Freshdesk vs Help Scout, tickets or a shared inbox

The seats come first. Freshdesk’s Growth is $19 an agent a month billed yearly, or $23 monthly, for email tickets, a customer portal and a knowledge base, with the AI answering email. Help Scout’s Standard is $25 a user a month billed yearly, or $30 monthly, with live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. For an AI answering chat on your website, the plan to set against Help Scout’s Standard is Freshdesk Omni’s Growth, at $29 billed yearly or $35 monthly, because Freshdesk keeps its chat AI agent for Omni.

Take two people on yearly billing, with 100 chats a month reaching the AI and 60 of them settled by it. On Help Scout’s Standard that’s $50 in seats and 60 resolutions at $0.75, or $45, so $95 a month once the free 3 months are over. On Freshdesk Omni’s Growth it’s $58 in seats, and the 100 chats are 100 sessions, settled or not. The free 500 last five months, and after that a pack of 100 each month brings it to $107. The sums are ours.

The two AI bills cross at about two chats in three. A Freshdesk session works out at $0.49 and a Help Scout resolution is $0.75, so Help Scout’s AI costs less while it settles fewer than about 65 chats in 100, and Freshdesk’s costs less above that. Freshdesk also charges for the chats its AI didn’t help with, and Help Scout doesn’t.

Freshdesk fits a team that already works support as tickets. Growth gives you a ticketing system, a customer portal and a knowledge base for less a seat than Help Scout’s Standard. Pro adds intelligent routing, several SLA policies and custom dashboards, and Enterprise adds skill-based routing and Freddy AI Insights. A day pass lets an occasional helper in for $2 on Growth. Its AI stops when the sessions run out, so the spend has a ceiling unless you switch on auto-recharge, and it’s the better buy if your AI settles most of the chats it joins.

Help Scout fits a few people sharing one support address who want it to feel like email. Five of you can start on the free plan and help as many as 100 people each month. Standard puts live chat, SMS and the social channels in the same plan, rather than in a second product, and Docs holds your help articles. Its AI is billed only for what it settles, with a monthly cap you choose, so it’s the better buy while your AI settles fewer than two chats in three.

Both are built for a team and priced by the person. If you’re a founder without a support team, you may not need either, and there’s a third option.

Freshdesk turns each question into a ticket, and Help Scout puts it in a shared inbox. Both expect someone to be there to work through it. A founder without a support team needs the repeat questions dealt with before they land anywhere. Deacon is a chat widget that replies to visitors on your site within seconds, day or night, using your own help pages, files and website, and it replies in whatever language the visitor wrote in. There are no flows or decision trees to set up first.

Deacon’s AI isn’t metered apart from the plan. Freshdesk counts a session for every chat its AI joins, and Help Scout charges $0.75 each time its AI settles one. Each reply Deacon writes on your live site uses one of your plan’s monthly answers, and when they’re used up, nothing extra is charged and no plan upgrades itself. Previewing Freshdesk’s AI spends sessions, while a chat in Deacon’s Playground is never counted, so you can put your trickiest questions to it before a customer does.

When its sources don’t hold the answer, Deacon tells the visitor it doesn’t know instead of making something up, and offers a box for their email. A visitor who leaves an address or asks for a human shows up in your dashboard straight away, and if nobody on your team has it open, the owners are emailed after about three minutes. Type your reply there, and while their chat is still open it appears in it under your first name and your company’s. That’s human handoff without a ticket or an inbox in between.

Freshdesk and Help Scout both come with a help centre for writing articles, Freshdesk’s knowledge base and Help Scout’s Docs. Deacon has none of its own. It starts from the docs you already have and fills the gaps one reply at a time. A question it couldn’t answer waits in Conversations with an Answer this button, and your reply turns into a source Deacon answers from. Pressing Save & check puts the question to Deacon again, so you read its new reply, along with any other open questions your answer settles too.

Each chat tells you something as well. Conversations are kept, and you can search them by the visitor’s own words. Topics put similar questions together, show how many people raised each one, and tag a topic as a bug report, a feature ask, a how-to or another type when one kind leads it. Help Scout’s free plan stops your replies after 100 contacts in a month, and Freshdesk’s Free Program ends after 6 months. Deacon’s free plan gives you 50 answers a month with no end date, asks for no card, deletes nothing when you go quiet and carries every feature, Topics and website analytics included. Nor is there a “powered by” mark to pay to remove, like the one on Help Scout Standard’s Beacon.