Crisp
A self-funded, all-in-one shared inbox that bundles live chat, WhatsApp, and an AI chatbot into one workspace price.
- Crisp is an omnichannel customer messaging platform combining a website chat widget, shared team inbox, email, and social/WhatsApp channels with an AI chatbot layer (credit-metered) on top.
- Pricing is per-workspace rather than strictly per-seat, running Free ($0, 2 seats) through Mini ($45/mo), Essentials ($95/mo), and Plus ($295/mo, marked 'Best Value'), each bundling a set number of seats plus a pool of AI credits for automated conversations.
- Self-funded and profitable since founding — Crisp has taken no venture capital, founded in Nantes/Paris, France by Baptiste Jamin and Valerian Saliou, and runs lean at roughly 20 employees.
- Independent review scores vary sharply by platform: strong on most platforms for ease of use and support responsiveness, but a notably rougher 1.9/5 on Trustpilot driven by billing and cancellation complaints.
- Positioned as a budget-friendly alternative to Intercom/Zendesk for small-to-mid businesses that want live chat, shared inbox, and basic AI automation without enterprise-tier pricing.
Pricing
Per-workspace tiered SaaS with bundled AI creditsFree
$0
Free
2 seats, website widget, shared inbox, mobile apps, contact forms, e-commerce integrations, no AI credits
Mini
$45/mo
Per workspace/month
4 seats, $5 AI credits (~90 automated conversations), shared email inbox, shortcuts, triggers, private notes, custom email domain
Essentials
$95/mo
Per workspace/month
10 seats, $25 AI credits (~450 automated conversations), omnichannel inbox, workflow automation, AI chatbot, knowledge base, routing rules
Plus
$295/mo
Per workspace/month
20+ seats, $75 AI credits (~1,350 automated conversations), unlimited task automations, ticketing, 100+ integrations, white labeling, advanced analytics
Enterprise
Custom
Contact sales
Dedicated onboarding, personalized SLAs, custom features, team training
What this actually means
Crisp prices per workspace, not per seat, which is the detail that makes its numbers look deceptively cheap until you actually count heads: the $45/mo Mini plan bundles 4 seats, which works out to roughly $11/seat if you fill it — versus Intercom's Essential tier at a flat $29/seat/mo no matter your headcount. For a 4-person team, that's Crisp doing an entire inbox, WhatsApp, and social bundle for less than the cost of a single Intercom seat. The catch is the AI credit pool: Mini's $5 of AI credit buys roughly 90 automated conversations a month, which sounds generous until you line it up against Chatbase's Hobby tier ($32/mo for 700 message credits) — Crisp's AI is cheap to add but shallow at the bottom, so if AI automation volume (not seat count) is actually your bottleneck, Essentials ($95/mo, ~450 automated conversations) is the realistic starting point, not Mini. Where Crisp's pricing genuinely earns its 'budget Intercom' reputation is Plus at $295/mo for 20+ seats and unlimited task automations — Intercom doesn't get you anywhere near that headcount without seat pricing multiplying the bill many times over.
How it actually works
Shared Inbox
This is Crisp's actual center of gravity — website chat, email, and every connected social/messaging channel land in one thread view, with private internal notes and canned responses for team collaboration. If a unified inbox is the main thing you're shopping for, this is genuinely one of the strongest options at this price point, not a bolted-on afterthought.
Live Chat
The widget and shared inbox stand up fast, and independent reviewers repeatedly call the setup intuitive. It's the entry point into everything else Crisp does, and it's the one part of the product that's consistently praised across every review platform.
Chatbot & AI
The AI layer trains on your site, files, and Q&A pairs and includes routing rules for escalating to a human when it's out of its depth. One reviewer specifically credited it with a 40% reduction in incoming queries — a real number worth taking seriously — but remember it's credit-metered per workspace, so heavier automation needs mean upgrading tiers or buying add-on credits, not a flat unlimited allowance.
