Sarrai or Intercom: which platform fits your support team?

Difference 1: how quickly is your AI agent ready to use?

Intercom's AI agent, Fin, works on the basis of the knowledge articles you supply. That sounds logical, but in practice it means you first have to sit down and supply your documentation before Fin can do anything for you. Product information, procedures, FAQs, edge cases — all of which you have to supply, in article form, structured, up to date. So before you can deploy their AI agent, Fin, you first have to start writing.

At Sarrai we take a different approach. We believe that most companies already have that documentation, but scattered across Word files, PDFs, emails, old wikis. Our documentation agent helps to turn those files into helpdesk articles automatically, instead of asking you to start from scratch. So you don't start from a blank page. You upload documents, point the AI agent at your website, and the knowledge base is assembled for you. This is a difference in philosophy between Sarrai and Intercom.

Difference 2: what happens when information goes stale?

A knowledge base isn't a project you do once. Products change, procedures shift, prices are adjusted. And outdated information is worse than no information, because it undermines your customers' trust in the automated answers.

With Intercom you can see through the reporting which articles are no longer performing well, which questions get passed to a human more often, which answers receive low scores from customers. That's useful data. But it's up to you to put the time in: analysing the reporting, hunting for articles that have gone stale, rewriting them, republishing them.

If you have someone who can take full-time ownership of that, it needn't be a problem. But most SMEs have no one who can dedicate themselves to it full time. Then the work piles up, and outdated information creeps into your AI answers.

Sarrai is a colleague who writes alongside you. When signals indicate that an article is no longer correct — whether that comes from customer conversations, from new expert input, or from divergent answers — you get a concrete proposal in your approval inbox. Not "this article is doing badly, good luck with it", but a fully worked-out revision that you can approve, adjust or reject in a single click.

The difference: with Intercom, maintenance is a to-do list that someone has to pick up. With Sarrai, it's a process you get through in a few clicks.

Difference 3: how do you pay for it?

At first glance, Fin AI Agent is exceptionally cheap. Around € 0.90 per resolved question (resolution). So you only pay for results. That's a strong point in Intercom's favour, but we do have one important reservation about it.

Intercom is counting on you getting an explosion of support questions. And that makes sense. The more accessible your support is, the lower the threshold to ask a question. Customers who used to search through a manual or give up now put their question to your AI. That isn't a bad thing in itself, because more customer contact often also means better customer relationships and a better insight into how your products are used.

But it does mean your support volume can rise sharply, and that you only see the financial consequences of that after a few months. So your monthly Intercom bill can turn out considerably higher than you'd estimated in advance, and you have no visibility over, or grip on, that development beforehand. If you have no problem with that, the model is perfectly defensible. But it is very hard to budget for what support will cost you.

Sarrai works with a fixed monthly fee and a generous conversation quota that comfortably covers the average SME volume. If you go over it in a busy month, you see in advance what an expansion costs. There's no invoice after the fact with figures you weren't expecting. That's the real difference: with Intercom you pay per conversation from the very first one, and you only find out at the end of the month how expensive support turned out. With Sarrai you always know what you're paying.

This also ensures that our interests are aligned with yours. We want you to get more customer contact and build better customer relationships — not because we earn per conversation, but because an SME that sees Sarrai working stays a customer longer. Our added value doesn't lie in handling as many conversations as possible, but in the stability and calm we bring within your organisation.

Difference 4: how many features do you actually need?

Intercom is big. Alongside the AI agent you get workflows, segmentation, product tours, marketing campaigns, enterprise-level ticketing and dozens more modules. For an international support and marketing team of fifty people, that's logical and valuable.

But if you don't use that, you've got a Ferrari to nip down to the bakery in every day. You pay for features you never touch, your team gets lost in an interface that was designed for someone else, and implementation costs you weeks before you get the first real value out of the system.

Sarrai is deliberately smaller in scope. We do one thing: unlock internal knowledge in such a way that AI can work with it, both for your own team and for your customers. No marketing automation, no product tours, no fifteen modules you don't have time for. That isn't a limitation, but a deliberate choice.

Which platform is for whom?

Intercom is a high-quality product and contains a lot of functionality. In a number of areas Sarrai overlaps with it: we do comparable things, sometimes in a different way. But on other points we deliberately offer less, because we believe that doing a limited number of things really well is better than a long list of features where every item still needs work.

So the question isn't which platform is "better". The question is which platform fits your situation.

Choose Intercom if:

• You have a large, international support and marketing team
• You need complex workflows and segmentations
• You have the budget to make use of the whole suite
• You already have a fully built-out knowledge base and just want to activate it with AI

Choose Sarrai if:

• You're an SME or scale-up in the Benelux
• You don't yet have a structured knowledge base and want to build one
• You want predictable monthly costs without surprises
• You want a platform that does what you need, without the rest

Still unsure? Book a no-obligation introductory call or request a demo. Then we'll look together at whether Sarrai fits your situation — and if the answer is no, we'll tell you that honestly too.