How we compare
Eighteen vendors, two different jobs, one label. The field compared like for like in four tables, with every price read from the page that publishes it, on 31 August and 3 September 2026, including the seven pages that publish nothing.
Two jobs wearing one label
Every vendor on this page sells an AI agent, and the word hides a split. Qualified, Docket, 1mind and Warmly generate pipeline: they identify a visitor, qualify them and book a meeting. Everyone else runs support: they answer, act on the account and hand over. The support side splits again by who can buy it. Sierra, Decagon, Ada, delight.ai and Fin sell to enterprises through a sales team. Chatbase, Botpress and Tidio sell an agent you can buy with a card. Zendesk, Gorgias, Freshchat and tawk.to are helpdesks with an agent inside.
Algomo appears in every table, because it is one agent doing the inbound half of each job: it answers and acts for the visitors already on your site, and it qualifies and books the ones with money. It does not do the parts that live off your site, and the rows say so.
The field also moved under everyone's feet this year: Qualified [completed into Salesforce in April](/resources/qualified-alternatives), Fin [signed with Salesforce in June](/resources/intercom-alternatives), Warmly [agreed to join HubSpot in June](/resources/warmly-alternatives), and Drift was [retired outright with a six-figure successor](/resources/drift-alternatives). Each of those has a page of its own; this one is the map.
The enterprise service side, like for like
Sierra, Decagon, Ada, delight.ai and Fin all answer customers and act on their accounts, and four of the five sell through a sales call. So does Algomo, on your site, from a free plan. Sources and dates for every row are in the last section.
|  | Algomo | Intercom Fin | Sierra | Decagon | Ada | delight.ai |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Main job | Support and inbound sales, on your site | Support first, plus inbound sales | Enterprise service, expanding into revenue | Enterprise support concierge | Enterprise service agent that resolves and acts | AI concierge for support and sales, from Sendbird |
| Published pricing | Yes: a free plan, then $50 to $4,300 a month, you set it | Yes: $0.99 an outcome, $9.99 a qualification, seats extra | No: outcome-based, no numbers | No: pricing page is a 404 | No: pricing page books a consultation | No: pricing URL redirects to a blog post |
| Try it before a sales call | Free plan, self-serve | 14-day trial; a free year for startups | No: sales-gated | No: demo-gated | No: demo-gated | No: demo-gated |
| Built and operated from | Your own coding agent, over MCP | Intercom's dashboard; paid deployment services | Ghostwriter and Agent Studio, their harness | AOPs and Duet, their harness | Performance Center and Playbooks; APIs, MCP and SDKs for developers | Builder: Persona, Knowledge, Actionbooks, Boundaries |
| What answers the customer | Frontier lab models | Their proprietary Apex models | Their own model constellation | Frontier and specialized models, their words | Industry-leading LLMs, orchestrated, their words | Not disclosed |
| Acts in the visitor's live session | Yes: co-navigates the page with the visitor | No | No | No | No | No |
| Channels | Web chat only | Chat, email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, social | Voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, ChatGPT | Chat, voice, email | Voice, messaging, email | Web, in-app, SMS, email, WhatsApp, social, voice |
| Handover to humans | Live takeover by your team, conversation attached | Intercom's inbox, or nine helpdesks | Your care team and contact centers | Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom | Zendesk, Salesforce, Genesys, ServiceNow, Amazon Connect | Zendesk, Freshworks, Intercom, ServiceNow, NICE CXone, Sendbird Desk |
| Smallest customer it makes sense for | A five-person company, free | A startup: first year free | Fortune-50 scale | Enterprise | Enterprise; Vendr reports $30,000 a year and up | Enterprise |
The agent builders you can buy with a card
Chatbase, Botpress and Tidio are the closest products to Algomo in shape: a free plan, published prices, an agent you build yourself. The difference is what you build it with, and what a unit of usage is.
