Customer support tools, and which kind you actually need

Search for customer support tools and the results mix five different products together. There is software that answers your visitors with AI, software that turns email into numbered tickets, software that lets several people work one address without colliding, a chat widget with a person sitting behind it, and a public website of help articles. They are priced in units that do not convert into one another.

Most roundups rank them against each other anyway, vendor by vendor, as though a $10 ticket plan and a $0.99 answer were the same thing to buy. Sorting by kind is more use. Which kind you need is settled by how many people answer support at your company today, and you can work that out from last month's inbox in ten minutes.

Deacon is the one we make. It answers visitors on your own site out of the documentation you keep, installs as a single line of HTML, and there is no card and no end date on its free plan. It belongs to the first kind below and to none of the other four.

Every dollar figure here comes from the vendor's own pricing page, opened on 22 September 2026, and the section quoting it carries the link. Two of them publish no usable number. Document360 has replaced its tiers with a questionnaire, and Zoho serves no dollar figure by default outside the United States, so both are handled in words.

The five kinds, and what you are buying in each

Three of those five assume somebody is free to answer, and a fourth assumes somebody is free to write. That is what the category name hides.

AI answering

This kind reads what you have already written and replies inside a widget on your site. Nobody is on a shift. Each one either finds the answer in your pages or says it cannot, and the better ones then take an email address so you can follow up.

Fin, Intercom's agent, is $0.99 an outcome for a resolution, a procedure handoff or a disqualification, and $9.99 for a qualification. A 50-outcome monthly minimum puts a floor of $49.50 under the bill before a single visitor arrives. Figures from fin.ai/pricing.

Chatbase counts message credits. Free gives you 50 a month and one member, Hobby is $40 for 700 credits, Standard is $150 for 4,000 and Pro is $500 for 15,000. Auto recharge credits on top of a plan are $40 per 1,000, and taking the Chatbase name off the widget is $99 a month. Its plan card says a free agent is deleted after 14 days of inactivity. Figures from chatbase.co/pricing.

Tidio sells its agent, Lyro, by the conversation, from $32.50 a month for 50 on annual billing. The first 50 are free for the lifetime of the account and never renew. One conversation is any customer interaction with at least one reply from the AI agent, so a visitor who asks six questions has spent a single unit. Figures from tidio.com/pricing.

The wrong buy here is a site whose answers do not exist in writing yet. This kind repeats your documentation back to people faster than they could have searched it, and four help pages produce an assistant that declines most of what it is asked. Pointing an AI chatbot at your documentation covers what has to be there first.

Helpdesk and ticketing

A helpdesk gives every incoming message a number, an owner and a deadline. Routing, rotas and service levels are ways of deciding which person picks a given ticket up, and of proving afterwards that somebody did.

Zendesk Support Team costs $19 a seat each month on annual billing and $25 month to month. The Suite ladder is $55 for Suite Team, $89 for Suite Growth, $115 for Suite Professional and $169 for Suite Enterprise, all annual, against $69, $115, $149 and $219 monthly. Those dollar figures come out of the plan data the page carries for every market at once, because the page itself shows you your own currency. Figures from zendesk.com/pricing.

Freshdesk lands on almost the same numbers. Growth is $19 a seat a month on a yearly plan and $23 month to month, Pro is $55 and $66, Enterprise is $89 and $107. Its 500 included AI sessions are offered "to try out Freddy AI Agent" and are "limited to once per account", after which they cost $49 per 100. Figures from freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing.

Gorgias never charges by the person. Starter is $10 a month with 50 tickets in it and 40 cents a ticket after that, Basic is $50 annual and $60 monthly for 300 tickets, and the ladder climbs to Advanced at $750 annual and $900 monthly for 5,000. Figures from gorgias.com/pricing.

Zoho Desk has a free edition with three user licences and email ticketing, and no trial clock on it. Outside the United States the page hands you your own currency and no dollars, though its selector will switch to them, so open zoho.com/desk/pricing and pick the market you are buying in.

