Help Scout alternatives compared, with prices

If Help Scout’s per-user bill or its AI meter has you looking around, there are two kinds of answer. One is another shared inbox, and Front, Missive, Hiver, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Crisp are the six we’d look at. The other is to skip the inbox and let an AI agent answer the questions your docs already cover. We read every rival price below on the vendor’s own pricing page on 7 October 2026, in US dollars, and each one links to where we read it.

Deacon is ours, and it’s the second kind. It’s an AI customer support agent for founders without a support team. It answers your customers from your own docs in seconds, and shows you what they’re stuck on and what they’d like next. It has a free plan that needs no card.

Help Scout alternatives at a glance

Help Scout sits in the last row, so each tool can be read against it. Prices are for the cheapest paid plan, per person unless the row says otherwise.

Why people leave Help Scout

Most of the reasons come down to how Help Scout prices a growing team. Its pricing page opens on yearly billing with 16% off, and every paid plan is charged per user.

• Every new person adds a seat. Standard is $25 a user a month billed yearly, Plus is $45 and Pro is $75. Pro sells to 10 users at least, so a team of three pays for ten.
• The AI is metered on top. AI Answers costs $0.75 for each conversation it resolves, on every paid plan, after a 3-month free trial. Three people on Standard pay $75 a month billed yearly, and 200 resolutions add another $150. The sums are ours.
• The free plan stops you replying. Help Scout’s free plan article limits it to 100 contacts a monthly cycle. Reach that early and you can’t reply by email, chat or AI Answers until the next cycle starts.
• Chat and routing sit on higher plans. The pricing page lists live chat and SMS from Standard, and round robin routing from Plus.

None of this makes Help Scout a bad choice. For two to five people sharing one support address, it’s a calm, well-made inbox. Help Scout pricing works through the whole bill for one, three and five people.

Front

Front is a shared inbox for teams whose work arrives as email and gets handed from one person to the next. Starter is $25 a seat a month billed yearly, or $35 monthly, for up to 10 seats and a single channel type. Professional is $65 or $85 for up to 50 seats and every channel, including SMS, social and WhatsApp. Enterprise is $105 a seat and billed yearly only. There’s no free plan. The 14-day trial gives you Professional’s features and asks for no card.

Its AI agent, Autopilot, is an add-on on every plan, and the page prices it only as starting at $0.05 a conversation. Copilot, which drafts replies for your team, is $20 a seat a month on Starter and Professional and included in Enterprise. Pick Front if your support is mostly email that several people touch before it’s answered.

Missive

Missive has the lowest price of the tools here that charge per user, and it’s built for small teams sharing email. Starter is $14 a user a month billed yearly, or $18 monthly, for up to 5 users. Productive is $24 or $30 for up to 50 users, and adds integrations, rules, analytics and API access. Business is $36 or $45, with single sign-on and no user limit. Every new team gets a 30-day trial of Productive with no card, and nothing is charged when it ends.

Its pricing page lists email, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram in one place, with team chat and tasks beside each conversation. The AI is for your team rather than your customers. It drafts replies, translates, summarises and runs rules, using Missive’s AI credits or an API key of your own. Pick Missive if a handful of you want a shared inbox without a helpdesk’s weight.

Hiver

Hiver sells two products, and its pricing page opens on Hiver Omni, the standalone one that works with Gmail, Outlook and other email providers. Hiver in Gmail, the other, runs inside Gmail itself. Omni’s Growth plan is $25 a user a month billed yearly, or $35 monthly, Pro is $55 or $65, and Elite is $85 or $95.

Growth already includes AI Agents, an AI Copilot for your team, live chat, a shared inbox with ticketing and round-the-clock support from Hiver. The pricing page lists AI Agents on every plan and gives them no separate price. SLAs, a customer portal and CSAT surveys start on Pro. The free trial lasts 7 days, opens on Elite and needs no card, and once it ends you choose a plan or the account is suspended. Pick Hiver if you want the AI in the seat price rather than on a meter.

Zendesk

Zendesk is the step up when a shared inbox starts to creak, and its own pricing page pitches Support Team at teams “that have outgrown a shared inbox”. Support Team is $19 an agent a month billed yearly, for email, tickets, routing and automations. Suite Team, at $55, adds AI agents, messaging and live chat, and phone. Suite Professional is $115. There’s no free plan, only a 14-day trial.

Zendesk bills its AI agents by the automated resolution. Each plan comes with an allowance per agent, and more resolutions committed in advance cost $1.50 each. Zendesk pricing works through the allowance, and Help Scout vs Zendesk puts the two side by side. Pick Zendesk if you’re hiring support people and need queues, routing and reporting that grow with them.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a ticketing helpdesk priced per agent, with its AI agent counted in sessions. Growth is $19 an agent a month billed yearly, Pro is $55 and Enterprise $89. The page offers 20% off for yearly billing and a 14-day trial of Enterprise.

Every plan includes Freddy AI Agent with its first 500 sessions, and more cost $49 per 100 sessions. Freddy AI Copilot, for your agents, is an add-on on Pro and Enterprise at $29 an agent a month billed yearly. Day passes for occasional agents are $2 on Growth. Freshdesk alternatives looks at it from the other side. Pick Freshdesk if you want proper ticketing with an AI agent that has a fixed starting allowance.

