Have you narrowed down your search for a customer service platform to Help Scout and Zendesk?
I've spent time using both Help Scout and Zendesk across the companies I've worked with. Based on many learnings into both their strengths and weaknesses, my conclusion is that Help Scout is ideal for small to medium-sized teams focusing on email and live chat, while Zendesk is best suited for large to enterprise teams with complex needs and dedicated support platform operations.
Want to understand how I got to this conclusion? In this blog post, we will comprehensively examine both Help Scout and Zendesk, comparing their strengths and weaknesses. We will explore each platform's unique features, pricing, and overall user experience, providing all the information to help you decide if Help Scout or Zendesk is better for your organization.
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In this head-to-head comparison of Help Scout vs Zendesk, we'll be rating each tool on the following parameters: ease of use, support channels, help center capabilities, automations, reporting, tagging and organizing tickets, popular integrations, interface options, level of provided 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 Zendesk.
By scoring each category and sharing our thoughts, we hope to make your research and decision-making easier. We want you to find the perfect help desk solution for your customer support needs. Let’s get started!
When we're talking about "ease of use," we're looking at it from the lens of three different roles: agents, managers, and operations. How easy is it to see the needed information and reply quickly? How easily can you get to team reporting and monitor all your various metrics? What is the experience involved in operationally managing areas like automations and platform settings?
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 in 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 my own experience, the interface is something an agent who is brand new to using Help Scout or to support in general just “gets” right away without much (if any) training.
Now on to the manager's view. Most important, in my opinion, is the ability to quickly see snapshots of team metrics. Help Scout definitely performs well here with their reports and saved views.
As for the inbox, the ability to color-code tags makes scanning the mailbox 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, tags, and custom fields. 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 it’s still a fairly obvious interface, other features can get more complex to actually use. In my time using the platform, I've had to request their help many times to figure out how to create workflows. Most commonly, I’ve 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’re better than I am at keeping those straight, you’ll find it a useful feature.
Zendesk is a powerful help desk, but sometimes with that power comes added complexity. Learning to use Zendesk as an agent isn’t overly complicated, but it’s not immediately intuitive. Different areas that they may need to pay attention to can all blend together into the sidebars.
Managers will find that the Explore reports and dashboards do give them a quick overview of what’s going on.
Admins, though, may find Zendesk overwhelming. While each specific setting isn’t overwhelming, there are quite a lot of them. The sidebar of settings keeps scrolling for a while, and I personally find it difficult to find anything without using their settings search.
We give Help Scout a score of 9 and Zendesk a score of 6. If a clear, easy-to-use interface for agents and admins is your main goal, Help Scout is the clear winner.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Alternatives To Zendesk
The next feature up for discussion is the communication channels each support software offers. By this, we mean which ones each platform offers — especially of the most commonly needed types.
We expect to see at least email, chat, and phone as supported channels in any support platform, and in this case, Help Scout and Zendesk meet those needs. However, we're impressed if there are additional channels, such as public and private social media messaging, that don't require third-party integrations, SMS, or WhatsApp.
* 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.
Help Scout obviously received a check mark for the minimum channels, albeit with an asterisk on phone. What about other channels, though? Help Scout does offer 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.
Zendesk is a leader in omnichannel support, and their supported channels show that. In addition to our minimum channels, they also have built in connections with Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook to allow you to manage both public posts and private messages. Their optional Talk feature lets you add SMS messages as well.
Zendesk also has a number of third-party integrations to extend your channel functionality. You’ll be able to do things like switch your phone provider away from Zendesk Talk or integrate with Google Business to bring in your page reviews and questions.
We give Help Scout a score of 7 and Zendesk a score of 10. If having a wide variety of support channels is your big focus, Zendesk clearly wins out while Help Scout meets the minimum.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Alternatives To Help Scout
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 do an amazing job building that self-service content is vital in my eyes, but it may differ for you. Both Help Scout and Zendesk offer a help center as part of their service, so that’s checked off. But how do they differ?
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.
You can also import a style sheet and scripts to do more advanced customization.
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.
Regular article writers have a simple editor with advanced features accessed by typing a forward slash. It’s straightforward to create and update articles.
Zendesk offers a knowledge base called Zendesk Guide in which you can create articles and structure them into categories and sections.
Zendesk lets you edit everything about the appearance of your help center and has a huge library of themes that are premade if you don’t have the resources to make your own from scratch.
Additionally, it also offers you features like Community, which allows your customers to ask questions publicly and interact with each other.
We give Help Scout a score of 8 and Zendesk a score of 10. Both offer a good base for a customized and organized help center. However, Zendesk offers more extensibility and customization options, pushing it over the top. If having a great help center matters to you, though, either tool will do a solid job.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
For Automations, we’re going to combine a couple of different types: routing and other internal automations to prioritize and assign your tickets, and automated deflection, including chatbots and AI, meant to answer your customers without agent involvement. A scaling business or anyone with a large volume of support will find automations essential, and the amount offered often defines which platform is best for you.