Knowledge Base
Available from the Essentials tier ($95/mo) up, paired with workflow automation tools. It's there to feed the AI layer and support agents alike, but it's not the standalone, deeply-featured knowledge base product you'd get from a dedicated helpdesk platform — think of it as functional, not a differentiator.
Contact Management
Native e-commerce integrations surface order and customer context directly inside a conversation, which matters more in practice than a generic CRM field list — an agent can see what someone actually bought without tab-switching. It's solid for support-driven contact context, less built out as a full marketing-CRM replacement.
Campaigns
This is the one area where Crisp is honestly thinner than its reputation elsewhere — chat triggers and canned responses exist, but independent hands-on reviews specifically call out limited marketing functionality on social channels. If proactive campaign broadcasting across channels is a core requirement, look elsewhere first and treat anything here as a bonus, not a reason to buy.
Channels
Key features
- Shared team inbox unifying website chat, email, and connected social/messaging channels in one thread view
- AI chatbot with a credit-based automation budget scaling by plan (from ~90 automated conversations on Mini to ~1,350 on Plus)
- Knowledge base and workflow automation tools available from the Essentials tier upward
- Ticketing system and unlimited task automations on the Plus plan, alongside white-labeling and 100+ integrations
- Chat triggers, canned responses/shortcuts, and private internal notes for team collaboration
- Native e-commerce integrations for order/customer context inside conversations
- Custom email domain and unlimited conversation history retention from the Mini tier up
- Enterprise tier with dedicated onboarding, custom SLAs, and team training
Our scorecard
Overall 3.6/5Widget and shared inbox are quick to stand up; independent reviewers repeatedly call the interface intuitive.
One reviewer reported a 40% query reduction from AI handling mundane questions, but the credit-metered automation budget caps how much AI work smaller plans can actually do.
Genuinely unifies web chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, SMS, and email in one inbox — a real strength versus single-channel widgets.
Per-workspace pricing with a generous free tier and mid-tier plans well under Intercom/Zendesk equivalents, though multi-workspace credit structure confuses some buyers.
Praised as responsive in most independent reviews, but a much lower Trustpilot score reflects a real subset of billing and cancellation-support complaints worth taking seriously.
Full scoring breakdown
Overall 3.6/5 · 24/25 criteria scoredChannel Coverage
Crisp's pricing page lists email, live chat, WhatsApp Business, Instagram DM, Messenger, SMS, Viber, Line, Telegram, and X/Twitter in one workspace; true telephone voice requires a third-party integration (Aircall, KrispCall) since Crisp natively only offers in-widget audio/video calls, not PSTN phone (crisp.chat/en/pricing, help.crisp.chat video/audio-chat article, aircall.io/call-center-software-integrations/crisp-chat).
Crisp's own LiveTranslate documentation confirms it "works across all the channels connected to your Crisp Workspace: chat conversations, emails, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, Line, Telegram" inside one Inbox thread per customer, not separate per-channel views (crisp.chat/en/livechat/realtime-chat-translation).
AI Capability
Crisp ships a named AI agent ("Hugo") with a no-code workflow builder (event/action/condition blocks), routing, and MCP tool integrations — a genuine agent, not just canned smart-replies (crisp.chat/en/ai, help.crisp.chat AI Chatbot & Automations category).
Crisp's own marketing claims 50-60% automated resolution, but this is a self-reported, unaudited vendor number. An independent third-party review (eesel.ai) found Hugo works well only for documented FAQs, performs poorly on account-specific judgment calls, and — unlike some competitors — does not learn from historical resolved tickets; no independent benchmark study was found to corroborate the vendor figure.
Hugo auto-crawls the website and lets you import PDFs, knowledge-base articles, and past-conversation Q&A snippets rather than requiring manual intent-building — but an independent review (eesel.ai) notes it does not automatically learn from historical resolved tickets the way some rivals do.
Crisp's MagicReply/Hugo block includes a configurable confidence threshold "to prevent the AI to hallucinate," and if it can't find an answer in trained data "it'll say it" and hand off to a human — a real guardrail, though explicit per-answer source citation to the customer isn't documented (crisp.chat/en/ai).
