Struggling to choose between Help Scout and Intercom?
As an active user of both platforms, I've learnt a lot about their strengths, weaknesses, and key differences. To provide you with a comprehensive and honest comparison, I assessed Help Scout and Intercom in 11 crucial areas, including UI, features, integrations, and pricing, determining the better tool in each category.
The short conclusion is that Intercom is ideal for medium-sized teams seeking automation, excelling in bots and AI. On the other hand, Help Scout stands out for small-to-medium teams focusing on email and live chat, catering to those wanting to offer personalized, high-touch support.
Prefer to watch a video instead? Here’s a live walkthrough of Help Scout vs Intercom.
Want the details on how I got to this conclusion? Read the full comparison between Intercom and Help Scout on 11 key areas below.
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In this head to head comparison between Help Scout and Intercom, we'll be rating each platform on parameters like ease of use, features, support channels, knowledge base capabilities, routing, reporting, canned responses, tagging and categorization, automated deflection, popular integrations, level of service, and pricing.
Each parameter will get a score on a 1-10 scale, and we'll also share how we came to those conclusions so you can make your own informed choices between Help Scout and Intercom.
By scoring each category and sharing our thoughts, we hope to make your decision-making process a breeze, so you can find the perfect help desk solution for your customer support needs. Let’s dive in!
When we're talking about "ease of use," we're looking at three specific areas. First, what is it like to be an agent in your day-to-day tasks? How easy is it to see the information you need and to reply quickly? Second, what is it like to be a manager? How easily can you get to team reporting and monitor all your various metrics? And third, what is it like to operationally manage the system, including setting up automations and changing settings?
Help Scout
One of Help Scout's big selling points is its intuitive interface, and it doesn't disappoint. For agents, a ticket view shows you all the information you could need on just a simple scan:
Assuming you're sending the customer properties along with data (it can be sent as part of their Beacon integration), agents can quickly review whatever data you've defined as necessary. Using their CRM integrations, you can also pull in customer details automatically. You'll have a quick view into previous conversations, which often provides necessary context for a customer's question.
From the manager's view, you have simple snapshots of team metrics that are easy to get to.
With the ability to color-code tags, scanning the mailboxes is made much easier compared to mono-colored setups.
I especially like the folder view. You can set up folders to match specific ticket data like age or tags and custom fields. Then anyone looking at the inbox can quickly see how many open tickets are in those folders. It helps agents prioritize and lets managers know the scope of work waiting to be done.
An operational view is where things get a bit trickier.
Some areas can be dead simple, like moving the order of your custom fields.
While still being a fairly obvious interface, other features can get more complex. For example, I've had to request their help many times in figuring out how to create workflows, and I have run afoul of needing to make something an OR condition when my brain is convinced it should be AND. A prime example is having fields that prompt "is not equal to" rather than "is equal to." As long as you can keep those straight, though, it's a helpful feature.
Intercom
For Intercom, let's start off by looking at the agent's views. Rather than having one full picture of an inbox or folder like Help Scout, Intercom gives you a bit of a blended view, where you see the conversations waiting along with the content of a specific conversation.
The right sidebar gives you a view into all of the data found in your Intercom account for that customer. If you're using Intercom for marketing or sales or you've filled in data for support specifically, you'll find a nice picture of essentials there.
Editing those details is trickier than in Help Scout, as you'll need to head to Contacts and look them up rather than directly editing the properties. However, whether that's positive or negative really depends on your team. While my team finds it handy to quickly edit details, I can easily see that being a detriment if you're treating something as your source of truth.
For a manager, Intercom can either be incredibly easy to use or absolutely impossible. It comes down to the plan you're on. When trying to get a dashboard or reporting view of my team on their Starter plan, I kept hitting upgrade notices.
Adding on their Support and Convert plans would give you an ingenious dashboard view that allows managers to easily see their team's workload. If you have the budget, definitely upgrade.
You can switch your unassigned/inbox view to a table to make it a bit more scannable for a manager or lead looking to triage.
The operational side of Intercom is where it really shines, though. Many settings are displayed on one screen with easy-to-understand descriptions and the ability to simply toggle on and off settings.
More complicated areas, like their Operator bot task workflows, are quite intuitive to set up.
While I get stuck sometimes on how to set up complex tasks that require a balance of permissions, creating small automations has always been seamless for me in Intercom.
