The best Crisp alternatives for Shopify app teams (2026)

Crisp is a solid starting point for live chat. But as a Shopify app grows, teams often run into the same walls: pricing that climbs with contacts, a generic inbox that isn’t built for app-merchant support, and a migration that feels scary enough to keep you stuck.

If you’re evaluating a switch, here’s an honest look at the main options in 2026 — including where we think each one fits.

What to look for as a Shopify app team

Before the list, the criteria that actually matter for app developers (not merchants):

• Speed to respond — live chat plus a real mobile app, so you answer before a question becomes a one-star review.
• Language coverage — your merchants are global; translation shouldn’t be a manual copy-paste.
• A self-serve help center to deflect repetitive questions.
• Developer surface — webhooks and an API to wire support into your stack.
• A painless migration off your current tool.

Intercom

The enterprise standard. Deep automation, a strong AI agent, and a huge feature set. The trade-offs are price and complexity — it’s built for large support orgs, and the per-seat-plus-usage pricing adds up fast for a small app team. Great if you’re scaling support headcount; heavy if you’re a two-person team.

Tidio

Friendly, affordable, and popular with smaller e-commerce businesses. Good live chat and a capable AI agent. It’s aimed more at merchants than at the developers building apps, so some of the workflow is e-commerce-storefront-shaped rather than app-support-shaped.

Chatwoot

Open-source and developer-friendly, with a self-hostable option that appeals to technical teams who want control and no per-seat pricing. The trade-off is that you run and maintain it yourself (or pay for their cloud), and you assemble some of the polish.

Convot

We built Convot specifically for the teams building Shopify apps. It’s live chat, an embedded help center, and a native iOS/Android app, with a few things we found app teams need:

• Claude-powered live translation in 25+ languages, both directions, automatically — so you support merchants worldwide without a translation tool.
• A native mobile app with push so you can answer that 2am merchant before it becomes a review.
• 9 signed webhooks and a REST API to hook support into your own systems.
• One-click Crisp import — bring your conversations, contacts, and help-center articles over without losing history.

It’s intentionally focused: not an enterprise suite, but the support stack a Shopify app team actually uses.

How to choose

Switching is the easy part

The biggest reason teams stay on a tool they’ve outgrown is migration fear. With Convot you can import everything from Crisp in one click — conversations, contacts, and articles — and keep your history.

If you build Shopify apps, try Convot free. Your first app is on us, no credit card required.