Intercom vs Tiledesk
Intercom and Tiledesk are both live chat software. Intercom is a commercial product from Intercom, Inc. Tiledesk is open source under MIT, with 323 GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Intercom when
- A SaaS or app business wants in-product chat and AI-first support with handoff to human agents.
- Pick Tiledesk when
- You want an open-source Voiceflow or Intercom-style setup with bot-to-human handoff on your own servers.
Side by side
Customer messaging platform with in-app and web chat, helpdesk, help centre, product tours and the Fin AI agent.
Installation files (Helm and Docker Compose) for Tiledesk, a live chat platform with LLM chatbots that hand over to human agents across web and mobile.
Seat prices plus per-resolution AI fees make costs hard to predict.
Many containers to run; this repo is only the deployment wrapper, and the company's cloud is the easier route.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service and mobile app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Node.js, Express, MongoDB and Kubernetes
Closed source, sold by Intercom, Inc.
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
No Wikipedia article of its own
323 GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release 1.2.1.
Other comparisons
More live chat and customer messaging tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.