The no-code workflow builder chains event, action, and condition blocks to do routing, tagging, refund processing, and profile updates in one flow, not simple single-step if/then rules (crisp.chat/en/ai, help.crisp.chat workflow docs).
Inbox & Agent Experience
The shared inbox is Crisp's core product — website chat, email, and all connected social/messaging channels land in one thread view with one customer profile, confirmed across Crisp's own docs and consistently praised in user feedback.
Crisp states that "when a handoff is needed, AI passes the conversation along with full context, reducing friction and resolution time," and the workflow builder includes explicit escalation/routing blocks to hand off to a human agent (crisp.chat/en/ai, help.crisp.chat AI Chatbot & Automations category).
Private notes (not visible to customers), @mentions to pull in teammates, manual or rule-based conversation assignment, and scheduled reminders are all documented native features (help.crisp.chat private notes article, crisp.chat/en/livechat/internal-notes).
Crisp ships shortcuts/canned responses and chat triggers for reusable agent replies, consistently referenced across its own feature docs and existing product marketing.
Native Integrations
Native, official Shopify integration syncs order history and lets agents process refunds directly in the inbox; Hugo's AI agent has a native 1-click Shopify connection with a "Get Order Details" tool that returns live tracking status inside chat for WISMO-style bots (crisp.chat/en/integrations/shopify, help.crisp.chat WISMO chatbot article).
Native WooCommerce integration mirrors Shopify — order history in the inbox, refunds, dynamic order data in templates — and is listed among Hugo's native 1-click ecommerce integrations for order lookups, though documentation is thinner than Shopify's (crisp.chat/en/integrations/woocommerce).
Crisp ships a WordPress plugin that embeds the same universal chatbox widget used sitewide (not a WP-limited feature subset), per Crisp's own installation docs and integrations page.
An official "Crisp Connector" app is listed in the Wix App Market — enter a website ID and it auto-creates the connection — with a manual custom-code fallback also documented (wix.com/app-market/web-solution/crisp-connector, help.crisp.chat Wix install article).
No dedicated Squarespace app exists; installation is manual code injection of the chatbox script into Squarespace's footer code injection, with Zapier available only for Squarespace Forms, not the core widget (help.crisp.chat Squarespace articles, zapier.com/apps/crisp/integrations/squarespace-forms).
Crisp's own integrations page lists a one-click Webflow integration ("Add Crisp to your website in one click"), making it one of the more direct website-builder integrations Crisp offers (crisp.chat/en/integrations).
Official, listed integrations exist for Zapier, Make.com, and n8n, covering both no-code and more technical automation workflows (crisp.chat/en/integrations).
Official HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive integrations exist, described as automatic contact synchronization — solid for keeping contact records aligned, but documentation doesn't indicate deep bidirectional workflow/pipeline sync beyond contacts (crisp.chat/en/integrations).
Commerce & Business Logic
Hugo's native ecommerce integrations (Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop) include a "Get Order Details" tool that queries the connected store's live order/shipping data and returns real tracking status inside the conversation, not just talking-points about orders (help.crisp.chat WISMO chatbot article).
LiveTranslate auto-detects the customer's browser-set language and translates in real time across 50+ languages, embedded in the Inbox so it works across chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and SMS alike (crisp.chat/en/livechat/realtime-chat-translation, crisp.chat/en/livechat/multilingual-livechat).
Reporting & Scale
Crisp Analytics covers first response time, resolution time, CSAT, and contact rate, plus AI-specific metrics (deflection rate, misunderstanding rate, fallback rate, automation CSAT), operator performance dashboards, SLAs, and customizable/filterable dashboards (crisp.chat/en/analytics, help.crisp.chat AI chatbot ROI article).