Crisp

Crisp charges by the workspace, not the person, which is why a small team often lands on it. The free plan gives 2 seats, a chat widget for your site and a shared inbox, and Crisp marks it Free Forever, though it includes no AI credits. Mini is $45 a month for 4 seats, a shared email inbox and $5 of AI credits, which Crisp puts at about 90 automated conversations. Essentials is $95 for 10 seats and $25 of credits, and adds WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS. Plus is $295, and it’s the plan that removes the “We run on Crisp” mark.

Every plan can be tried free for 14 days. Hugo, its AI agent, runs on those credits. Crisp alternatives covers the tools people move to from Crisp. Pick Crisp if you want live chat first and one flat price for the whole team.

Deacon, for a founder who’d rather not run an inbox

Help Scout and every tool above share one idea. A customer writes in, and a person on your team picks it up. That works when you have a team. When support is you, between building and selling, most of what arrives is the same few questions your docs already answer. Deacon is built for that founder.

It goes on your site with one script tag and learns from your pages, files and pasted text. Then it answers your customers in seconds, at any hour, in the language they write in. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know rather than guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email. There are no flows to build first.

When a visitor leaves an address or asks for a person, the conversation shows up in your dashboard straight away. If nobody on your team has the dashboard open, you get an email about three minutes later. Reply from the dashboard, and your words appear in their chat under your name while it’s still open.

Each question your docs missed waits with an Answer this button. Write the answer once and it becomes part of what Deacon knows, so the next visitor gets it from Deacon, and Answer once shows you which other open questions it now covers. The more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

You also see what your customers need, from everyone who asks rather than the loudest few. Topics group their questions, count the people asking and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on. The same script runs your website analytics too.

Every feature is on every plan, and each plan includes its seats. Free gives you 50 answers a month and 1 seat, with no card, no end date and nothing deleted for inactivity. Starter is $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. Growth is $150 a month, or $120 a month billed yearly, for 4,000 answers a month and 10 seats. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, no plan upgrades itself, and there’s no “powered by” line to pay to remove.

What you lose without a shared inbox

Deacon replaces the questions, not the inbox, so be clear about what stays behind if you leave Help Scout for it.

• There’s no support inbox for email. Customers who email you still land in your own mail.
• There are no tickets, assignment, routing, rota or SLAs.
• There’s no phone, WhatsApp, SMS or social channel.
• There’s no help centre of its own, so your docs live wherever they live now.
• There are no helpdesk integrations, no CSV export and no satisfaction surveys.

If two or more of you share a support address and need to know who’s replying to what, keep a shared inbox. Some founders run Deacon on the site and a shared inbox for email, and AI help desks shows how the helpdesks price their own AI if you’d rather keep it all in one tool.

Choosing between them

Start with who answers support today, then match the tool to that.

If several people pass email between them, Front and Missive are built around that, and Missive starts lowest. If you want AI in the seat price rather than on a meter, Hiver includes AI Agents on every plan. If you’re hiring support staff and need queues and reporting, Zendesk and Freshdesk are the full helpdesks, and Help Scout vs Intercom covers the chat-first option. If you want live chat and one price for a small team, Crisp charges by the workspace. If you’re choosing your first tool rather than replacing one, the best customer service software for startups ranks the field for a small team.

If you’re a founder without a support team, start with Deacon’s free plan. It answers your customers from your docs, emails you when someone needs you, and shows you what they’re asking for, with no card and no inbox to run.

Questions about Help Scout alternatives

Is there a free alternative to Help Scout?

Yes, two of the tools here. Crisp’s free plan, marked Free Forever, gives 2 seats, a chat widget and a shared inbox, with no AI credits. Deacon’s free plan gives 50 answers a month and 1 seat with every feature, AI included, but it isn’t a shared inbox. Front, Missive, Hiver, Zendesk and Freshdesk offer trials of between 7 and 30 days. Free ticketing systems compares the free helpdesks, Help Scout’s included.

Which Help Scout alternative costs least per user?

Of the tools that charge per user, Missive’s Starter costs least, at $14 a user a month billed yearly or $18 monthly, for up to 5 users. Zendesk’s Support Team is $19 an agent billed yearly, and so is Freshdesk’s Growth. Crisp prices the workspace instead, and its Mini is $45 a month for 4 seats, which is about $11 a seat once all four are used. The AI is priced differently on each, so add it before you compare.

Can Deacon work alongside Help Scout?

Yes, as a separate tool. There’s no connection between them, so a conversation in Deacon doesn’t become a Help Scout conversation. Deacon can learn from a public Help Scout Docs site, like any other website, or article by article as links. On the free plan it reads a site’s home page and main pages, and a paid plan can crawl the site, up to a hundred pages a crawl.

Is Deacon a helpdesk?

No. Deacon is an AI customer support agent that answers on your website. It has no ticketing, email inbox, routing, service levels, phone or social channels. You reply to the people who need you from its dashboard, and it suits a founder without a support team better than a team sharing one inbox.