Help Scout has made sure the basics are covered with automations, but it’s not necessarily their big strength. When it comes to routing, you can use their workflow tool. For example, you can automatically move conversations from one team to another based on fields set in Beacon.
You’re also able to look for keywords and route to specific people. This gives you a skill-based option to assign conversations, but if you’re working with a large team, it is more complex to keep their workloads balanced.
For deflections, Help Scout gives you two main options. 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 offered is their workflows feature. Essentially, workflows are 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 to confirm the question and, if correct, give them the answer.
Zendesk has obviously put time into its automation functionalities. They have powerful routing that can send customer questions to the right people based on a multitude of factors. That includes my personal favorite feature, their skill-based routing. Being able to automatically route questions to different team members based on their knowledge or focus can bring efficiency to a whole new level.
Zendesk also offers some degree of deflection with its Answer Bot feature. Answer Bot automatically suggests articles for a customer based on the question they’ve sent in. This allows you to show customers FAQs that match their ticket content, and if it answers their question, the customer can close their ticket. Answer Bot is AI driven and matches possible answers based on the natural language your customers use. It is a bit manual, though, and you’ll need to set up your specific questions and answers, which can be time consuming.
Zendesk wins with a score of 7 to Help Scout’s 6, but neither tool has cutting-edge automation capabilities. Zendesk edged out Help Scout with their built-in tools like Answer Bot and the power of skill based routing, while Help Scout only has workflows. If automation is your number one need, neither platform may be perfect, but both can handle the basics.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Team and ticket reporting is your way to both keep track of KPIs and to keep track of where your customers are getting stuck. Having powerful reports helps you keep an eye on what matters without investing a lot of time in manual data analysis.
Help Scout's reporting offers everything a small to medium-sized business could need, all in their characteristically intuitive style. You'll find built-in reports for all three default support channels as well as reports for their Docs and Happiness (CSAT) features.
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 generate views that are outside of their basic function, you're stuck. And if you want a dashboard with multiple report metrics in one view, you'll have to build it on your own outside Help Scout. 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, if reporting is all that’s holding you back from choosing it as your support platform.
When it comes to reporting and analytics, the first tool I hear mentioned in support communities is Zendesk. It’s the tool many companies gravitate toward solely because of its powerful reporting. Like Help Scout above, Zendesk offers basic reports via Zendesk Explore.
They also have built-in dashboards to get a wider view. While Zendesk Explore is very powerful and allows you to create a huge variety of reports, it comes with a steep learning curve and an intense time commitment. To get the most out of their reporting, you’ll likely need a team member who is certified in Zendesk reporting and has invested a fair amount of time learning the tools, or you may need to hire an external resource to do your initial report setup.
Help Scout's reporting is perfectly adequate and will perform well for many teams, gaining them a score of 7. However, while Zendesk may be complicated, the power it offers in reporting is hard to beat. I give Zendesk a 9. The only thing that would improve it is finding ways to simplify the experience so creating complex reports doesn’t require months or years of learning first.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
The ability to add tags and categorize your customer conversations is vital to learning from your support data. It's a feature you can live without, but to grow your team or product, you'll want to have it. It enables functions like routing and different automations, and it’s vital to thorough reporting.
Help Scout offers the ability to both tag and categorize conversations, but with some caveats. You can use their tagging functionality or custom field functionality for categorizing. 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, making scanning lists of conversations much easier.
My big pet peeve with Help Scout’s tags, though, is there is no central place to create them. While they offer a list of all tags in use to view and delete quickly, adding them is only possible from within a conversation. Its tags can also stick around in an agent’s 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.
Zendesk displays tags on the side of the agent interface. Tags can also be added manually or automatically based on automations.
Zendesk additionally offers another bit of functionality here: ticket forms. You can create custom ticket forms and adjust the fields to include a drop-down menu, date, or any other type of information. This makes tagging tickets, controlling the input, and tracking them easier.
I’m giving both Help Scout and Zendesk an 8 when it comes to categorizing and organizing. They both have their positives and negatives, but in the end both do a competent job. If categorizing your tickets is your main goal, either help desk will likely offer what you need.
You probably already have a tech stack for your support team. Think about all the tools you use across your customer’s lifecycle. You likely use a CRM, some kind of marketing automation, and various project management tools. And those are the company-wide applications. What about customer service-specific tools like CES reporting or health scoring?
Integrating these tools with your help desk gives you access to more information and better assistance for your customers.
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.
Integrations 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.
As a market leader in the support space, Zendesk has an entire ecosystem of applications to extend their functionality or integrate with other tools. Companies themselves often build direct integrations and this shows in Zendesk’s marketplace.
