Help Scout vs Zendesk Comparison 2023: Which Is Better?

No business software stack is complete without a customer support system. This includes things like a help center, live chat, shared inboxes and self service tools. In this article, we will compare Help Scout vs Zendesk, two of the most popular customer service software solutions. Whether you are helping a small customer or a big business, being offered top-grade support will always improve your user experience. 

What is the difference between Help Scout and Zendesk?

The main difference between Zendesk and Help Scout is that Help Scout helps your customer support team offer great service through live chat, a shared email inbox and other help center tools, whereas Zendesk's customer service module is a more comprehensive platform allowing users to choose any channel for customer support.

Your common Help Scout review often praises this set of tools for startups and small businesses. It is very popular especially when used with a CRM integration or other sales tools, as Help Scout does not stray outside of its help center lane. While some people insist on spelling it HelpScout, the real name actually does use the space, which is rare.

If you pop over to read about a Zendesk review that is specifically dealing with Zendesk Service, you will likely see positive feedback from small to mid-sized businesses and startups from across the globe. A lot more big brands use Zendesk than Help Scout or other similar apps like Freshdesk. What's more, Zendesk Service tools work very well if you streamline them with Zendesk Sell features, especially when it comes to post-sales, as opposed to pre-sales. 

Help Scout vs Zendesk comparison chart

This table below lays out the final score of our side by side comparison. 

Help Scout vs Zendesk: Pricing

Help Scout offers three pricing options. The standard package is $25 per user per month or $20 per user per month billed annually. The Plus plan is $50 per user per month or $40 per user per month billed annually. And the Pro plan is $65 per user per month billed annually with no monthly payment option. Help Scout also offers a special price for nonprofits, as well as one for startups on a budget. Help Scout has a free 15-day trial.

Zendesk does offer many pricing options for both the basic plans and the suite plans. Basic plans are $25, $59 and $125 per user per month for the Team, Professional and Enterprise plans, or $19, $49, $99 per user per month billed annually. Zendesk Suite Teams is $59, Growth is $99, Professional is $125 per user per month, or $49, $79 and $99 per user per month billed annually. Zendesk also has a Suite Enterprise plan, but for pricing, contact them directly. Zendesk offers a free trial.

Winner: Zendesk

Zendesk has more pricing options compared to Help Scout, as it has two overall packages depending on how many team members might be using it.
 

Zendesk or Help Scout: Customer support and knowledge base

On all Zendesk plans, you get digital support during business hours. A Zendesk guide comes with additional support with a help center and community forum, onboarding and training resources and more. There are more premium support options offered as add-ons, like 24/7 proactive support and a Zendesk Assist tool.

Help Scout focuses more on self help resources than Zendesk. There is a docs site serving as a blog and lots of how-to tutorials and FAQs. You can also sign up for live Help Scout classes. Finally, there is a web form to contact their customer service department.   

Winner: Zendesk

When it comes to customer support, Zendesk has better service than Help Scout. Although, if we are talking just about the knowledgebase and self service parts of support, Help Scout is just as good as Zendesk.
 

Help Scout and Zendesk: Ease of use

User friendliness is so important for these kinds of apps, as the easier they are for your customer support team to use, the better customer service they will provide. Help Scout scores really high points when it comes to ease of use. It has an easy-to-use interface and intuitive tools.

Like Help Scout, Zendesk is also pretty popular for being easy to use. You can really get your team started on this help desk tool with out-of-the-box features.  

Winner: Help Scout

This is a close category when talking about ease of use for support software and help desk solutions. While Help Scout wins this one, there are certainly many Zendesk users who would argue that their system has an equally simple overall user experience.

Help Scout vs Zendesk features & functionality

Now that we have covered the basics like pricing, support and ease of use, it is time to look at the tools. The functionality we will cover today are:

• Desktop, online and mobile versions

• Email and mailbox

• Messaging and live chat

• Help center and knowledge base

• Bots

• Collaboration

• AI

• Workflows and automation

• Analytics and reporting
   

Help Scout vs Zendesk: Desktop, online and mobile versions

Help Scout is primarily a cloud-based SaaS, which means it’s all about the web browser version. Although, it does seem like you could get a usable desktop version through a third party download. However, for most people, the web version of Help Scout will be fine. Help Scout also offers mobile apps for iOS and Android which are well-regarded by the Help Scout user community. 

