. ChurnZero and Intercom are pretty neck and neck.
Salesforce Service Cloud

No answer on this topic

Features
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Fin by Intercom
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
77 Ratings
9% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.475 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings8.553 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.663 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings8.260 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.375 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings9.174 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Fin by Intercom
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.7
72 Ratings
10% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.463 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.970 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Fin by Intercom
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.7
77 Ratings
11% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings8.054 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.834 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.947 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings9.276 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.866 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Small Businesses
LocaliQ
LocaliQ
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Score 9.3 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Conversica
Conversica
Score 9.9 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(320 ratings)
8.4
(83 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(21 ratings)
6.3
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(228 ratings)
8.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.5
(28 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.6
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
5.7
(10 ratings)
7.0
(20 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
7.4
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.6
(5 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Intercom
While Fin is an awesome investment, the setup and tuning of responses to meet brand alignment and delivery have taken some time. If you prioritize not just resolution rate and accuracy, but style and delivery, it's a bigger lift. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the step and its impact on resource management are a worthy investment.
Read full review
Salesforce
It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with
Read full review
Pros
Intercom
  • Answer easy questions based off of the knowledgebase I provided
  • It's decent with redirecting customers who aren't satisfied to a human agent (me)
  • I like how it quotes the article that it is using to the customer, I'm not sure how often they're actually clicking on that article, but it's nice that the option is there
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
  • Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
  • Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system
Read full review
Cons
Intercom
  • Customizing Fin by Intercom's escalation paths could be easier (ex. if there are some inquiries we don't want passed to the human team)
  • Reporting on conversations handled to completion by Fin by Intercom (not just those that are marked as "resolved")
  • It would be helpful to be able to indicate to Fin by Intercom when an answer is wrong, or train it on things that it shouldn't do (not only what it should do)
Read full review
Salesforce
  • There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
  • Costing is high.
  • Maintenance is more.
  • Expertise is required for implementation.
  • The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Intercom
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
Read full review
Salesforce
Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
Read full review
Usability
Intercom
It's incredibly useful. You're honestly a little silly if you don't because it can handle simple conversations very easily and more in-depth conversations if you're willing to put in the work. It's great both as a customer success representative (with the AI agent) and as a higher-level customer success reporter.
Read full review
Salesforce
I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Intercom
always there
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.
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Performance
Intercom
works perfect
Read full review
Salesforce
The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
Read full review
Support Rating
Intercom
Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
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In-Person Training
Intercom
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
Read full review
Online Training
Intercom
Easy to know the learning path
Read full review
Salesforce
Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
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Implementation Rating
Intercom
The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.
Read full review
Salesforce
I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Intercom
I used Zendesk briefly but found it difficult to navigate — I often couldn’t tell what was going on or how to simply reply to a ticket. In contrast, Intercom is much more intuitive and user-friendly. Its clean interface and support for multiple communication formats like emails, posts, and banners make client communication clear and efficient.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
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Scalability
Intercom
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports
Read full review
Return on Investment
Intercom
  • Since we implemented Fin AI in February, we have been able to support customer queries during non-business hours. This is a game changer. Fin has brought down response times and is also extremely capable of handling complex queries from our customers. We have seen closure rates go down by 24-30 hours, which is quite phenomenal.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
  • The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
  • Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
  • Limited to annual subscription model
Read full review
ScreenShots

Fin by Intercom Screenshots

Screenshot of Fin, delivering conversational support experience to customers.Screenshot of where to monitor, analyze, and optimize Fin by spotting trends, filling content gaps, and fixing quality issues topic by topic.Screenshot of where to customize Fin's tone of voice, teach it support knowledge and policies, and configure how it handles complex tasks in over 45 languages.Screenshot of where to test answers, review the sources and settings that shape them, and get tailored recommendations to optimize performance.Screenshot of Fin, as it appears across email and live chat to phone, SMS, and social. Fin can answer any question, across any channel, any time.

Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center