9 Best Help Scout Alternatives for 2024 (With Features & Prices)
Help Scout is a powerful help desk software designed to streamline customer communication and support. But as with most software, it has downsides that lead people to look for alternative solutions.
Here are the most common reasons users look for a Help Scout competitor:
- Limited customization options: While Help Scout offers a range of features, it is not always possible to customize the platform to meet the unique needs of your business. As an example, their self-service knowledge base is less customizable as others in the market and they only have 50 integration partners compared to Zendesk's 949 integration partners.
- High 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.
- Lack of versatility: Help Scout is exclusively designed for customer support, specifically for ticket management. 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.
- Lacks key features: Help Scout lacks some basic features to act as a full-fledged email client for your customer support team, with functionalities like CC missing.
In this article, we narrowed down the best alternatives to Help Scout ensure customer satisfaction. Some are traditional customer service software options, and others are more flexible tools. Keep reading to discover their key features and pricing.
9 Best Help Scout Alternatives
1. Missive
Missive and Help Scout are customer support tools with shared inboxes, live chat, reply templates, and integrations with tools like CRMs. It also offers analytics to get an insight into your team’s performance metrics.
While Help Scout has a help center, it is limited in custom domains support, language support, and customization options. Missive offers more integrations, like with Grammarly, CMS, and can even be AI-powered with OpenAI, and is a more versatile platform for businesses. Missive is the better alternative to Help Scout for teams who value collaboration.
Ticket Management
Missive and Help Scout both offer email and communication management with label/tag options to create a organized ticketing system. 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 startups 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 for iOS and Android 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 and routing for incoming/outgoing messages and user actions. Rules can also be a great way to respect your SLAs. This feature allows for a more personalized and customizable automation 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 its top-tier yearly plan being 45% more affordable than Help Scout's Pro yearly plan.
2. 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, chatbots, 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 team performances.
- Offers a variety of integrations with other popular business tools, making it easy to integrate Zendesk into your existing workflow and automate repetitive tasks.
Overall, Zendesk is a good omnichannel support platform that offers businesses everything they need to provide customer service.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $25 per user, per month for their basic plan. For more features their other plan starts at $69 per user, per month.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and service software that offers a complete help desk solution. It's a great tool for companies looking for one software to do it all. It's cloud-based solution offers features like a ticketing system, a live chat, a chat bot builder, a customer portal so customers can access and search help articles, submit tickets, check statuses, through self-service customer portals.
It also offers analytics, an integration with their CRM, and email support. Compared to Help Scout, HubSpot may be a better alternative for companies already using their sales and marketing software who want to add a customer support software.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $30 per user, per month for the starter plan. They also offer a free plan for basic functionnalities.
4. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a help desk and customer support platform offered by Zoho, a suite of web-based tools for businesses. Like Help Scout, it provides functionalities for customer support, knowledge bases, help desk ticketing, and live chat support.
It offers integrations with their other tools like thir sales, marketing, and project management software.
Using their ticket management tool, support agents can view, manage, assign, and resolve support tickets using a simple UI. Tickets can be tagged, prioritized, and automatically routed based on rules.
Zoho Desk provides a full-featured help desk and customer support solution comparable to Help Scout at competitive pricing plan. However, its high level of configurability makes it a good alternative for companies looking for a more customizable support software.
Pricing
Pricing for Zoho Desk starts at $20 per agent/month for their standard plan.
5. 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, self-service knowledge base solution.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $18 per user, per month for the Growth plan. They also offer a free plan for basic functionnalities.
6. 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. Being a less traditional option, it does lack a few customer support features like an out-of-the-box knowledge base.
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.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $19 per user, per month for up to 10 users with a contact of one year.
7. 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.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $15 per user, per month for up to 10 users.
8. Hiver
Hiver is one of the more lightweight alternatives to Help Scout.
Familiar interface: Hiver is built right into the Gmail interface which minimizes any changes to existing email workflows.
A little bit of everything: Multi-channel support, chatbots, and internal email threads are all features that come with Hiver. Their features don't have a lot of depth or customization, but the suite covers a few core bases.
If you're looking to stay in your Gmail interface, and you don't need a lot of customization or automation, Hiver might be a good option.
Pricing
They have a free plan and their paid plans start at $19 per user, per month.
9. 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.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $15 per user, per month.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Help Scout is a well-established customer support software for support teams. However, there are alternative solutions like Missive, Hiver, 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 plugins with many CRM tools so you can manage your customer directly into their help desk solution.
What is Help Scout Used For?
Help Scout is a customer service software made for support teams looking to manage customer interactions in one platform while enabling collaboration between team members.
Is Help Scout Free?
Help Scout isn't free. Its pricing options start at $25/month per user. However, they do offer a free trial for 15 days.