We give Help Scout a score of 9 and Intercom a score of 7. Help Scout clearly puts a lot of time and effort into their ease of use for both agents and admins, whereas Intercom focuses more on powerful features — sometimes to the detriment of its interface and ease of use. If being able to set up and use your support platform day to day with minimal effort is your big end goal, Help Scout clearly takes the win here.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
The first feature up for discussion is support channels. By this, we mean how many each platform offers — especially of the most commonly needed types. We're looking for a minimum of email, shared inbox, chat, and phone, with bonus points for any other additional channels like public and private social media messages without third-party integrations, SMS, or WhatsApp.
Help Scout
For the essential channels, we're giving Help Scout a checkmark in all the boxes but with an asterisk on the phone. Help Scout itself doesn't provide any kind of phone service, but you do have the ability to create phone conversations to capture notes and make sure your customer's history contains what was discussed.
What about other channels, though? Help Scout does offer a built-in integration with Facebook Messenger, but for other channels like WhatsApp or SMS, you'll need a third-party integration with something like Sunshine Conversations.
Intercom
When it comes to Intercom, they also get a checkmark for all the required channels but with some asterisks. First, Intercom centers around their async messenger, so while it can be "live," that isn't fully the intention, and it doesn't offer the same level of online and offline tools since it's meant to be always available. I still definitely count it as live chat, but it's one area I've seen support teams and end customers complain about since the beginning. Phone is where the main asterisk comes in. Until recently, if you wanted to use the phone, you'd have to use a third-party integration. However, Intercom has recently released their new "Calling" feature into beta, and it's a game changer if this is your channel of choice.
With Calling, you'll be able to place outgoing calls as well as voice or video call your customers right from within their messenger tool. It also gives you the option to allow customers to request a callback, which is pretty nifty.
When it comes to other channels, Intercom also excels. There are natively built integrations for channels like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. You'll also find numerous third-party integrations to connect to other channels like Google Meet for video calls or Aircall for a phone call that tie in nicely with their messenger system.
Best of all, using their ticket functionality, you could add on some ad-hoc channels yourself. While it doesn't create an integration, it's great if you just need to be able to log calls or even in-person interactions in a system.
We give Help Scout a score of 7 and Intercom a score of 9. If having a wide variety of support channels is your big focus, Intercom clearly wins out while Help Scout meets the minimum.
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Help Scout Alternatives
The ability to create a knowledge base or help center for your customers is something I personally value a lot. I think it's one of the best tools you have to help customers, and when it's done well, it's an incredibly efficient support operation. In essence, a tool that allows you to create a great knowledge base is essential for me, but it may differ for you.
Help Scout
Let's start with the basics. All Help Scout plans come with at least one Docs site, and their Pro plan offers up to 10. Having multiple Docs sites can be essential if you support multiple brands or products.
When it comes to the Docs sites themselves, they have the standard ability to brand with your own custom domain (e.g., help.yourdomain.com). You can choose to brand by simply setting your colors and uploading an icon.
Alternatively, you can create a custom stylesheet and/or scripts and embed them into your site.
You can organize your content into collections, which is vital. They also have a helpful feature to create custom redirects. If you remove a doc or replace a feature, you can redirect the now offline page elsewhere so customers aren't confused.
My absolute favorite Docs feature is the ability to make a collection private. With that, any pages found within it are accessible only to people logged into your Help Scout account. I use it to keep all of our internal team documentation so it's accessible to the support team from within Beacon and during conversations when they're helping customers. It's a feature I didn't know I needed and one that's a requirement for any future knowledge base systems.
Where Help Scout struggles in their Docs is anything beyond those basics. Probably 90% of smaller businesses and startups will be well served by the features they offer, but if you want to customize your page display more deeply or have pages that live in multiple collections — both things you'll likely find yourself wanting eventually — those are lacking.
Intercom
When it comes to a help center and the tools that enable it, in my opinion, Intercom is just OK. The features they offer are sufficient if you just need to have a knowledge base, but they're lacking if you need more advanced features. Intercom definitely focuses on the use of chatbots and similar features for self-service rather than a separate help center.
Within Intercom, you'll be able to set up basics like a custom domain as well as define your brand colors and upload an icon.
Customization beyond that point isn't possible, though.
In the articles themselves, you do have a powerful editor that allows you to add collapsible sections and other functions that improve your documentation.
