Crisp in 30 Seconds

Crisp is a customer messaging platform based in France. It's popular with startups and small teams for one big reason: the free tier is genuinely usable. Two agents, live chat, basic inbox. No credit card. No trial countdown. Just free.

That's rare. Most "free" plans in this space are so limited they're basically demos.

Pricing Breakdown

Crisp has four tiers:

Free

Two agent seats. Live chat widget. Basic inbox. No chatbot, no automation, no knowledge base.

Pro ($25/month per workspace)

Four agent seats. Adds a knowledge base, automated messages, and a basic chatbot builder. The chatbot is rule-based, not AI-powered.

Unlimited ($95/month per workspace)

Unlimited agents. Adds audio/video calls, screen sharing, and more advanced automation. Still no real AI classification or intent detection.

Enterprise (custom pricing)

Dedicated infrastructure, SLA guarantees, custom integrations. You'll need to talk to sales.

Notice those are per-workspace prices, not per-agent. That's a meaningful difference from tools like Zendesk or Intercom. A 10-person team on the Unlimited plan pays $95/month total, not $95 per person.

Who Crisp Is Good For

Two-person startups that need live chat yesterday. The free tier is the best in the industry for this use case. Install the widget, start chatting, figure out the rest later.

Small European companies that care about data residency. Crisp stores data in the EU, which matters for GDPR compliance.

Teams that want screen sharing and video calls built into their support tool. Most competitors charge extra for this or don't offer it at all.

Where Crisp Falls Short

AI and automation. Crisp's chatbot is a decision-tree builder. You create flows manually. There's no intent classification, no AI-generated responses, no smart routing based on message content. For teams getting more than a couple hundred messages a month, this means every conversation still needs a human looking at it.

Reporting. The analytics are basic. You get response times and conversation counts, but nothing like intent breakdowns or resolution tracking.

Scale. The free and Pro plans cap your agent count. If you're growing fast and hiring support agents, you'll hit the Unlimited tier quickly.

How Supp Fits In

If you've outgrown Crisp's manual approach and want AI handling the classification and routing, Supp picks up where Crisp stops. At $0.20 per classification, you can process 475 messages for the same $95/month you'd pay for Crisp Unlimited, but with actual AI intent detection across 315 categories.

Supp doesn't replace Crisp's chat widget, though. You could run both: Crisp for the live chat interface, Supp for the intelligence behind how messages get classified and routed.

Should You Switch?

If you're on Crisp Free and handling under 50 conversations a month? Stay. It's free and it works.

If you're on Crisp Unlimited and drowning in manual triage? That's when you need something smarter. Either upgrade to a platform with built-in AI (and pay 3-5x more) or add a classification layer like Supp on top of what you already have.