A helpdesk is the wrong buy when one person answers everything. A ticket number exists so two people avoid replying to the same customer twice, and with only you on it every ticket is assigned the moment it lands. Zendesk competitors and alternatives prices the AI layer on top of each of these.

Shared inbox, and where the phone fits

A shared inbox is one address several people work out of, with collision detection so two of them do not answer the same email. It still looks like email, because it is email. Ticket numbers and service levels are usually absent.

Front caps seats by plan. Starter costs $25 a seat a month and stops at 10 people, Professional is $65 and stops at 50, and Enterprise is $105. Those are the annual rates, and the toggle above them puts Starter at $35 and Professional at $85 month to month, while Enterprise reads "Only available on annual" in the page's plan data. Its AI arrives as four add-ons, with Copilot and Smart QA at $20 a seat each, Smart CSAT at $10, and Autopilot starting at $0.05 a conversation behind a Talk to Sales button. Figures from front.com/pricing.

Help Scout is the one a team of three is most likely to fit inside. Its free plan carries five users, a single inbox and a single Docs site. Paid, Standard costs $25 a user a month, Plus $45 and Pro $75, with 16% off for paying annually. AI Answers is charged separately at $0.75 a resolution after a three month free trial. Figures from helpscout.com/pricing.

Hiver puts the shared inbox inside Gmail, so nobody learns a second application. Growth is $25 a user a month on annual billing and $35 monthly, Pro is $55 and $65, Elite is $85 and $95, and all three have a two seat minimum. Its AI agents are on every plan, with no separate meter. Figures from hiverhq.com/pricing.

Phone and contact centre software is a sixth kind, and a company of five almost never buys one outright. It arrives bolted to something already on this page. Hiver sells voice at $30 a seat a month with 1,000 minutes in it, and Zoho Desk connects to outside telephony providers so a toll-free number can take calls.

The wrong buy here is an address with one person on it. Every tool in this kind bills by the person, so the feature is worth least exactly when your bill is smallest.

Live chat

Live chat is a widget with a human behind it. The visitor types, somebody on your side answers inside a minute or two, and the whole design assumes that somebody is watching.

tawk.to gives the chat itself away, with no seat limit and no expiry. Its pricing page says it wanted everyone to use the software "without having to fork over silly amounts of $ i.e. truly free". Removing the "Powered by tawk.to" line is $29 a month, its AI Assist chatbot starts at $29, and it will rent you trained human agents to answer on your behalf at $1 an hour. Figures from tawk.to/pricing. That last line item is outsourcing sold by the hour, and what support outsourcing costs reads the rates the agencies publish.

Crisp prices by workspace rather than by head. Free carries two seats and 100 customer profiles, Mini is $45 a month with four seats, Essentials is $95 with ten, and Plus is $295 with twenty seats or more. Figures from crisp.chat/en/pricing.

Tidio's free tier gives 50 billable conversations a month, plus the one-off 50 Lyro conversations every account starts with, which never refresh. Starter is $24.17 a month on annual billing, Growth starts at $49.17, and Plus starts at $300 a month plus usage. Figures from tidio.com/pricing.

Live chat is the wrong buy when nobody can watch it. A widget that takes four hours to answer is worse than no widget at all, because the visitor stood in front of it waiting. Free AI chatbot plans for a website lists which of these widgets answer with AI on the free tier and which are silent.

Help centre and knowledge base

A help centre is a public site of articles your customers search. It answers nobody directly. It is also the raw material every AI answering tool reads, so the writing has to happen whether or not you pay somebody to host it.

HelpDocs is $99 a month billed annually or $129 monthly for Sprout, $239 and $299 for Bloom, and $399 and $499 for Harvest, carrying 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 AI credits a month. Figures from helpdocs.io/pricing.

Helpjuice prices by tier with users bundled in. Knowledge Base is $249 a month for 30 users, AI-Knowledge Base is $449 for 100, and the unlimited tier is $799. Both it and HelpDocs give you 14 days without a card. Figures from helpjuice.com/pricing.

Document360 publishes no prices at all now. A three step questionnaire sits where the tiers used to be, and the page explains that "A flat tier would either overcharge small teams or undercharge enterprises. We quote what fits." Budget for a sales call before you shortlist it. Figures from document360.com/pricing.