|  | Algomo | Chatbase | Botpress | Tidio |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Main job | Support and inbound sales, on your site | Support, sales and product guidance | Support platform that executes actions | Live chat plus the Lyro AI agent, for ecommerce |
| Published pricing | Yes: a free plan, then $50 to $4,300 a month, you set it | Yes: free, then $40, $150 and $500 a month | Yes: free, then $150 and $750 a month, billed annually | Yes: free, then $24.17, $49.17 and $300 a month, plus usage |
| What a unit of usage is | A conversation that actually helped: five credits. One that went nowhere: none | A credit per message, roughly; $40 per extra 1,000 | A conversation, with $0.10 of AI spend inside it; packs of 100 auto-added | A Lyro conversation, from $0.50 each, on top of the plan |
| Do unused credits roll over | Yes on a paid plan, and they never expire. The balance holds up to 40% above the plan | Subscription credits reset each month; the credits you buy separately never expire | No: pack conversations expire at month end | No: the limit refreshes 30 days after you pay |
| When you run out | Auto-renew tops you up at your threshold; otherwise it pauses until you renew. Never a bill above the amount | Buy more credits | A pack of 100 is added and cannot be switched off, their words | Buy more Lyro conversations |
| Changing plan mid-month | Raise it today and keep your leftover credits; lower it from next renewal. Nothing prorated | Downgrades apply at once with a prorated money credit; auto-recharge credits never expire | Not published; unused pack conversations expire at month end | Up or down, from the next billing cycle |
| Try it before a sales call | Free plan, self-serve | Free plan; 7-day trials on paid tiers | Free plan, no card | Free plan; 7-day trial, no card |
| Built and operated from | Your own coding agent, over MCP | Their dashboard, plain-language procedures; API from $150 | Studio and Viber, on their Engine | Their dashboard and Flows builder |
| What answers the customer | Frontier lab models | Named per model: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, by tier | Any model you bring, through their Hub | Claude and their in-house models, their words |
| How it reaches your systems | Finds the endpoints your own pages already call | Sixteen named integrations, Zapier and an API | 500+ Hub connectors and a website crawler | Native apps, scraped FAQs, and MCP to your CRM or billing |
| Acts in the visitor's live session | Yes: co-navigates the page with the visitor | No: backend actions | No: backend actions | No: visitor monitoring, backend actions |
| Channels | Web chat only | Web, email, voice, WhatsApp, Slack, Messenger, Instagram | Web, WhatsApp, Slack; voice on Enterprise | Web, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email |
| Handover to humans | Live takeover by your team, conversation attached | Its own helpdesk, or seven others | Botpress Desk, or Zendesk and Intercom | Its own inbox and ticketing |
| Smallest customer it makes sense for | A five-person company, free | A solo operator at $40 a month | Three seats and 100 conversations, free | Ten seats and 50 conversations, free |
The helpdesks with an agent inside
Zendesk, Gorgias, Freshchat and tawk.to sell a helpdesk first and an agent second. Algomo is not a helpdesk, so the honest question here is whether you need one.
|  | Algomo | Zendesk | Gorgias | Freshchat | tawk.to |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Main job | Support and inbound sales, on your site | Omnichannel helpdesk with AI agents | Ecommerce support and marketing | Live chat and inbox, upsold to a helpdesk | Free live chat and shared inbox |
| Published pricing | Yes: a free plan, then $50 to $4,300 a month, you set it | Seats from $55 to $115 a month; the resolution price is not on their site | Yes: $10 to $1,430 a month | Yes: EUR 19, 49 and 79 a seat, plus EUR 45 per 100 AI sessions | The inbox is free; AI Assist $29, whitelabel $29 a property |
| How the AI is metered | Per useful conversation, inside one monthly amount | Per resolution, on top of seats; allowance per seat | Per ticket, in the tier | Per 100 sessions, on top of seats | A flat add-on with a limited free tier |
| Try it before a sales call | Free plan, self-serve | 14-day trial; two years free for qualified startups | Free trial, no card | Free plan for 10 agents, no AI; 14-day trial | Free forever, no card |
| Built and operated from | Your own coding agent, over MCP | Agent Builder, in early access; MCP server due summer 2026 | Their dashboard, self-serve | AI Agent Studio | Their dashboard; a REST API and webhooks |
| What answers the customer | Frontier lab models | Multiple leading LLMs, their words | OpenAI models behind their prompt cascades | Not disclosed | Not disclosed; the assistant is called Apollo |
| Acts in the visitor's live session | Yes: co-navigates the page with the visitor | No | No | No | No: visitor monitoring only |
| Channels | Web chat only | Messaging, chat, email, voice | Email, chat, social; voice and SMS add-ons | Web, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, SMS, LINE, Messenger, Google Business | Web, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, Telegram, Instagram |
| Handover to humans | Live takeover by your team, conversation attached | Its own helpdesk | Its own helpdesk | Its own inbox | Its own inbox; AI drafts, you approve |
| Smallest customer it makes sense for | A five-person company, free | A startup on the free programme, else $55 a seat | A store at $10 a month | Ten agents, free, without the AI | Any size, free |
The pipeline side, like for like
Qualified, Docket, 1mind and Warmly qualify visitors and book meetings. So does Algomo. The difference in every column after the first is who can afford the row.