Integrations are installed by admins and can vary in complexity depending on the tool itself. That goes for which plans they’re accessible within, although all paid plans can install integrations.
This one generally comes down to which specific integration you’re hoping for. It may be that Help Scout can link with every software that matters to you or Zendesk is able to. In general, though, due to their breadth of apps, Zendesk has scored a 10, and Help Scout with their smaller but still sufficient integrations has scored a 7.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
When we talk about interface options, what we mean are the various and sundry ways your team can use the support platform. Are they tied just to the web app? Or are there other ways they can answer customers?
Help Scout offers a fairly basic mobile app for Android and iOS that allows supporting customers on the go. It’s great if you need to answer a quick customer question or add a note to a conversation, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to work from it full time. Their app also only supports the email channel and doesn’t allow agents to live chat or admins to change settings.
Help Scout also offers the ability to reply to email notifications and make basic changes like adding notes, setting tags, and responding to customers.
Zendesk also offers mobile apps for both Android and iOS, but they take it a step further. Their mobile apps allow all agent functions, even live chat. If you use an iPad, they also have an iPad-specific app that takes advantage of the larger screen.
Both apps give you ways to communicate with your customers on the go or in the event of a computer meltdown, but Zendesk has clearly put more time and attention into it. We give Help Scout a 6 here and Zendesk a 10.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Service is an incredibly 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.
To judge their service, we’re going to compare both what they offer on their various plans and also an unofficial poll of members of the support pro community about their own experiences when needing help.
Help Scout offers email and live chat support to all customers, and on their Pro plan, you also have a dedicated account manager as well as quarterly team trainings.
In the years I've been a Help Scout customer, it's always been apparent 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 simultaneously with their live chat, their team is always quick to reply. Emails, though, can lag. Responses are currently stated as taking 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.
Zendesk has different levels of support depending on plans as well. Their standard level plans come with basic support during working hours. Once you move up to their enterprise plans, you’ll find yourself with a dedicated account manager and SLAs for how long responses take.
Current Zendesk customers routinely see responses to their emails in about 8 hours, depending on when they’re sent, and they’re typically efficient and offer the help needed. Enterprise customers report extremely fast responses, under 15 minutes, but have SLAs in that same range.
In this instance, both Help Scout and Zendesk receive 10 points. They've obviously invested in their teams and capabilities, and it shows. If the fastest responses matter most in both platforms, I’d suggest looking at their higher-tier Enterprise level plans. However, no matter what, with either platform you’ll have someone there when you need them.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world with infinite budgets where a software decision would come down only to the right feature set for your needs. The reality is that price matters.
Comparing their entry-level price within TestBox Compare, Help Scout comes out ahead with a beginning price of $20/agent per month, but that’s not the full picture.
Help Scout’s Standard tier starts at $20/agent per month on an annual payment plan (it's $25/agent on a monthly payment 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 their $50/agent per month Plus plan ($40 annually).
Help Scout tops out with their Pro plan at $65/agent per 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.
Zendesk has a wide variety of plans. They start at $19/agent per month on their limited annual foundational support plan all the way up to $215/agent per month on their highest enterprise-level plan.
Most small to medium-sized teams will find themselves starting their Zendesk service with the Suite Teams plan at $49/agent per month or Suite Growth plan at $79/agent per month. As your company grows or if it’s already a mid-sized to large business, you’ll likely want the Suite Professional plan at $99/agent per month.
Both Help Scout and Zendesk scored a 9 on pricing, with clear-cut plans that fit specific-sized teams. Which is best for you, in this case, will come down to your budget and the features you’re looking for.
You decide.
I know which is best for my team, but my conclusion might be completely different from yours.
We can give you our personal observations of their offerings, but the 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.
Zendesk offers a market-leading support platform that is the default for many businesses and therefore has the ecosystem that the default choice develops. They have plans that suit companies in every stage, from brand new startups with their foundational plans all the way up to large enterprises with complex needs.
Based on our analysis, Help Scout is best for small to medium-sized teams looking to focus on email and live chat. If you’re a smaller team who is seeking ease or a larger team who has a focus on preventing questions by fixing your product or focusing on intuitive product designs, Help Scout will really shine for you.
On the other hand, Zendesk is best for large to enterprise teams. They offer the power you’ll need to scale your support at that level, and the complexity that power comes with is easier to handle if you have a dedicated support platform operations team member.
If you fall between those two company sizes, the best platform is going to come down to the specific features you’re focusing on. Both platforms will do an admirable job for you.
If you're looking to compare Help Scout and Zendesk (or other platforms!), make sure you sign up for a TestBox account. You can test and compare Help Scout and Zendesk side by side using TestBox Compare. It's 100% free to use for software buyers and saves you considerable time and effort in your software search.
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