The wrong buy here is any of them, if nobody will write the articles. Software is the cheap part of a help centre. Help Scout's free plan hosts a Docs site for nothing, which is enough to find out over six weeks whether the writing habit sticks.

How many people answer support decides the kind

Every roundup sorts by feature. The thing that actually settles it is how many people answer support at your company right now, and the answer is often one.

If that one person is you, what you need is the answering. The queue, the owner field and the rota are machinery for dividing work between people you have not hired yet.

At two or three people sharing one address, the thing that breaks first is two of you writing to the same customer within the hour. Help Scout's free plan carries three of you while you find out whether that was the real problem.

Once there is a rota, and you have told customers they will hear back inside a working day, the helpdesk earns its seat price. Routing and service levels stop being rows on a comparison table and become things you open every morning.

The test takes ten minutes and needs last month's inbox. Sort it by sender and count how many separate people wrote to you. Read the subject lines and mark every one you could have answered by pasting a link to a page you have already published. Then check whether anybody other than you sent a reply all month.

A high mark-up rate with a single replier means the answering is the entire job and the rest of the category is overhead. A low one means people are asking about things nobody has written down, so the help centre comes before any software that reads it. Two or more repliers, plus one customer who got two different answers, is the case a shared inbox was built for. How to reduce support tickets covers what to do once you know which questions repeat.

Deacon

Ours, and it sits in the first kind. Deacon answers on your website from the pages, files and notes you give it, and it does none of the other four jobs.

You paste one line of HTML into your site. A crawl lists what is on it and nothing is read until you tick the pages worth having, and Deacon also takes PDFs, Word files, Markdown and CSVs you upload, pasted text, and answers you write by hand. A visitor asks something, and Deacon replies out of those passages or says it cannot help and offers an email field.

There is no ticket queue, no owner field, no rota and no service levels. There is no shared inbox for email, and nothing routes or assigns anything. Deacon has no phone agent, no WhatsApp and no SMS. It does not host your help centre either. It reads the one you have. What it does have is a list of the questions your pages failed to answer, and a topic view that groups what people asked once two of them have asked it.

One thing does overlap with the live chat kind. A teammate can type a reply straight into a conversation from the dashboard, and sending it takes that conversation off Deacon until you hand it back. The chat stays open to the visitor for twenty quiet minutes, and anyone who has already closed the tab gets that reply by email, provided they left an address in the same conversation.

A plan caps four things and prices none of them separately, which are the answers a month, the size of the knowledge, the pages crawled a month and the seats. Nothing is charged per resolution, there are no credit bundles, and there is no overage, because nothing bills past the plan's answers and no plan upgrades itself. There is no badge to pay to remove. What each plan allows is set out on the pricing page, and what Deacon does has the rest.

Where one tool covers two kinds

Plenty of vendors sell more than one kind under a single bill, which is how the category ended up with one name. Zendesk sells the helpdesk, the help centre and the AI. Help Scout sells the shared inbox, a Docs site and AI Answers. Crisp and Tidio both sell live chat with an agent bolted alongside. A bundle is sensible when you will open all of it, and it is also why a lot of founders pay every month for a queue they never look at.

The add-ons are where a bundle stops behaving like one. Front's AI is four line items stacked on a seat price everywhere below Enterprise, which is where three of them stop costing extra, and Freshdesk's 500 AI sessions are once per account rather than once a month, which makes them a trial wearing the word included. Chatbase wants $99 a month to take its name off your widget and tawk.to wants $29 to take off its own.

One sum is worth doing before you buy anything. Take the cheapest plan in the kind you picked, multiply it by the number of people who will hold a login in a year, then add the per-answer rate times the questions you counted in last month's inbox. Do it again for the free plan you were about to skip past. Three people on Help Scout Standard is $75 a month plus 75 cents each time the AI settles something, against nothing at all on the free plan that already holds five people and a Docs site. The gap between those two numbers is what collision detection costs you, and it is a better thing to know now than in March.