|  | Algomo | Qualified | Docket | 1mind | Warmly |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Main job | Qualify and book the visitors already on your site | Inbound AI SDR for marketers | Inbound demand, sold on AQLs | AI sellers across the whole journey | Deanonymize, convert, and outbound |
| Owner | Independent | Salesforce, since 1 April 2026 | Independent | Independent; Drift's anointed successor | Joining HubSpot |
| Published pricing | Free plan; then a monthly amount you set, $50 to $4,300 | Three tiers, no numbers | From $3,000 a month, billed annually | No pricing page exists | $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 a year |
| Try it before a sales call | Yes, self-serve | No: demo-gated | No: no trial, their FAQ's words | Only by chatting to their own agent | No: demo-gated |
| Deployment | One script tag; test on your live site first | A few weeks, their FAQ's words | 7 to 14 days, done by their CS team | Not published | A pixel, plus an optional forward-deployed engineer |
| Who identifies the visitor | Enrichment from the email it captures | Salesforce matching and ZoomInfo | Your CRM history and intent signals | Not published | Native person-level reveal, its flagship |
| Meeting booking | Google and Outlook calendars, native | Google and Office 365 | Yes, calendars unnamed | Yes, calendars unnamed | Google and Outlook |
| Acts in the visitor's live session | Yes: co-navigates the site with them | A guided tour of the website, their closest claim | No | No | No |
| Cold outbound | No | No: rides clicks from your own sequences | No: inbound only | Not published | Yes: the TAM Agent |
| Smallest customer it makes sense for | A five-person company, free | Enterprise | About 20,000 visitors and $36,000 a year | Enterprise | A funded startup at $10,000 a year |
The harness bet
Every other vendor in these tables built its own agent harness and put it between you and the model. Sierra builds agents with Ghostwriter, the agent-building agent, inside its own Agent OS. Decagon gives you AOPs and Duet on a proprietary engine. Fin runs the patented Fin AI Engine with its own Apex models. Ada has Performance Center and Playbooks, delight.ai has Builder, Botpress has Studio and Viber on its own Engine, Freshchat has AI Agent Studio, and Zendesk's Agent Builder is in early access. Docket calls its harness a custom cognitive architecture, 1mind calls its own the Brain, and Qualified builds on Xforce, native to the Salesforce platform. Of the eighteen, three will name the lab behind their answers: Gorgias says OpenAI, Tidio says Claude, and Chatbase lists its models by name.
We made the opposite bet, and it is worth stating plainly: the frontier labs will spend more engineering on Claude Code and Codex this year than this category will spend on harnesses in a decade, and their harnesses will end up better than anything a vendor builds internally, including anything we would build. So Algomo has no builder chat of its own. The platform is an MCP server, and you build, test and operate it from the coding agent you already run: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT or Claude, signed in over OAuth, no API key.
That choice compounds. The agent you operate Algomo with already holds the context of everything else you do in it: your codebase, your docs, whatever your Claude or ChatGPT subscription has learned about your company. A vendor's internal builder starts from zero and keeps what it learns inside the vendor's walls. Ghostwriter will only ever know what was typed into Ghostwriter.
