The Intercom help center alternative that keeps itself accurate, with every feature included
Keep Intercom for chat and Fin, and move only the help center. Fin and your customers both read your articles, so a stale one means wrong answers twice. Fern reads the pull requests you merge, your resolved Intercom conversations and your live product, and drafts the fix for you to approve.
Book a demo - 7-day free trial
- No credit card
- Import from Intercom, URLs kept
Ferndesk Intercom- Built for
- Help centers that keep themselves accurate Customer conversations, with a help center included
- Keeping articles current
- Fern drafts fixes from PRs, conversations and the live product AI suggestions from conversations, with the Pro add-on
- Private and multilingual help centers
- Included Advanced plan and up
- Price per month
- $149, or $124 billed yearly $29–$132 per seat, plus $0.99 per Fin outcome
Use Intercom for conversations and Ferndesk for your help center.
Intercom’s help center works, but private and multilingual help centers need Advanced seats, and keeping articles current needs the Pro add-on. Ferndesk is built only for the help center: it keeps every article accurate and includes every feature on one plan.
When to choose Ferndesk, and when to choose Intercom
Choose Ferndesk if
- Your product ships every week and the articles fall behind.
- Fin gives wrong answers because the articles behind it are out of date.
- You want private and multilingual help centers without moving everyone to Advanced seats.
- You want API reference docs next to your help articles.
Choose Intercom if
- You want your inbox, Fin and help center from one vendor.
- Your help center is small and rarely changes.
- You rely on the Messenger and outbound messages for sales conversations.
- You already pay for Advanced seats and the Pro add-on.
They work together
Ferndesk connects to Intercom and reads your resolved conversations to find missing articles. Fin can keep answering from the new help center as a website source.
Where Intercom’s help center holds teams back
Teams move the help center when the articles can’t keep up and Fin starts answering from stale ones.
Fin is only as good as your articles
Fin answers from your help center. When a release changes a flow and nobody updates the article, Fin repeats the old steps, and each answer still costs $0.99 per outcome.
Keeping articles current costs extra
Intercom’s AI article suggestions, and Fin Operator, which drafts edits from release notes you paste in, need the Pro add-on, from $99 a month. Nothing reads your code to spot what changed.
The help center is a side feature
Private and multilingual help centers need Advanced seats, the design allows no custom CSS or HTML, and there are no API reference docs.
Ferndesk and Intercom, side by side
| Feature | Ferndesk | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| Keeping docs accurate | ||
| Drafts doc updates from merged pull requests | Yes | No |
| Drafts articles from support conversations | Yes | Pro add-on |
| Checks every article against the live product | Yes | No |
| Retakes screenshots when the UI changes | Yes | No |
| Help center | ||
| Every help center feature on one plan, no add-ons | Yes | Split across plans and add-ons |
| Visual editor | Yes | Yes |
| In-app help widget | Yes | Yes |
| AI answers from your docs | Yes | $0.99 per Fin outcome |
| Private help center | Yes | Advanced plan and up |
| Multiple languages | Yes | Advanced plan and up |
| Live chat and a support inbox | No | Yes |
| Developer docs | ||
| API reference from OpenAPI | Yes | No |
| Interactive API playground | Yes | No |
| llms.txt for AI tools | Yes | Yes |
Fin answers from your articles. Fern keeps them right.
Fern watches the places docs go wrong: merged code, your Intercom conversations and the live product. The fixes arrive drafted, and nothing publishes until someone on your team approves it.
Every merged PR, checked for doc impact
Fern reads each pull request you merge, finds the help articles it made wrong, and drafts the edit with a link to the change it came from.
Intercom conversations turned into articles
She reads your resolved Intercom conversations, spots the questions your docs do not answer, and drafts the missing article.
Every article checked against the product
Verification reads each article claim by claim and checks it against your codebase, your website and the live product. Anything that is no longer true becomes a drafted fix, and scheduled audits repeat the check.
Screenshots retaken from your real UI
When a screen changes, Fern recaptures the screenshot from your product, so articles stop showing last year’s design.
“I simply connected Discord, Intercom, and GitHub, and within five minutes I had more than 20 tailor-made draft articles generated.”
Richie McIlroy Founder, Cap 20+ tailored documentation drafts generated in 5 minutes
Read the Cap story
Move your help center in minutes
Ferndesk has a dedicated Intercom importer. It rebuilds your collections, brings translations across, rewrites internal links, and redirects your old URLs to the new pages so links and search rankings survive the move. If something will not import cleanly, we do it with you.
What comes across
- Your collections, nested collections and article order
- Translated articles, in their languages
- Article content and images
- Internal links, rewritten to the new pages
- Your URLs, with redirects from the old paths
The importer reads your public help center. Audience-targeted articles move from an export, or we import them with you.
One flat price for the help center
Every help center feature on one plan, at a price that does not grow with the size of your support team.
Ferndesk Pro $149a month
Or $124 a month billed yearly, $1,490 a year. Includes the help center on your own domain or /help, the in-app widget with 1,000 AI conversations a month, private help centers, white labeling, 5 languages and 5 seats, with Fern keeping every article accurate. 7-day free trial, no card.
Under $1M ARR? The first 12 months are half price: $745 for the year. Early-stage rate
$29–$132per seat a month, billed yearly
The help center comes with your seats. Private and multilingual help centers start on Advanced at $85 a seat, Fin costs $0.99 per outcome, and AI article suggestions need the Pro add-on, from $99 a month.
From Intercom’s pricing page, checked 24 September 2026.
Ferndesk vs Intercom: common questions
Something we missed? Write to us, a human answers.
No. Ferndesk replaces only the help center. Your Messenger, inbox and Fin stay in Intercom, and Ferndesk connects to Intercom to read your resolved conversations.
More on Intercom and the alternatives
The tools teams weigh when Intercom stops fitting.
How Cap uses FerndeskTwenty draft articles from Intercom, Discord and GitHub in five minutes.
IntegrationsThe support tools, code hosts and chat apps Fern reads from.
Self-updating help centerHow Fern keeps every article accurate as your product changes.
Help center softwareWhat a modern help center does, and how Ferndesk compares.
How migration worksWhat comes across, what redirects, and how long it takes.
Your docs have been stale for months. Fix them in ten minutes.
Import your help center and Fern checks every article against your product, drafts the fixes, and keeps them current from then on. You approve, she publishes.
- 7-day free trial, no card
- Import in 10 minutes, URLs preserved
- Your support tool stays where it is
- Nothing publishes without you