Help Scout vs Zendesk, a shared inbox or a ticketing suite

Help Scout suits you if your support starts in email and a few of you share the address. The team works customer 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, and Help Scout pitches Standard at teams moving beyond email. AI Assist comes with every paid seat, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize with Plus and Pro, so the AI for your own team isn’t a separate bill. If you’re new to Help Scout and an incorporated tech startup under 2 years old with under $1 million in recurring revenue, Help Scout for Startups gives you 6 months of Plus free.

Zendesk suits you if support already runs as a team with a queue. Zendesk pitches its cheapest plan at teams that have outgrown a shared inbox. Suite Team brings messaging, live chat, social channels and voice into one ticketing system. Suite Growth adds a customer portal and up to 5 help centres, and Suite Professional IVR phone trees and skills-based routing. Its AI agents answer by email on every plan and can take actions in your other systems, and its marketplace lists more than 1,800 apps, partners and integrations. Zendesk for Startups can make the Suite free for 6 months, or up to 2 years through a partner.

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

A shared inbox stops two people replying to the same customer. When support is just you, what you need is for the same questions to stop reaching you. Deacon answers them on your site in seconds, at any hour, from your own docs and in each customer’s language, with no flows to build first. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of inventing an answer, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and you reply from Deacon’s dashboard, straight into their chat while it’s open, under your first name and your company’s. That’s human handoff without an inbox to staff.

Each answer you write makes it better. A question your docs missed gets an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Save & check then asks Deacon the question again, shows you what it now says and tells you how many other open questions your answer covers.

You also see what customers are stuck on and what they want next, from everyone who asks rather than the loudest few. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count the people behind each one and label most of them, as a bug report, a feature ask, a how-to and so on. That’s on every plan, the free one included, and the script behind the widget also runs your website analytics, with visitors, sources, goals and funnels.

And the AI isn’t a second bill. Deacon counts its own replies, so what you pay never waits on a judgement of whether a conversation was resolved. Every feature is on every plan, nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, no plan upgrades itself and none shows a “powered by” line. The free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.