At the entry-level, Help Scout pricing seems to be a little more expensive than other help desk software.
For example, Freshdesk’s Sprout plan only charges $15 per agent per month. Meanwhile, if you want to use Help Scout’s Standard plan, you have to pay an extra $5 every month. That doesn’t mention the fact that Freshdesk solution offers a free plan.
In this post, I’ll give you a quick overview of Help Scout’s pricing plans. It’s best to read through all the plans in order, as every plan builds on those before it. Once you finish reading, you’ll find it easier to decide if Help Scout brings the best value of your money.
Note: This post explains Help Scout’s annual pricing. Monthly pricing is higher. You should check its pricing page before making a decision.
What is Help Scout?
Since you’re reading this article, you may have known about Help Scout.
But in case you don’t, Help Scout is a customer service platform widely used by SaaS startups and small businesses. It provides three powerful tools: Shared Inbox, Docs, and Beacon, to help you create great customer support experience.
Besides, Help Scout offers over 50 integrations with third-party services like Jira, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Zapier, or WooCommerce. You can easily add them to your account or remove any app you no longer need.
Using Help Scout, you can:
- Manage all your email, chat, and phone conversation with a shared inbox. It’s useful to streamline communication with your customers.
- Create a knowledge base to provide customers with a hassle-free self-service experience.
- Use messages to onboard new customers, announce new features, suggest helpful content, or start a conversation.
- Manage customer data with customer relationship management (CRM) features.
- Track and measure your customer support performance with insightful reports.
- Use Beacon to design a live chat widget and embed it into your website.
Depending on the plan you sign up for, you may have access to all or some of these features.
Help Scout Pricing Plans
The first time you land on Help Scout’s pricing page, you’ll see three plans: Standard, Plus, and Company prominently displayed on the page. But if you take a closer look, you’ll see it also offers the Basic plan.
All these four plans give you:
- 24x6 support
- Unlimited email volume and storage
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
- One Docs site with no limit to the number of collections, categories, or articles you can add, plus full customization. On any plan, if you want to create more Docs sites, you need to pay an additional $20 per site per month.
Now, let’s find out the differences between these plans.
Help Scout’s Basic plan
The Basic plan is great for small teams that need a simple customer service solution. All emails will be transferred into a single shared inbox where all team members can work together.
If you want to develop a knowledge base without needing a help desk, the Basic plan is a good choice. Note that this plan doesn’t include automation tools or any third-party integrations.
Price: $10 per user per month, up to 5 users.
Features:
- 1 shared inbox
- 1 Docs knowledge base site (You can purchase more sites if you want)
- 30 days of reporting history
- Beacon (Live chat not included)
- Saved replies
- Follow a conversation to keep updated with changes
- Create saved replies to handle tickets faster
- Use @mention in notes to ping another user or team
Help Scout’s Standard plan
The Standard plan gives your team more advanced features than the Basic one. For example, you can create a live chat with Beacon and have access to integrations. This plan best suits companies that have a single product/service.
Pricing: $35 per user per month
Features:
- All features in the Basic plan
- Multiple shared inboxes
- Use Beacon to create a live chat
- Real-time reports with full history and metrics
- Workflows (similar to Gmail filters)
- Gather feedback with customer satisfaction ratings
- Access to Mailbox API
- Over 50 apps and integrations (Note: You don’t have access to services like Jira or Salesforces)
- Set company office hours
- Send targeted messaging to customers
- Enable single sign-on (SSO) to securely log in (Note: This is an add-on)
Help Scout’s Plus plan
The Plus plan is suitable for large teams or companies with multiple products. This plan includes HIPAA compliance, which you have to pay a lot more to get if you use Zendesk.
Price: $35 per user per month.
Features:
- All features in the Standard plan
- Create teams to collaborate more effectively
- Categorize or prioritize conversations with custom fields
- Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot integrations
- HIPAA compliance
Help Scout’s Company plan
The Company plan is Help Scout’s highest plan, designed for established and growing teams of over 25 members. This plan comes with enterprise security and dedicated onboarding training and support.
Price: $1,000 per month for the first year. A flat annual fee is based on $40 per user applied if you want to renew.
Features:
- All features in the Plus plan
- Unlimited mailboxes, unlimited users, Docs sites
- Concierge onboarding
- Enterprise security
- Built-in SAML/SSO authentication
Is Help Scout right for your online business?
Help Scout’s prices are undoubtedly more affordable than other customer service software like Zendesk, especially at higher plans.
But it’s easy to see that Help Scout doesn’t meet all needs. It lacks many essential ticket management functionalities of a typical ticketing system tool. Besides, Help Scout features aren’t optimized for ecommerce customer support.
If you’re looking for a Help Scout alternative for your ecommerce business, I recommend you check out Gorgias. It’s a powerful help desk ticketing system specifically designed to help you bring the best customer experience to your online customers.
Here are what make Gorgias different from Help Scout:
- Quick setup: Type some basic information, and you’ll be directed immediately to your Gorgias account. You’ll have a 7-day free trial to explore our system. No demo, no wait, no credit card required.
- Ease of use: Gorgias aims to simplify your customer support workflow. You’ll never lose an email or misplace contact information. Easy for both end-users and help desk agents.
- Feature-rich ticket management: Search, assign, reply, and resolve tickets. Add tags to manage your support requests with ease.
- Multichannel support: Phone, SMS, live chat, email, social media (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, etc.).
- Powerful automation: Play with macros, automation rules, customer sentiments, tags. You don’t need to waste a lot of time doing repetitive tasks anymore.
- Affordable pricing plans: Our plans are consistent with the size of your store, with Starter plans beginning at $10/month.
- Mobile apps: Besides a web app, Gorgias is available on Google Play and Apple App Store. Your support team can answer tickets on the go.
- Ecommerce-focused integrations: Shopify, Magento, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Yotpo, Smile.io, to name a few. No nonsense integrations (Jira for your online store, seriously???)
Ready to switch? Join our buyout program to get full access to Gorgias at no cost and prepare for your most profitable BFCM ever.
Whatever you decide, we wish you and your business the best!