We give Help Scout a score of 8 and Intercom a score of 6. For a small business, both are sufficient, but Help Scout's additional branding capability gives their Docs feature a large edge over Intercom's Articles.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Intercom Alternatives
With routing you can automatically send a customer question to the right place. This saves your team valuable time and enables you to scale more efficiently.
Help Scout
Help Scout enables automated routing with its workflow feature. You can use a workflow to automatically flag conversations based on data you pass in, the conversation subject or body, or by adding tags or fields manually.
Each workflow only runs once per conversation, though. This is meant to prevent it from creating its own loops, but it can also result in you needing to create multiple workflows for the same task to allow it to run multiple times.
Intercom
On Intercom's side, it handles routing with what are called Inbox Rules. With Inbox Rules, you can build automations using your conversation data as well as with the other data you store within Intercom.
For example, you can give a higher priority to a request from a higher-paying customer with a billing question by combining company information and customer communications data.
The downside to Intercom's powerful automations, though, is their availability on lower-priced plans. If you're on Intercom's Starter plan, unfortunately, Inbox Rules aren't available as a feature.
This was a tough category to judge. Help Scout received 7 points for their sufficient but not extremely powerful routing. Intercom's routing is clearly better, but only on higher-cost plans, so while the feature would edge out Help Scout in pure versatility, the lack of routing ability on their support-specific plans had to knock a point off, leaving them at 7 as well. If you have a higher budget, though, or are using Intercom for multiple functions and need their marketing and sales features, Intercom would win.
Customer Support reporting is your way to both keep track of KPIs and also keep track of where your customers are getting stuck. Having powerful reports helps you keep an eye on what matters, but without investing a lot of time in manual data analysis.
Help Scout
Help Scout's reporting offers everything a small to medium-sized business could need, all in their characteristically well-designed, intuitive style. You'll find built-in reports for all three of their default support channels as well as reports for their Docs and CSAT.
They let you choose your reporting period using a calendar option, and you can even create filters with views that you can save for later use.
While basic reporting is definitely covered, one downside is that if you want to get more complex and run cross-functional reports that are outside of their basic views function, you're stuck. Also, if you want a dashboard with multiple report metrics in one view, you'll have to build it on your own. Help Scout does provide a report export, but it's your raw ticket data, so it can be quite complex to even re-create the stats they give you in order to get them into one view to share. There are several third-party reporting tools that integrate with Help Scout, though.
Intercom
With Intercom, reporting is heavily influenced by the plan you're on. On their Starter plan, you'll be able to access most of their support reports. These give a small to medium-sized support team all of the basic data they need. They also have a conversation report that can give you a quickly scannable version of the essential statistics on one screen.
You'll find your basic incoming and outgoing support reports as well as CSAT and metrics looking at your overall effectiveness and response rates. You can also filter by specific time periods as well as by basics like assigned team members and customer locations.
The downside, though, is that Intercom locks some of their more advanced reports away in higher-priced plans. If you're subscribed to their Starter plan, you'll be prompted to upgrade in order to access reports like their team views and effectiveness metrics. They also offer a powerful custom reports feature available on their higher-priced plans. If you have a larger budget, these would be absolutely worthwhile upgrades.
While the plan-based limitations are sure to be aggravating if you're an Intercom customer, they're also extremely effective upgrade paths — because they're worth it. Help Scout's reporting is perfectly adequate and will perform well for many teams, gaining them a score of 7. Intercom's more advanced features, though, combined with their Starter plan reports scored them an 8 (and the win if reporting is what you care about).
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Canned responses are one of those things that are so ubiquitous that you expect any support platform to offer them, and that's true of Help Scout and Intercom. For those who aren't aware, though, canned responses, also known as macros or saved replies, are the ability to write and save replies to common questions and quickly answer with those replies rather than typing them fresh each time. You can also typically combine a bit of other automation into that response like adding tags or setting custom fields.
Help Scout
Within Help Scout you'll find a feature called Saved Replies.
Saved Replies allow you to create both email and chat replies, including formatting and inserting variables to pull in customer data like their name or email address.
In addition, Help Scout's workflows feature also offers a manual mode that allows you to essentially run a macro function to perform different actions on a conversation including sending a pre-written reply.
Intercom
Macros are Intercom's version of canned responses, and they offer exactly what you'd want.
You're able to both create written responses to common questions as well as build in some basic functionality like adding tags or assigning to specific team members.
