Crisp alternative with CRM and invoicing built in

By the Onsites AI team · Last updated August 28, 2026 · 5-minute read

Crisp and Onsites agree on the disease and disagree on the cure. Both were built on the observation that support teams live inside five tools — chat, inbox, CRM, knowledge base, and a spreadsheet pretending to be a billing system — and both collapse the stack into one product with one login. The disagreement is the meter. Crisp prices per seat in tiers, with its AI assistant (Crisp AI, Lyro-style) as a subscription line whose cost tracks the plan you are on rather than the work you did. Onsites prices seats at $15 beyond a free three, treats AI as prepaid credits published to the cent, and folds quotes, orders and invoices into the same editor the replies come from. This guide is the side-by-side for teams that like the all-in-one shape but want to see each stack's bill before choosing — the honest comparison, since both products earn their keep, is which meter compounds more gently on your actual workload.

Where the stacks overlap

Give overlap its due, because it is large. Both carry a shared team inbox with assignment and internal notes; both have chat widgets and visitor awareness; both hold a contact record that conversations attach to; both ship AI that drafts replies and summarizes threads. A team migrating in either direction loses less than it fears: the concepts — inbox, ticket, contact, note, draft — transfer whole. The real differences sit one level down, in what the shared record includes and how usage prices. Crisp's CRM is a contact profile with activity; the desk's CRM is an account with contacts, deals and auto-linked conversations — because "what did we promise Acme in May" is a CRM question, not an inbox question. And Crisp's answer to invoicing is a third-party integration; the desk's answer is a native quote-order-invoice pipeline sharing the product catalog — the whole commercial loop in the thread.

Where the meters diverge

Three lines behave differently as you grow. Seats: Crisp counts every operator and prices them by tier, so a fourth and fifth teammate climb the tier's rate; the desk keeps the first three seats free forever and charges $15 beyond, prorated daily — the meter and the org chart stay in lockstep either way, but the free three change small-team math entirely. AI: Crisp AI rides subscription tiers — pay monthly whether the assistant drafts three replies or three hundred; the desk's AI prepaids credits that never expire at published rates (draft 3, suggested reply 6, translate 3, summary 6) — costs that fall to zero in quiet months. A busy month costs more, a slow month refunds nothing: that is the honest trade between subscriptions and meters, and teams with seasonal volume usually want the meter. Volume: neither desk meters per resolution — a genuine difference from Intercom-era pricing; no invoice rises just because the busiest month was busy.

The side-by-side bill, at five seats

Take a five-seat team, 600 conversations a month, light AI use — roughly 400 drafts, 100 summaries and a stack of translations. On the tiered stack that is five operator seats plus the AI subscription riding their plan: a fixed monthly figure that is the same in March and in August regardless of how the work flowed. On the metered stack: two paid seats at $15 (the other three free), $30 a month billed annually; storage inside the included band for a text-first desk; AI credits for that volume land in the low single-digit dollars most months, prepaid at published pack prices and never expiring. The totals are not close — but the shape matters more than this month's number: one bill is a fixed bet that the subscription tier was chosen correctly; the other is a meter that scales with seats actually hired and credits actually spent. Run the worked models on your own headcount before signing either.

The AI line, worked at real volumes

The subscription-versus-credits question deserves its own arithmetic, because it is where the two meters think differently. On the subscription model, the AI line is a constant: it appears in December's quiet week and during July's flood at the same monthly figure. On the credit model it is a variable that follows work: a suggested reply at 6 credits (∼6 cents), a draft at 3, a translation at 3, a summary at 6 — prepaid in packs ($10 for 1,100, $20 for 2,400, $50 for 6,500) that never expire. A month with 400 drafts, 100 summaries and translations across multilingual threads lands in the low dollars; the prepay sits as a balance until the next busy quarter consumes it. Teams with seasonal volume — freight quarters, holiday retail, trade-fair springs — consistently prefer the meter's sympathy to the subscription's constancy. Teams with flat, high AI volume at scale may genuinely prefer the subscription's predictability. That is the shape of a fair choice: both models bill honestly; they simply bill different months differently.

Switching costs, both directions

From Crisp: conversations export, contacts export, the widget snippet swaps in minutes, and email connects by IMAP so history persists (the channel setup guide covers forwarding versus import). Automations and canned replies re-express in the desk's vocabulary; the AI layer re-prices from subscription to credits — the first month's bill shrinks is the usual observation. The deeper shift is the commercial one: quotes and invoices move into the support thread, which takes a week of habit and then pays for the migration by never retyping an order. To Crisp — fair treatment requires the reverse column — a team that lives in chat-first, multilingual conversations and wants one vendor covering chat, inbox and knowledge base at a known monthly price may genuinely prefer a subscription's predictability over a meter's variance. The choice is a temperament question as much as an arithmetic one: fixed bets versus published meters. The 10-person math (≈$255 versus ≈$3,100 on per-seat-plus-per-resolution stacks) sits in the modeling guide for teams who want the full derivation.

When Crisp deserves to win, honestly

Crisp earns the seat when the team's center of gravity is live multilingual chat with one known operator count, when a flat subscription is preferred for budgeting simplicity, and when the chat-centric UX — the thing Crisp genuinely polished — fits how the team thinks. Companies that will never send an invoice from support have no use for the commercial loop and lose nothing by skipping it. The honest case for the metered desk is the inverse shape: a team that will hire, that wants the commercial loop in the thread, that prefers AI billed by usage and wants the first three seats at zero while the product proves itself. Neither stack is a compromise; they are two coherent answers to "all-in-one". Pick by the meter you want compounding under the team — and by which bill you want to open in August: a subscription line, or seats and cents.