Help Scout review

Help Scout is a shared-inbox help desk for email, live chat and messaging, with a built-in knowledge base called Docs ¹. Reviewers praise its simple interface, and many describe it as a good fit for small teams ^15,16.

Pricing is per user again: Standard, Plus and Pro cost $25, $45 and $75 per user a month on annual billing, with unlimited contacts on paid plans ^1,6. The company had moved to billing by contacts helped in late 2024, and accounts still on those plans are billed under separate terms ^7,17. The AI agent, Compass, is sold separately at $0.75 per resolution ^1,2.

Compass, sold as AI Answers, answers questions in website and in-app chat using your help centers, websites and Google Docs, in 50+ languages ². It hands off to your team with full context, and you can exclude topics it must never touch ². A Test tab runs simulated conversations before launch without counting toward billing, and dashboards track performance and sentiment ^2,4. It does not take actions in other systems: email answers and connections to payment and CRM tools are marked Coming Soon ².

Compass costs $0.75 per resolution, billed monthly in arrears; a resolution is one chat session closed without human help, billed once however many questions it covers ³. New accounts get three months of free resolutions, you can cap monthly spend, and prepaying saves up to 33% ^2,3. Agent assist is bundled: AI Assist on every paid plan, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize on Plus and Pro ¹.

A 10-agent team on Standard with 500 AI resolutions a month pays about $625 a month, or $62.50 per agent ¹. Monthly billing costs a fifth more: $30, $54 and $90 per user instead of $25, $45 and $75 ¹. The catches are plan limits rather than hidden fees. Standard tops out at 25 users and Plus at 50, Pro needs at least 10 users, and AI Drafts, round robin routing and the Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot apps start on Plus ¹. Extra Inboxes cost $10 a month and extra Docs sites $20 on annual billing, and phone calls need a paid Aircall add-on ¹.

Help Scout is SOC 2 Type II certified for security and availability and runs on AWS in the USA ^8,10. It publishes a Data Processing Amendment, and a HIPAA BAA is available on Pro, with an extra addendum for AI features ^9,12. No ISO 27001 certificate or EU hosting is published ⁸. AI features run on OpenAI foundation models; Help Scout does not send your data back to retrain them, but may use limited samples to tune small adapters for tone and clarity ¹¹. The sub-processor list also names Anthropic, Google and Freeplay for machine learning and AI quality work ¹⁰.

Help Scout averages 4.4 out of 5 from 431 G2 reviews and 4.6 from 226 on Capterra ^14,16. Reviewers praise the interface, collaboration tools and knowledge base, while complaints center on thin reporting for larger teams, features held back for higher plans and gaps in integrations ^15,16. Public customer stories include eCatholic, The New Wheel, Litmus, Mixmax, TeamSnap and Threadless ¹³.