In this instance, both platforms offer essentially the exact same functionality. I give Help Scout a 9 and Intercom a 9. The only reason their features aren't a 10 is that anyone who's ever used something like TextExpander knows there is more you can do with that seemingly simple function. If this is your must-have feature, either platform will work for you.
The ability to add tags and categorize your customer conversation is fairly vital to being able to learn from your support data. It's a feature you can live without for sure, but in order to grow your team or product, you'll want to have it.
Help Scout
Help Scout offers both tagging and categorizing but with some caveats. For categories, you can use their tagging functionality or their custom field functionality. Personally, I think custom fields are the superior way to gather categorization data, but you won't find them on Help Scout's lower-priced plans. Custom fields are only available on their Plus plan and up.
Tags are easy to add from conversations, and you can pull them into reports, which is incredibly valuable. You'll also find a handy ability to set a color for individual tags, which can make scanning lists of conversations so much easier.
My one big pet peeve with Help Scout tags, though, is there is no central place to add them. While they offer a list of all of your tags to quickly view what's in use and even delete tags, adding them is only possible from within a conversation. Their tags can also stick around in browser history even after being deleted, which causes rogue tags to re-emerge. If this happens to you, Help Scout can share a code snippet to clear them out.
Intercom
Intercom's tags are the main area of categorization. You're able to add them directly from within a conversation or from a tag management admin page.
Because tags are shared with other elements, though, they can get a little confusing. Having one large list of tags that can be used for people, companies, conversations, and more means when your team is browsing for the tag to use, they can easily get overwhelmed.
Once again both platforms have completely usable versions of this feature, and either choice would be a good choice. I'm giving the edge to Help Scout, though, with 8 points. While some of the tagging quirks are annoying and the more powerful custom fields are limited, keeping a tidier list and color coding your tags makes up for it. Intercom scores a 7 for their flexible tagging and ability to report on tags, but they lost some points for how tough they are to control if they're in use across multiple functions.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Automated deflection is something not every company needs right now, but as your product scales, you'll likely want it later. It's the ability to answer a customer's question without a person needing to be involved.
Help Scout
Help Scout gives you two main ways to deflect questions. The first (and simplest) is by setting their Beacon to "self-service" mode. With this mode, your customers will be forced to search your knowledge base before they're given a way to contact you. This adds some friction to a customer's support experience, but it can save your team from a lot of easily answered questions.
The second area of deflection that Help Scout offers is its workflows feature. We looked at this above, but essentially workflows are their manual or automated processes that you can set up. With an automatic workflow, you could look for specific keywords in your customer's message and then automatically send them a reply asking if that was their question and, if so, this is the answer.
Intercom
Automated deflection is one of those features where Intercom absolutely shines. Between their operator bot, resolution bot, task bot, and Fin, their newly launched assistive-AI beta feature, it's easy to say it's a topic they have covered.
The only real downside when it comes to deflection is that most of their tools are locked to higher-cost plans. However, if you need deflection, upgrading your plan is definitely going to be less of a cost than growing your team.
While their deflection is adequate for smaller teams, Help Scout has a long way to go in embracing modern tools like AI, and I give them a score of 7. Intercom has been on the forefront of automation from day one, and it shows. Their features aren't quite a 10, mostly because the most powerful aspects are still in beta, but at a 9.5, they're the obvious winner if deflection is what you need most.
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Integrations can often make or break an experience and typically end up on the must-have features lists, so let's talk about them.
Help Scout
Within Help Scout you'll find the majority of must-have categories of integrations but possibly not the exact names you're hoping for. They offer integrations for various CRMs, reporting platforms, call center software, project management, and the often necessary Zapier.
Apps are easy to add if you're an admin, although some are locked to the Plus plan and above. They also have an API to build your own custom integration if that's something you're looking for.
Intercom
Intercom offers a huge library of integrations, both created by Intercom and created by third parties.
Their App Store offers hundreds of integrations, and you're sure to find what you need.
Help Scout has a decent number of popular integrations and landed a score of 7. However, Intercom really pulls out all the stops in this category with a score of 9. It does always come down to what specifically you need to integrate with, but if you're looking for the platform with the most integration versatility, Intercom is the clear winner.
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Service is absolutely a subjective topic, as any customer support team will tell you. What makes for excellent service for one person is mediocre for another. However, getting help when you need it can make or break your experience, so it isn't something you can ignore.
