6 Best Help Scout Alternatives for Your SMB in 2023
Help Scout is a powerful help desk software designed to streamline customer communication and support. With features like email, live chat, and knowledge base management, Help Scout provides small businesses with a comprehensive solution to their customer support needs.
However, as the world shifts towards a more digital environment, you may find that it isn’t the best solution for your business needs. If you are in search of the best Help Scout alternative, you’re at the right place.
Let’s explore the best options for your business if you're looking for a more efficient way to manage customer support.
What is Help Scout?
Help Scout is a help desk software offering a shared inbox, live chat, in-app messages, a knowledge base, analytics, and some integrations.
It is designed to help teams collaborate on client inquiries and centralize customer interactions in one place. You can also assign a team member to a specific conversation and add private comments to any new emails incoming.
Its popularity is due to its simplicity of use, workflow automation, and knowledge base solution.
Why you should consider a Help Scout alternative?
With so many customer support solutions available, it can be difficult to determine which software is the best fit for your business. Help Scout is a well-established help desk solution, but it may not always be the best choice for your business. Here are some reasons why you may want to consider a Help Scout alternative:
- Limited customization options: While Help Scout offers a range of features, it may not be possible to fully customize the platform to meet the unique needs of your business.
- Higher costs: While Help Scout can be a great Intercom alternative, it can also be expensive compared to other solutions on the market, making it less accessible for smaller businesses with tight budgets.
- One more tool: Help Scout is exclusively designed for customer support. It cannot be used for any other purpose. Customer service, however, often requires input from multiple people in the company. With Help Scout it can be hard to streamline your workflow and make customer support processes more efficient.
There's also the fact that Help Scout is lacking some basic features to act as a full-fledged email client for your customer service team with functionalities like CC missing.s
Considering these factors, it may be worth exploring alternative help desk solutions that offer a better fit for your business needs and budget.
The Best Help Scout Alternatives for Your Business
Missive
Missive and Help Scout are customer support tools with shared inboxes, live chat, reply templates, and integrations with tools like CRMs. While Help Scout has a help center, it is limited in custom domains, language support, and customization options. Missive offers more integrations, like with Grammarly and OpenAI, and is a more versatile platform for businesses. Missive is the better alternative to Help Scout.
Ticket Management
Missive and Help Scout both offer email and communication management with label/tag options. Missive offers more advanced search and filtering options and a traditional email client interface, making it easy to manage conversations and find what you're looking for. Missive also allows you to add labels to the sidebar to quickly access communications depending on their status.
Email Management
Missive is a robust email management tool compared to Help Scout, offering a variety of features such as collaboration on email replies, email delegation, and management of multiple email addresses from one Gmail account. It is ideal for small businesses needing to efficiently manage their email communications. Help Scout, on the other hand, only offers shared inboxes for collaborative service emails, lacking advanced email management capabilities.
Assign Conversations to More Than One Coworker or a Team
Missive offers more flexibility in communication management than Help Scout, with the ability to assign conversations to a whole team, a specific person, or multiple people. Missive also has a Team Inbox feature for team collaboration that is not available in Help Scout.
Native App for All Communications
Help Scout is limited to a web app and a mobile app with limited features. Missive, on the other hand, offers a native app on multiple platforms with a unified experience for all communications, allowing you to efficiently manage conversations in one place. With Missive, you won’t have to switch between different apps to handle different types of communications.
More Than Just Emails
Missive offers broader support for communication channels, including email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and more, while Help Scout almost only supports emails and live chat. With Missive, you can connect through integrations with your phone app, so you can handle all your communications in one place without having to switch between apps.
Automation With Fine-Grained Control
Missive offers Rules to automate your workflows for incoming/outgoing messages and user actions. This feature allows for a more personalized and customizable experience compared to Help Scout, which applies rules to all emails equally and does not work on other channels of communication.
Aliases
Help Scout does not support multiple aliases per inbox, while Missive allows the management of aliases in a traditional email client fashion and supports multiple domain addresses from a single Gmail account.
