Ask a support platform whether it trains on your conversations and the answer you get is usually written by the company you are asking. Ask what it really costs and you get a demo booking. That is the normal condition of this category, and it is why KiteIndex exists. We score what a vendor publishes, we date the score, and we keep the old one.
Intercom is the first entry in the index. Assessed on 17 August 2026 against six published criteria, it scores 70.5, on 6 of 6 assessed. Every number below comes from a page you can open yourself, without a login or a sales call, and every one is linked on the scorecard.
| Criterion | Weight | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | 1.5 | 85 |
| Training on your data | 1.5 | 60 |
| Data export | 1.25 | 55 |
| DPA and subprocessors | 1.0 | 90 |
| Status page history | 1.0 | 40 |
| Security attestation | 1.0 | 95 |
Does Intercom train on your data?
Partly, by default, and you can turn it off.
Fin may use anonymised customer data to fine tune models unless you opt out. Opting out is available at any time and the data is deleted within thirty days. Separately, the third party model providers behind Fin are contractually restricted from training on your data and run on zero retention terms once an output is generated.
The subprocessor posture is genuinely strong and the opt out is real rather than theatrical. It scores 60 rather than higher because the default is on, and the default is what the majority of accounts actually run under. A criterion that scored the best available configuration instead of the shipped one would flatter every vendor in the category equally, which would make it useless.
What Intercom actually charges
All three standard tiers publish a list price: Essential at $29, Advanced at $85 and Expert at $132 per seat per month on annual billing. Fin, the AI agent, is $0.99 per resolved outcome, published alongside the seat prices rather than quoted on a call.
That is worth saying plainly, because most of this category does not do it. Publishing the AI unit price at all puts Intercom in the minority.
Two things keep it off 100. The standalone Fin offering, for teams keeping an existing helpdesk, shows Contact sales instead of a price. And the minimum monthly outcome commitment is illustrated by example, as in 50 outcomes, rather than given as a figure you could budget against. A buyer can estimate their bill. They cannot calculate it.
Can you get your data out?
Some of it, self serve. The rest needs code.
The dataset export under Reports returns reporting metadata such as conversation IDs, timestamps, attributes and metrics, but not conversation content. Browser downloads cap at 10,000 rows and anything larger arrives by email. To export the actual conversations you need the Conversations API, which works in ninety day windows per request, or an Amazon S3 export. Bulk export through the interface handles 200 to 300 conversations at a time as PDF or text.
So you can leave. You cannot leave in one self serve step with your content intact, and that is what the 55 records.
The weakest number, and what would move it
Status page history scores 40, the lowest of the six. The page at intercomstatus.com now redirects to finstatus.com, which publishes current incidents, issues and planned maintenance. We could not find published historical uptime percentages, per component uptime figures, or a durable incident archive with postmortems.
That is a dashboard, not a record. A green light today tells you nothing at renewal, which is exactly when the question gets asked. A published uptime series would move this score further than anything else on the list.
The strongest number
Security attestation, at 95. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27018 and ISO 42001, plus HIPAA and GDPR/CCPA coverage, with the documents self serve from a public trust centre instead of released after a sales call. ISO 42001 in particular is an AI management system certification that most of this category has not obtained.
The Data Processing Agreement scores 90 for similar reasons. It reads in full without signing in, it links a public subprocessor page, and it commits to at least twenty days notice before a subprocessor changes. The only deduction is that change notice is opt in by emailing the vendor, rather than a feed a reviewer could monitor.
A low score is not an accusation
A 40 on status page history means we could not find published historical uptime. It does not mean Intercom is unreliable, and nothing here should be read that way. This index measures disclosure, which is what a vendor puts in public where a buyer can check it. Product quality is a different claim, and only one of the two can be verified from outside.
Scores are append only. When Intercom is reassessed, the new score becomes a new dated row and this one stays visible beside it. If something here is wrong and you can point at a URL, the correction is published the same way, as a new dated score, with the old one still on the page. Most comparison sites cannot offer that, because they overwrote the previous answer.
Update, 19 August 2026: Intercom renamed itself Fin in May 2026, and Salesforce has since signed a definitive agreement to acquire it for around $3.6 billion. We have also now scored Zendesk on the same six criteria. The two side by side is here.
See the full Intercom scorecard, with the evidence and source link behind every score.