Top 7 Help Scout Alternatives in 2024 for Customer Support

Help Scout is a popular customer support software that helps businesses bridge that gap and deliver exceptional experiences. Help Scout is a customer service software solution that centralizes all customer data, interactions, and history in one inbox. This consolidation equips agents with the necessary information to handle customer requests efficiently.

However, with a vast array of options available, it's wise to explore all your choices. This blog dives into 7 of the top customer support software alternatives to Help Scout in 2024. We'll explore their strengths, and weaknesses, alongside considering how they might stack up against Help Scout for your specific needs. Whether you're looking for a more robust feature set, a more affordable option, or something that integrates seamlessly with your existing tools, I am certain you will find the perfect fit on this list.

Ready? Let’s get to it.

Why Help Scout?

Help Scout enables you to maintain a ubiquitous presence wherever your customers seek assistance, all while equipping your team with the collaborative, organizational, and automated tools necessary for enhanced efficiency. Seamlessly deliver email, self-service, and live chat support through a unified platform that mirrors the familiarity of your inbox. Experience a remarkable increase in email response rate and a notable reduction in support ticket volume, culminating in heightened customer satisfaction and diminished support inquiries – a victory for all parties involved. Initially conceived as a shared inbox solution approximately 12 years ago, Help Scout has since evolved into a comprehensive customer service software platform boasting a myriad of customer-centric solutions.

As a well-regarded customer service software solution, Help Scout caters particularly well to the needs of small- to medium-sized businesses. Unlike cumbersome enterprise-level tools that often necessitate intricate setups, foster impersonal interactions, and demand constant administrative oversight, Help Scout champions simplicity, agility, and a customer-centric approach, enabling you to focus on swift action and customer delight.

Why might Help Scout be the right fit for your team's Customer Support needs?

• Easy to set up.
• Help Scout has a shared inbox that helps teams collaborate and manage customer emails effectively.
• Its beacon help widget integrates with websites to offer immediate support assistance.
• Automated workflows to improve response times and streamline processes.
• Reporting capabilities for tracking performance and customer satisfaction.

Why do you need a Help Scout Alternative?

• The platform's interface, especially the inbox UI, has a lot of room for improvement.
• Social channels and unlimited report history are only available on the Plus and Pro plans.
• Some users have expressed that customization options for the help documentation are somewhat limited, which may be a drawback for teams requiring more integrated solutions.
• They lack integrations in some areas and they primarily focus on email so tracking chats and calls isn't that helpful.
• Compared to the features offered, the pricing is rather high.

What are the Top 7 Customer Support Alternatives to Help Scout in 2024?

1. Distrobird
2. Zoho desk
3. Team support
4. Hubspot
5. Gorgias
6. Re-amaze
7. Kayako

1. Distrobird

Distrobird has earned the trust of countless companies worldwide as the pinnacle of efficiency, offering unparalleled automation for top-tier customer support. This trust is well-placed, as Distrobird empowers companies to effortlessly centralize all their customer support operations within a single, cohesive tech stack. From a versatile shared inbox to robust multi-channel sequences and campaigns, Distrobird equips you to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions with ease via its continuously expanding list of integrations which seamlessly integrates with your existing software stack and enables you to leverage data across our suite of products or connect to third-party applications for enhanced automation or comprehensive view of each customer or prospect.

Moreover, getting started with Distrobird is a seamless process. Our customer support stack leverages the familiar interface of email clients and extends that user-friendly experience to every other channel through which your customers interact with you – including SMS, voice, and social media. This feature proves especially beneficial when engaging with brands at various stages of your pipeline.

Distrobird best features

• A free plan that incorporates all of our features.
• Distrobird’s familiar interface helps you to onboard your team without hassle and deploy in minutes, not days.
• Distrobird seamlessly integrates with your existing software stack, offering unparalleled versatility.
• It organizes your website activities in a chronological timeline so your team can provide the world-class service customers deserve.
• Contacts data is automatically enriched so your team knows exactly who they’re talking to, and how to keep them delighted
• With Distrobird’s rule engine, you can create automated sequences targeting customers at every stage of your pipeline.

Distrobird limitations

• Distrobird currently lacks a mobile application.
• Its free plan supports a maximum of 3 users and 4 teams.

Distrobird pricing

• Free plan for the Voice, Sequences, and Shared Inbox products.
• Startup plan for Shared Inbox: $8/month.
• Startup, Growth & Enterprise plans for both the Sequences and Voice products: $25,$50, & $75 respectively.

2. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based context-aware customer service software boasting users among service teams. Zoho Desk helps service teams manage customer conversations across email, phone, live chat, and social media. It is designed to pack the automation and analytics necessary to scale to any volume of customers. It is presented as easy to implement, and tightly integrated with other software used by the team for context and continuity.

Zoho Desk helps service teams manage customer conversations across email, phone, live chat, and social media. It is designed to pack the automation and analytics necessary to scale to any volume of customers.

Zoho Desk best features

• Easy to set up and get started.
• Helps reduce your call center costs by having the Zoho chatbot deal with routine questions and requests.
• The interface's simplicity is outstanding and offers an intuitive user experience that's incredibly user-friendly.
• It organizes support tasks and keeps track of the organization and employees' current status.

Zoho Desk limitations

• Artificial intelligence is only available on the Enterprise plan.
• Although the user interface is quite user-friendly, it can take some time to get to grips with some of the more advanced features.
• Limited integration options with certain third-party applications can sometimes hinder the ability to fully integrate its support system with the other tools being used.
• If you're a small team the options available in Zoho Desk may be too much for what you need.

Zoho Desk pricing

• Standard - $18 per user per month.
• Professional - $30 per user per month.
• Enterprise - $45 per user per month.

3. TeamSupport

TeamSupport stands out as a formidable customer support solution crafted to enhance customer satisfaction, streamline workflows, and enhance agent efficiency. Tailored to accommodate teams of all sizes, it enables seamless consolidation of channels, expedited time to resolution, collaboration with external departments, and access to valuable customer insights – all within a user-friendly dashboard. With TeamSupport, agents can confront their most pressing challenges head-on, thanks to a nimble solution that's both easy to learn and implement.

The suite of proactive customer service software offered by TeamSupport empowers you to prioritize your customers by gaining a deep understanding of their needs, effectively supporting them, and evolving alongside them as their requirements change. With TeamSupport, fostering strong customer relationships and delivering exceptional support becomes not just a goal, but a tangible reality.

TeamSupport best features

• Easy to use for basic tasks.
• Support for simple issues is quick and easy.
• Its centralized tracking system makes teamwork more interesting.
• Its compatibility with our other resources also makes it easy to centralize the management of customer tickets, tasks, and interactions.

TeamSupport limitations

• The configuration and setup procedures are non-intuitive and confusing.
• Users have complained aboutTeamSupport's sluggish functioning and page load times.
• Several parts of the system are poorly designed, making it impossible to represent data appropriately.

TeamSupport pricing

• Chat support: $29 per agent per month.
• Essential support: $35 per agent per month
• Professional support: $49 per agent per month
• Enterprise support: Customizable.

4. ThriveDesk

ThriveDesk is another dynamic helpdesk solution that harnesses a variety of communication tools, such as live chat, email, and contact forms, to streamline customer support operations. At its core lies a shared inbox, providing representatives with a centralized dashboard to manage customer requests, chat interactions, and phone conversations seamlessly. Key features of ThriveDesk encompass customer relationship management, a digital workspace, team collaboration, community engagement, and a knowledge base. This comprehensive suite empowers customer support teams to effectively search, create, delete, merge, or assign conversations to fellow team members.

Moreover, ThriveDesk offers an array of additional functionalities to enhance efficiency, such as automatically forwarding incoming emails to the shared inbox, tracking recurring queries, executing bulk changes across conversations, and configuring team signatures. With ThriveDesk, businesses can optimize their customer support processes and elevate their overall service delivery.

ThriveDesk best features

• ThriveDesk is less priced compared to its alternatives.
• It has a very easy-to-use interface/dashboard.
• Its collaboration features allow teams to search, create, delete, merge, or assign conversations to other team members easily.
• Users have reported prompt customer support when resolving issues.

ThriveDesk limitations

• Third-party app integrations aren’t the best on ThriveDesk.
• Its contact management feature lacks the depth and customization options found in more comprehensive customer relationship management systems.
• Its reporting and analytics features can be better and provide more precise and detailed graphical representations.

ThriveDesk pricing

• Starter: $49 per month
• Plus: $99 per month.

5. Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer support help desk solution specifically suited for e-commerce enterprises. Functioning as an all-in-one hub for customer service, support, and live chat, it offers a comprehensive suite of tools to bolster customer interaction management including features like seamless email integration, autoresponders, ticket management, customer history tracking, and request assignment. Gorgias also seamlessly integrates with a plethora of support platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, and Live Chat, facilitating the aggregation and streamlined management of customer queries from diverse channels.

This unified approach empowers e-commerce companies to efficiently handle customer interactions, irrespective of their origin. Whether via email, social media, or live chat, all customer support tickets are seamlessly funneled through Gorgias's unified ticketing system. Moreover, automated sorting based on predefined attributes and topics ensures swift ticket resolution, while customizable autoresponders enhance response times.

Gorgias best features

• Highly customizable dashboard
• AI-assisted ticket management
• Automation tools
• Allows multiple languages in one price plan.

Gorgias limitations

• Verified users have reported issues while navigating the interface with one user reporting Gorgias as “not the best experience on the customer's end”.
• Gorgias gets a lot of updates and it tends to interrupt the workflow sometimes.
• Users are sometimes unable to mark a ticket as unread, and sometimes tickets get lost.
• Some e-commerce platforms are not supported in lower pricing plans.

Gorgias pricing

• Starter: $10
• Basic: $60
• Pro: $360
• Advanced: $900.

6. Re:amaze

Re:amaze emerges as a versatile cloud-based solution, blending help desk functionality with customer messaging capabilities to empower businesses in supporting, engaging, and converting customers seamlessly. With applicability across a wide array of industries including higher education, retail, food and beverage, healthcare, and more, Re:amaze offers a comprehensive suite of features tailored to meet diverse business needs.

Further enhancing its utility, Reamaze boasts a self-service portal, customizable branding options, seamless email integration, and digital document storage. Mobile applications compatible with both iOS and Android devices ensure accessibility on the go.

Re:amaze best features

• Available on mobile.
• Easy to set up and operate.
• Allows for multi-channel communication, automated routing, and issue tracking.
• Its real-time monitoring capabilities enable users to stay abreast of customer activities and promptly respond with canned responses tailored to specific queries.

Re:amaze limitations

• Their knowledge base editor doesn’t support uploading photos to an article.
• Sometimes the mobile app crashes when typing replies.
• Customization of certain features seems rather limited or restricted.

Re:amaze pricing

• Basic: $29 per team member per month
• Pro: $49 per team member per month
• Plus: $69 per team member per month

7. Kayako

Kayako is a versatile cloud-based customer support platform that seamlessly integrates a plethora of support channels including email, live chat, and phone calls. This unified approach enables users to effectively manage multi-channel customer support while facilitating seamless internal and customer-facing communication. One of Kayako's key strengths lies in its ability to track conversations across various mediums such as email, chat, social media, and help center tickets. The chat tool empowers users to initiate new conversations or resume existing ones directly through the help center module or via their website and apps. Additionally, the ticket management system offers efficient organization through the use of tags and prioritization based on the current status of tickets.

Moreover, Kayako boasts extensive integration capabilities with popular applications as well as social media channels including Facebook and Twitter. Overall, Kayako provides a robust solution for businesses seeking to streamline customer support operations, enhance communication, and deliver exceptional service across multiple channels.

Kayako best features

• Integrates many customer support channels, including online chat, email, and social media, into a single dashboard.
• Automate workflows, routine tasks, and replies.
• Assists businesses in monitoring and evaluating key performance metrics related to client satisfaction.

Kayako limitations

• The platform regularly encounters technical problems that require assistance from the customer support team to resolve.
• Ticket notifications are not prompt.
• Users frequently mention delays in response from the Kayako customer service team.
• Utilizing the reporting feature demands understanding Kayako’s unique query language for configuring and running reports - making the feature hard to use.

Kayako pricing

• Kayako pricing plans are only available upon demo request.

Which Customer Support Platform Is Right For You?

While Help Scout provides a foundation with its chat functionality, it falls short of delivering a fully comprehensive customer support experience due to its complex UI, limited customizations, and high pricing.

Distrobird stands out as a comprehensive solution, offering an all-in-one platform for calls, emails, SMS, and integrations with popular CRMs and business tools.

Its features cater to both sales and customer support teams, with functionalities like multi-channel communication, automation, and a customer-centric inbox for streamlined workflows.

Whether you're a startup or an established business, Distrobird's scalable pricing plans make it a cost-effective choice. Create your free Distrobird account and see how it can transform your customer interactions!