Draft Collaboration
Missive offers live draft editing for collaboration with team members, while Help Scout does not have the option for collaborative replies.
Chat with Team Members
Missive offers a direct chat feature within any conversation for collaboration and communication between team members, whereas Help Scout only offers the ability to add notes to support emails.
Pricing
Missive pricing is a lot more affordable, with the top-tier plan being 42% more affordable than Help Scout.
Zendesk
Zendesk is another alternative to Help Scout for small to medium businesses looking for a support and customer service platform.
Here's why Zendesk is worth considering:
- Offers a wide range of channels for customer communication, including email, phone, chat, and social media.
- Comes equipped with a robust set of tools for customer service and support, such as a knowledge base, a self-service portal, and a ticketing system.
- Provides detailed analytics and reporting to help businesses understand customer behavior and improve their support process.
- Offers a variety of integrations with other popular business tools, making it easy to integrate Zendesk into your existing workflow.
Overall, Zendesk is a good support platform that offers businesses everything they need to provide customer service.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a help desk software for small businesses that offers a range of tools to manage their customer support needs. It’s a cloud-based platform that provides a seamless experience for businesses to handle customer queries via various channels, like email, phone, chat, and social media.
Here are some of the key features of Freshdesk that make it a good alternative to Help Scout:
- Multi-channel support: With Freshdesk, businesses can manage their customer support inquiries through multiple channels, including email, phone, chat, and social media, all from a single inbox.
- Automation: Freshdesk’s automation features help businesses streamline their support operations and save time.
- Collaboration: Freshdesk enables team members to collaborate on support tickets, with options for assigning, commenting, and resolving tickets efficiently.
Freshdesk provides small businesses with a user-friendly help desk solution.
Front
Front is a customer communication platform that offers an alternative to Help Scout. It combines all of your company's communication channels into one place, making it easier to manage customer interactions.
Here are some key features:
- Multichannel support: Front supports all popular communication channels, including email, live chat, social media, and SMS.
- Team collaboration: Front allows teams to work together more efficiently by providing real-time collaboration and commenting capabilities.
- Customizable inboxes: Front offers customizable inboxes that can be tailored to meet your specific needs.
- Automation capabilities: Front offers a wide range of automation capabilities, including rules and macros, that can be used to streamline your customer support processes.
Front offers a modern platform for customer communication and support.
Helpwise
Helpwise is a helpdesk solution that is a good alternative to Help Scout. Here are the key features:
- Shared Inbox: The shared inbox feature allows team collaboration on support requests.
- Collaboration: In addition to the shared inbox feature, Helpwise also has a built-in commenting system.
- Efficient Email Management: Helpwise has an email management system that helps keep track of all support requests, prioritize them, and respond to them.
Overall, Helpwise is a helpdesk solution that offers a set of tools to manage support effectively.
LiveAgent
LiveAgent is the last alternative to Help Scout on the list. It offers a help desk solution for businesses. Here's what you need to know:
- Multi-channel support: LiveAgent supports multiple channels of communication such as email, live chat, social media, phone, and more.
- Advanced reporting: LiveAgent provides advanced reporting and analytics to help you understand your customer interactions and make data-driven decisions.
Overall, if you're looking for a flexible help desk solution, LiveAgent is worth considering.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Help Scout is a well-established customer support software. However, there are alternative solutions like Missive, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Helpwise, and LiveAgent that offer similar or even better capabilities at a lower cost.
In the end, the best customer support software is the one that fits your business's needs and goals to help you deliver an outstanding customer experience.
FAQ
Is Help Scout a CRM Tool?
Help Scout isn't a CRM tool, but it offers integrations with many CRM tools so you can manage your customer directly into their help desk solution.
What is Helpscout Used For?
Help Scout is a customer service software made for teams looking to manage customer interactions in one platform while enabling collaboration between team members.
Is Helpscout Free?
Help Scout isn't free. Its pricing options start at $25/month per user. However, they do offer a free 15-day trial.