Because I actively use both Help Scout and Intercom, I didn't need to send them test questions to measure their responses. Instead, I can look at my support history with both platforms as well as ask my team about their experiences.
Help Scout
To receive help, you can get in touch with Help Scout via a direct email, the contact form found on their help center, or from two different places within their app: Either the question mark Beacon icon or the small question mark icon at the top of the screen.
Over all the years I've been a Help Scout customer, it's always been incredibly clear that good service is something they believe in. I've almost always gotten incredibly thoughtful answers on first replies and on the rare occasions they slipped, they corrected course immediately. If you happen to be online at the same time as their live chat, their team is always quick to reply. Emails, though, can lag. Responses are currently offered in 24 hours, and in my experience, it typically takes between 12-24 hours, which is fine for normal questions, but when it's urgent, it can be a bit wearing.
All that said, Help Scout is easily impressive when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Intercom
I've had a tumultuous time with Intercom's support over the years. I've gotten incredibly slow replies and replies that quite frankly made no sense. However, in the last couple of years, they seem to have turned that around.
You can contact their team either via a direct email or look for their operator icon within their app or on their website.
While their message option initially offers a 24-hour response, in my experience, their team is on for live chat more often than not and you'll receive a response quickly. I generally hear back from them within 15 minutes.
In this instance, both Help Scout and Intercom offer 10 points worth of service. They've obviously invested in their teams and capabilities, and it shows. I wouldn't worry about the service you'll receive with either platform.
While I wish we all lived in an infinite world where a software decision would just come down to the right feature set for your needs, the reality is that price matters.
Help Scout
You'll find plans starting at $20 per agent in Help Scout for their Standard plan on an annual subscription. It's $25 per agent on a monthly plan. The Standard subscription offers the features that most small businesses need, but as you grow, you're going to find yourself needing features like custom fields, light users, and advanced permissions. As soon as you want to integrate with a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, you'll also find yourself upgrading. At that point, you're on to their $50 agent/month Plus plan ($40 annually).
Help Scout tops out with their Pro plan at $65 agent/month (annual only) if you're looking for a higher level of service. This is likely the plan you'd want if you're managing support for multiple products, because a dedicated account manager will help you best take advantage of their features.
Intercom
Intercom's pricing is a bit deceptive. A smaller team can sign up for their Starter plan which starts at $79 per month and includes two agents. The Starter plan, though, does have limited features, and quite a lot of the more powerful parts of Intercom are only available on higher-tiered plans.
Their more expensive plans are priced based on users, activity, and customer data, so it's not a clear-cut monthly fee. You'll typically need to talk to their sales team to figure out the right pricing for your needs.
You can't beat around the bush on this one. If value for your money is what you're looking for, Help Scout is the winner with 9 points. They have reasonable pricing that matches what a team may need as they grow, and they won't force you to upgrade before you're ready. Intercom performs poorly on price comparisons with 6 points because so many of their features are restricted from the Starter plan, and their pricing overall is opaque and hard to predict.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
You decide.
While we can give you our personal observations of their offerings, the simple fact is there is no simple answer to which is better. Only you will know what weight you want to place on specific features, but we can give you some generalizations from our own experience.
Help Scout offers you just what you need at a reasonable price. While they don't have advanced AI features or the same level of automation as other services, those can often be overkill when you're a smaller to medium-sized team. They know their market and they aim those features at that market well. Help Scout is easy to use and easy to get help from when you need it.
Intercom has some incredibly powerful features, but those features are not available to everyone, which is a shame. If you want an all-in-one platform for sales, marketing, and support, Intercom is an obvious choice, and paying for those functions will enable various features that will improve your support. Intercom is obviously always growing its features. For example, in the timespan of me writing this article, they launched the beta for their Calling feature, and their Fin AI tool is barely a month old. However, if you're a tiny company just starting out, Intercom may not give you everything you need now, even if it will a bit later on.
Based on our analysis, Intercom is a better option for medium-sized teams looking for automation. Bots and AI are clearly their strongest suit, and if those are your biggest concerns, you're not going to beat Intercom.
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
On the other hand, Help Scout is a better option for small to medium-sized teams looking to focus on email and live chat. If your team has a focus on preventing questions by fixing your product or focusing on intuitive product designs, automation may not be as big of a concern. In that case you want a tool that allows you to provide personal high-touch support, and this is where Help Scout really shines.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
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