Crisp publishes flat per-workspace tier pricing ($0/$45/$95/$295) with seat counts and $10/mo/extra-seat listed openly on its pricing page, but the added AI-credit-pool system (dollar-denominated, converted to an approximate conversation count per tier) layers in complexity that isn't a simple per-seat or per-resolution model (crisp.chat/en/pricing).
Crisp offers a full REST API, RTM API, a plugin marketplace, and two webhook systems (Website Hooks and Plugin Hooks, the latter with retries and signed payloads), plus MCP tool support for the Hugo AI agent — genuine build-on-top capability, not a closed workflow builder (docs.crisp.chat, help.crisp.chat webhooks article).
Pros
- Genuinely unified omnichannel inbox (web, WhatsApp, social, SMS, email) rather than a chat widget with bolt-on channels
- Free tier is usable enough that small teams can run real support before ever paying
- Self-funded and profitable company history suggests low risk of a sudden pivot or shutdown driven by investor pressure
- Strong day-to-day usability scores across major review platforms
Cons
- A notably lower Trustpilot rating reveals a real pattern of billing and cancellation complaints that the higher-profile review sites don't fully surface
- AI automation is credit-metered per workspace, so heavier automation needs mean upgrading tiers or buying add-on credits
- Message-delivery reliability issues appear in a non-trivial number of independent reviews
- Advanced features (ticketing, white-labeling, 100+ integrations) are locked behind the $295/mo Plus tier
What people are saying
“The tool is awesome, the support team very reactive if you need anything. What more can we ask for?”
“Crisp often doesn't send our support team's responses to our users, and when we bring this up with them it takes a lot of arguing and persistence to finally fix it.”
“It's value for money already bringing us a 40% reduction in queries due to their AI handling mundane queries on behalf of our agents.”
Best for
Our verdict
Crisp is the honest budget pick in this category, and the math backs it up, not just the marketing: a genuinely unified inbox across web, WhatsApp, and social for $45-95/mo is a fraction of what Intercom charges per seat, from a company that's stayed self-funded for a decade instead of chasing a Series B that would eventually need to be repaid through your invoice. The catch is the split personality in its own reviews — reviewers who actually use it day-to-day rate it highly, while Trustpilot's 1.9/5 is dragged down by a real, specific thread of billing and cancellation complaints that's hard to wave away as noise. My honest read: if you're the kind of team that reads the fine print on auto-renewal and AI-credit consumption before signing, Crisp is a strong pick that punches well above its price. If you tend to sign up and forget to check back in, that lower Trustpilot score is describing exactly the kind of billing surprise that catches people like that off guard.
Frequently asked questions
Is Crisp priced per seat or per workspace?
Per workspace, with a set number of seats bundled into each tier (2 on Free, 4 on Mini, 10 on Essentials, 20+ on Plus) — adding more seats than the bundle typically costs extra rather than being a flat per-user fee.
How does Crisp's AI chatbot billing work?
Each paid plan includes a dollar-denominated AI credit pool (e.g. $25 of credits on Essentials, roughly 450 automated conversations) that automated chatbot replies draw down; heavier automation usage requires a higher tier or add-on credits.
What channels does Crisp support beyond the website widget?
Crisp connects WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email into the same shared inbox alongside the core website chat widget, so agents work every channel from one thread view.
Is Crisp a good fit for larger support teams?
It scales up to an Enterprise tier with custom SLAs and dedicated onboarding, but its strongest reputation and pricing sweet spot is small-to-mid-sized teams; larger orgs weighing Zendesk or Intercom should compare ticketing depth and reporting before committing.
Why is Crisp's Trustpilot score so much lower than its other review scores?
Trustpilot reviews for Crisp skew heavily toward billing and cancellation complaints — customers reporting continued charges after attempting to cancel and friction getting refunds — while day-to-day usability reviews focus more on day-to-day product usability, where Crisp scores well.
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Company details — for context, not a scoring factor.
- Founded:
- 2015
- Headquarters:
- Nantes/Paris, France
- Funding:
- Self-funded, no VC investment
- Employees:
- ~20