Fin by Intercom vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.6 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 8.6 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
8.4
81 Ratings
3% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.879 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings8.157 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.567 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings7.762 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.079 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings8.578 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
76 Ratings
8% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.567 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.874 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Fin by Intercom
-
Ratings
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.3
81 Ratings
4% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings7.958 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.337 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.051 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings9.080 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.370 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Small Businesses
LocaliQ
LocaliQ
Score 8.8 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 9.2 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Conversica
Conversica
Score 4.1 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Fin by IntercomSalesforce Service Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(384 ratings)
8.7
(100 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(21 ratings)
6.5
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(294 ratings)
8.2
(22 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.7
(45 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.6
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
5.8
(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
Fin by Intercom is well-suited for handling basic questions, especially for smaller teams that don’t have the time or resources to fully train it. That said, it’s easy to see how much more powerful Fin could be with proper guidance, training, and well-developed content in place.
Read full review
Salesforce
I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.
Read full review
Pros
Intercom
  • Serves as the first point of interaction.
  • Answers questions based on the knowledge base.
  • Tries to suggest a solution for reported issues (in some cases).
  • Gives the option to improve its answer.
  • Learns from other conversations and replies by humans.
  • Understands other languages.
  • Interprets images (somewhat).
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
  • The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
  • Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.
Read full review
Cons
Intercom
  • Setting up workflows are not easy to do and have some limited scope
  • Making repeated suggestions should be easier to contain
  • It would be great if it could identify other tickets that may have similar issues or identify Linear or Jira tickets that may be relevant
  • Prevent service agents from making duplicate customers of the same name or even close misspelled names - it makes for very dirty data
  • Make suggestions for tagging conversations to rely less on the agents to do clean up
Read full review
Salesforce
  • We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.
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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
I think Intercom and Fin by Intercom AI is pretty intuitive and user-friendly. I think, touching on already mentioned topics, that Fin by Intercom AI could be a little more intuitive in conversations especially when allowing customers to be routed to a person. Also, have to be honest, the search features (e.g. Inbox searches) and reports could be made more intuitive. Also, while I appreciate how fast Intercom changes, I have found that sometimes options or feature just move or change without warning. This can make things a little confusing if you get used to a particular way of working or using a feature.
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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
Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.
Read full review
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.
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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
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Alternatives Considered
Intercom
We initially used Dixa Mim Bot, which is a far inferior chatbot and AI system. It felt like they were behind the curve compared to Intercom, with slow progress and little investment in the future of the Bot. It was very basic in its capabilities and needed more Dev support to manage.
Read full review
Salesforce
We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.
Read full review
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
  • With Fin, we achieved higher customer satisfaction and faster response times.
  • It saves time for our support team, allowing them to focus on more complex questions or issues.
  • It provides the opportunity for support staff to work at a more strategic level.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
  • The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
  • Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person
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