Two precisions, so the claim stays checkable. First, the conversation your visitors have runs inside Algomo's own runtime on frontier models; the lab harness is how the agent is built, changed and tested, not what chats with your customers. Second, MCP appears in other columns too, pointed the other way: Fin, Decagon and Tidio use MCP to reach your data, Sierra and Docket use it to publish their agents into ChatGPT, Ada lists it in a developer toolkit, Zendesk's server is due this summer, and Warmly sells MCP access to its platform. Algomo is the one whose entire configuration surface is the MCP server, which is why moving the greeting, staging it, testing it on the live site and saving it is a sentence you type to Claude Code rather than a ticket you file with a vendor.
What we concede
A comparison is only worth trusting if it names its losses, so here are ours. Our only conversational channel is web chat on your site: Fin answers in email, voice, WhatsApp and Instagram; Sierra runs phone lines for the Fortune 50; Decagon, Ada and delight.ai carry voice and email; Chatbase and Tidio reach WhatsApp and Instagram from a free plan; Freshchat and tawk.to run seven channels each into an inbox they also sell; Gorgias sits inside an ecommerce helpdesk. If most of your support arrives by email or phone today, buy one of them. We are not a helpdesk either: if you need ticketing, Zendesk, Gorgias, Freshchat and tawk.to all sell one, and tawk.to's is free. We do not do cold outbound; Warmly's TAM Agent does. We have no photorealistic avatar, and no plan for one.
And at enterprise scale, Sierra and Decagon will staff your rollout with their own engineers as the default. With us, deployment engineers are optional help rather than the product, which is exactly why a five-person company can start on the free plan, and exactly why a procurement team that wants a staffed delivery org on the contract should shortlist them instead.
Where these rows come from
Every competitor cell was read from the vendor's own site, on 31 August 2026 for the original eight and on 3 September 2026 for Ada, delight.ai, Chatbase, Botpress, Tidio, Zendesk, Freshchat, tawk.to, Qualified and Docket. The published prices: Fin's $0.99 per outcome and $9.99 per qualification are on [fin.ai/pricing](https://fin.ai/pricing), with seat prices on [Intercom's pricing page](https://www.intercom.com/pricing); Gorgias publishes tiers from [$10 to $1,430 a month](https://www.gorgias.com/pricing); Docket publishes a [$3,000-a-month floor](https://www.docket.io/pricing), billed annually, and a $36,000-a-year figure in its own FAQ; Warmly publishes [$10,000, $20,000 and $30,000 a year](https://www.warmly.ai/p/pricing). Chatbase's tiers are on [chatbase.co/pricing](https://www.chatbase.co/pricing), Botpress's on [botpress.com/pricing](https://botpress.com/pricing), with the auto-added packs in its FAQ, Tidio's on [tidio.com/pricing](https://www.tidio.com/pricing/), where it also says plan changes take effect at the next billing cycle, Zendesk's seat prices on [zendesk.com/pricing](https://www.zendesk.com/pricing/), Freshchat's euro prices on [the Freshworks live chat pricing page](https://www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software/pricing/), and tawk.to's add-ons on [its add-ons page](https://www.tawk.to/add-ons/). Chatbase's immediate downgrade with a prorated credit and its non-expiring auto-recharge credits are in [its workspace settings guide](https://www.chatbase.co/docs/user-guides/workspace/settings); Botpress's month-end expiry of pack conversations is in [its pricing lesson](https://botpress.com/academy-lesson/pricing-overview). The absences are checkable too: [Sierra's pricing page is a 404](https://sierra.ai/pricing), and [so is Decagon's](https://decagon.ai/pricing); [Ada's pricing page books a consultation](https://www.ada.cx/pricing); [delight.ai's pricing URL redirects to a blog post](https://delight.ai/pricing); Zendesk prices the resolution only as [value delivered](https://www.zendesk.com/service/ai/ai-agents/), and the dollar figures in circulation come from third-party trackers, not Zendesk; Qualified's pricing page has [three tiers and no numbers](https://www.qualified.com/pricing); 1mind has no pricing page at all, which is why we [priced it from the public record](/resources/1mind-pricing) instead. Ada's contract range is Vendr's, not Ada's.
