Migrating from Intercom to Crisp, and from Fin to Hugo? You're in the right place. This guide walks you through the key steps to make your migration smooth and help you get the most out of both platforms.

Things you should know 📚

Crisp is a complete Human-First customer support platform

Intercom is a broad customer engagement suite. Crisp is a complete customer support platform built around a Human-First philosophy: your agents stay at the center, empowered by tools that make them faster and more efficient.

Crisp covers everything you need: LiveChat, Shared Inbox, CRM, Knowledge Base, Campaigns, Ticketing, Analytics, Status Page, and more. It's not just messaging, it's a full-stack support platform at a fraction of the cost.

The key difference in philosophy: where Intercom tends to push maximum automation with Fin, Crisp puts your human operators first and lets Hugo, our AI agent, handle repetitive tasks in the background, without removing the human touch.

We have a different approach to chat

Intercom treats all in-app conversations the same. Customers can start a conversation whether someone is available or not - and hear back in 1-2 minutes, 1-2 hours or 1-2 days. There's no real difference between a live chat and a conversation lasting for multiple days. Intercom offers the ability to create a conversation every time a customer come back.

At Crisp, conversations are organized per contact, giving agents a clear view of the full history in one place. By default, Crisp groups messages into a single thread per contact for easy navigation but you can also create multiple threads if needed, for example to separate different topics or support requests. Agents always have the full context at hand.

Hugo, Crisp's AI agent, works seamlessly within this model. Whether you're using a single thread or multiple ones, Hugo can handle a conversation and hand it off to a human agent with full context preserved. This is a key difference from Fin, where the bot and human agents tend to operate in more separate silos.

Understand the features 🧐

A lot of the terminology - like conversations - remains the same between Intercom and Crisp. If you've been using Intercom's inbox, Crisp inbox won't take a lot of time getting used to. There are some differences to be aware of, though:

• Tags - Intercom allows you to tag people and conversations. Crisp calls them Segments. No worries, it behaves the same as Intercom does.
• Priority - Crisp doesn't have a star icon to denote priority. However, you can leverage feature like customer data to set priority and combine with conversation filters to display the most important conversations first.
• Campaigns - Intercom offers customer engagement campaigns. Crisp Campaigns work similarly. The behavior is a bit different — it works thanks to users' interactions. You'll have to build a tracking plan to push user events. How to use automated campaigns?.

Finally, in Crisp Inbox, you can have multiple email addresses. If you'd like to forward multiple email addresses to a single mailbox, and even respond from multiple addresses, that's no problem. Check How to setup a Custom Email Domain?.

Intercom Fin → Hugo

Just like Intercom has Fin as its AI agent, Crisp has Hugo. Both are deeply integrated into their respective platforms and work directly inside the messenger widget. The migration logic is the same, but the differences matter:

The pricing difference is significant: with Fin, costs can grow unpredictably as your support volume scales. With Hugo, AI is part of your flat monthly plan, no surprise bills at the end of the month.

Pricing 💰

One of the most common reasons teams leave Intercom is cost predictability.

Intercom charges per seat ($29/seat/month minimum) plus $0.99 per conversation resolved by Fin. At scale, this adds up quickly and becomes hard to forecast.

Crisp uses a flat per-workspace pricing model:

• Mini: $45/month
• Essentials: $95/month
• Plus: $295/month

AI credits (for Hugo) are included in your plan. You're never billed per conversation resolved. This makes budgeting straightforward, whether you're a startup or a growing enterprise.

Intercom Messenger ▶️ Crisp Messenger

If you are using the Intercom API to send customer data and details to the sidebar, keep in mind that you can do very similar things with Crisp inbox.

To log custom fields (such as role, plan, average basket, etc.) to the Crisp sidebar, you should use the JavaScript SDK? or our REST API?.

If you want to merge data from unknown visitors to logged in visitors, feel free to check out this article: How to restore chat sessions with a token?

Just like Intercom's Messenger serves as the entry point for Fin, Crisp's widget serves as the entry point for Hugo. The structure is identical — making the migration intuitive. Additionally, Crisp's widget includes an Overlay feature (AI-powered site search) that helps deflect tickets before the user even opens the chat.

Intercom Campaigns ▶️ Crisp Campaigns

If you are using Intercom Campaigns to retarget customers and improve your onboarding and activation, you'll be happy to see that Crisp also offers this feature. Nevertheless, it's a bit different because Crisp Campaigns offer two kinds of campaigns. One is called 'one shot', the other is called 'automated'.

The one shot is like a product announcement or a newsletter and can target segments, advanced filters, specific list of users or all your users. Note that it's a manual action that needs to be done by yourself.

The automated is used to onboard or activate users automatically. It's event focused. It means that you'll have to push user events in your product or software to be able to trigger those events.

Both of these campaigns offer the ability to format messages, based on your users' language using our internationalization feature.

Crisp has an open platform policy

As a developer, you'll be happy to see that we have an open REST API that contains every route that we use to serve Crisp to our customers. Therefore, you'll be able to build powerful integrations and go even deeper thanks to our JS SDK for front-end interactions.

On top of that, Hugo supports MCP (Model Context Protocol), which allows the AI agent to connect to third-party tools and perform real actions, like updating a subscription, checking an order status, or modifying a customer record.

This is a major differentiator for developer teams migrating from Intercom: you get full transparency and control over what the AI can do, which tools it connects to, and how it behaves.

Migrating your data 🗂️

Importing your contacts

When you export a contact from your contact tabs in Intercom, you obtain a CSV file. With this file, you simply import in Crisp CRM. Simply follow the steps that are listed below:

• Head over to Crisp CRM (also known as Contacts)
• Click on "Actions" at the top right of the screen
• Select "Import contact profiles"
• Configure your import and map your CSV file
• Let Crisp do the job 🎉

Another way to do it would be to use our API and build a script that would import your data from your existing backend to Crisp.

Check out more details here.

Importing your knowledge base

Crisp has made importing knowledge base from Intercom really easy. What you need to give us is the URL we can access your knowledge base. That's it. Simply follow the required steps to automate knowledge base import:

• Navigate to the Crisp Knowledge Base
• Click on "Actions" at the top right of the screen
• Select "Import articles"
• Set the url of your existing knowledge base
• Let Crisp do the job 🎉

Check out more details here.

Importing conversations

Importing conversations is possible, however requires the use of our API and this Github repository: https://github.com/crisp-im/crisp-import-conversations

Still wondering if Crisp is the right fit? Discover Hugo, Crisp's AI agent and see how it compares to Intercom Fin, or explore Crisp's full feature set.

Updated on: 16/03/2026