Help Scout vs Intercom, an email inbox or a chat-first helpdesk

Help Scout suits you if most of your customers write in by email and a few of you share the address. The team works conversations together in one shared inbox, Docs holds your help articles, and Beacon puts those articles, a contact form and live chat on your site. The free plan runs a team of up to 5 while you help up to 100 people a month. AI Assist comes with every paid seat, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize with Plus and Pro, where Intercom sells Copilot on top. And its AI agent costs less per result than Fin.

Intercom suits you if your customers reach you in chat, on your site or in your app, and you want Fin to take most of it. Essential sells itself to individuals, startups and small businesses, with the Messenger, a shared inbox, a ticketing system and a public help centre. Advanced adds the Workflows builder, team inboxes and round robin assignment, and Proactive Support Plus, from $99 a month, adds product tours, surveys and checklists. If you’ve raised up to $10M, have fewer than 15 employees and are new to Intercom, Early Stage makes the first year of Advanced $33 a month for 2 seats, with 300 Fin outcomes a month.

Both are helpdesks for a team, priced by the person. If you’re a founder answering support between building, you may not need one at all, and there’s a third option.

A helpdesk shares the work between people. When the people are just you, the job is to stop answering the same questions. Deacon answers them on your site in seconds, day or night, from your own docs and in the language each customer writes in, with no flows or Procedures to set up first. When your docs don’t cover a question, it tells the visitor it doesn’t know rather than guessing, and asks for their email. You’re emailed when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard lands in their chat while it’s open, under your first name and your company’s. That’s human handoff with no inbox to watch.

Every gap gets answered once. Questions your docs missed wait in Conversations with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows. Save & check asks Deacon the question again, shows the reply it gives now and counts how many other open questions your answer covers, so the more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

You also see what customers need. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked, and Topics group the questions, count the people asking and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on. That’s on every plan, the free one included, and the same script counts your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

What you pay never depends on anyone judging whether a conversation was resolved, because Deacon counts its own replies. There’s no seat to buy for each person, every feature is on every plan, nothing is billed past a plan’s answers and no plan upgrades itself. No plan shows a “powered by” line, and the free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.