The harness rows quote product pages: [Ghostwriter is Sierra's name](https://sierra.ai/product/ghostwriter) for its agent-building agent, and [its ChatGPT channel runs over MCP](https://sierra.ai/product/channels); [AOPs are Decagon's authoring layer](https://decagon.ai/product/aop) on its proprietary engine; [the Fin AI Engine and the Apex models](https://fin.ai/ai-engine) are Intercom's own names; Gorgias describes [its OpenAI partnership and prompt cascades](https://www.gorgias.com/ai-agent) on its AI Agent page; Docket documents both its [custom cognitive architecture and its ChatGPT app built on MCP](https://www.docket.io/blog/inside-the-build-creating-dockets-chatgpt-app-on-mcp); Warmly's homepage sells [access via app, API and MCP](https://www.warmly.ai/); and a guided tour of the website is the closest claim to co-navigation on [Qualified's Piper page](https://www.qualified.com/piper). [Ada's developer toolkit page](https://www.ada.cx/platform) lists APIs, MCP and SDKs; [Tidio's Lyro Actions page](https://www.tidio.com/ai-agent/lyro-actions/) describes MCP to your CRM; [Zendesk's support article](https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10889847373466-Announcing-the-MCP-client-early-access-program) dates its MCP server to summer 2026. We searched every page we fetched, for all eighteen vendors, for co-browsing and live-session claims, and found none: tawk.to and Tidio watch the visitor, which is not acting for them. That is the evidence behind the row of noes.
What we could not verify from the vendors' own sites: Qualified's prices, 1mind's implementation time, and Docket's choice of calendars. Algomo's cells are read from [this site's pricing page](/pricing) and from the product as it ships; a conversation is five credits there, and the monthly amount you choose caps every charge.
The one-on-one pages
Each vendor compared on the same axes as the tables above, with sources, on a page of its own.
vs Intercom Fin
Both count the same event, a conversation that actually helped, so this is the cleanest comparison in the category. The difference is the ceiling: Fin bills every outcome with no limit, Algomo is a monthly amount you pick.
[vs Intercom](/resources/vs-intercom)
vs Sierra
Their harness is Ghostwriter and a staffed agent-development org. Ours is the coding agent you already run.
[vs Sierra](/resources/vs-sierra)
vs Decagon
They solve deployment with deployment engineers. We made deployment the part the agent does itself.
[vs Decagon](/resources/vs-decagon)
vs Gorgias
Published prices, self-serve, and it names its lab. Ecommerce helpdesk against any stack.
[vs Gorgias](/resources/vs-gorgias)
vs Chatbase
The closest product to ours in shape. A credit that is a message against a credit that is a conversation that helped.
[vs Chatbase](/resources/vs-chatbase)
vs Zendesk
A helpdesk that added an agent, priced per seat and per resolution, against an agent that is not a helpdesk.
[vs Zendesk](/resources/vs-zendesk)
vs Tidio
Live chat for ecommerce with Lyro on Claude, metered per conversation on top of the plan.
[vs Tidio](/resources/vs-tidio)
vs Botpress
A builder platform with 500 connectors and packs that add themselves. We have no builder of our own.
[vs Botpress](/resources/vs-botpress)
vs Ada
Enterprise service across voice, messaging and email, sales-gated, with a developer toolkit that lists MCP.
[vs Ada](/resources/vs-ada)
vs Freshchat
Three meters: seats, AI sessions and Copilot. One amount here.
[vs Freshchat](/resources/vs-freshchat)
vs delight.ai
Sendbird's concierge, sold by demo, whose pricing URL redirects to an essay about pricing.
[vs delight.ai](/resources/vs-delight)
vs tawk.to
The free inbox for any team size. The AI is a $29 add-on that drafts; the visitor is watched, not helped.
[vs tawk.to](/resources/vs-tawk)
vs Qualified
Salesforce's inbound SDR since April. Three tiers, no numbers, and a Salesforce org as the entry ticket.
[vs Qualified](/resources/vs-qualified)
vs Docket
Traffic-priced from $3,000 a month, no trial, fifty knowledge sources. Now at docket.io.
[vs Docket](/resources/vs-docket)
If your shortlist looks different
These eighteen are the vendors we are most often compared with, but whoever else is on your list, the comparison is easy to run yourself: put a working agent on your own site in minutes and judge it directly against anything, including the option most buyers actually weigh us against, which is building it themselves with Claude or ChatGPT.