Zendesk is quite similar to Help Scout in this respect. You can take full advantage of Zendesk’s tools and features through your web browser. For those who demand it, you can search for third party apps that can give you some desktop capability. The Zendesk mobile app for iPhones and Android phones is very practical and easy to use.

Winner: Tie

If you want to go mobile, or are happy accessing your SaaS via the web, then it is hard to choose a favorite between Help Scout and Zendesk.
 

Zendesk or Help Scout: Email and mailbox 

Comparing Help Scout and Zendesk side by side, we must start with email and inbox tools. Zendesk gets you email features with unlimited addresses to streamline your support channels. This works alongside a Zendesk contact form that you can place on your site which will send customer queries to email. Emails can have ticket attachments up to 50 MBs. More advanced Zendesk packages have automatic email archiving.

Help Scout specializes in a shared inbox feature for emails. You can set assignments, add private notes, save replies and add tags. Mailboxes come with email forwarding and email signatures, and a wide range of email templates. Help Scout has an auto-reply tool, and there is a good deal of customization when it comes to fields when storing customer profiles in the email module. With Help Scout, there is also an email and live chat integration.

Winner: Help Scout

Help Scout makes it easy to customize a lot of the email and shared inbox user experience for your team of support agents. Taking advantage of its multiple mailboxes for various issues gives you a great advantage.
 

Help Scout and Zendesk: Messaging and live chat 

Help Scout is great for live chat and messaging features. There is a live chat widget window that you can set up so that it only pops up when a support rep is ready to chat. If no rep is available, it will reroute their chat to a support request. You can also use Help Scout as a messaging platform with audience targeting, and you can even create customer feedback survey tools. You can also add images to your messages. 

With Zendesk's live chat support, you get a web chat widget that can be used to instantly create a support ticket or just chat with an agent. Widgets are highly customizable too. There are tools for pre-chat forms, and you can get unlimited chats at the same time. Zendesk even has automatic translation for its chats. More features include conversation rating, easy transferring between agents and departments, skills-based routing, whisper mode and full conversation history archiving.      

Winner: Zendesk

While Help Scout has live chat support and messaging features in separate toolkits, with Zendesk these are all part of the same module. It is easy for users to start a live chat with either of these systems, the average response time of a support representative using Zendesk's live chat is just a bit faster, although Help Scout is speedy enough for some. It should be added that with integrations, both of these can connect with chat apps like WhatsApp. 
 

Zendesk vs Help Scout: Help center and knowledge base 

Help centers refer to the overall collection of tools, including self-service features and the knowledge base, which is more specific. Zendesk splits up these two toolkits. The Zendesk help center has contextual self-service, which embeds self-service tools on your web widget or mobile app. The community forum is called Zendesk Gather. There is multilingual content, structured content, and theme customization. As for the Zendesk knowledge base builder, it uses a WYSIWYG dashboard, and it is SEO-friendly. You can also pre-schedule article publications.

Help Scout makes it easy to create knowledge base articles with texts, links, images, and even videos embedded in the articles. The Help Scout help desk works on all devices, including tablets and mobile. It is also SEO-friendly and is overall a great tool for frequently asked questions.

Winner: Tie

As self-service software solutions, both Zendesk and Help Scout are really good for letting your customer base seek out their own help and support. On both platforms, it is easy to add new articles and organize them by SEO keywords. Overall, both Help Scout and Zendesk have close-to-perfect help desk centers.
 

Help Scout vs Zendesk: Bots 

Bots are a super system to boost support productivity without overburdening your team. However, Help Scout's entire system is built around the idea that you want to create a more streamlined conversation between human reps and users, and therefore they don't really believe that bots are very effective for an ideal customer experience.

Now, Zendesk does indeed do bots and does them well. Every Zendesk plan comes with standard bots that work on live chat, emails, messaging and ticket forms. There is also a bot builder which employs basic tree branch logic. Finally, as an add-on to the more premium packages, you can get advanced AI-based bots.

Winner: Zendesk

Zendesk has bots that are very popular for their multi-channel help desk system. The more advanced AI bots really allow you to create in-depth canned replies, which will save your team significant time. Help Scout sadly surrenders this category completely. 
 

Zendesk and Help Scout: Collaboration

When it comes to team collaboration, Zendesk has some useful features. There is a light agent tool that gives extra team members access to support tickets without you needing to buy more seats. There is also a side conversation feature that employs a sidebar system to use third-party tools like Slack for extra assistance without leaving the main ticket window.

The most important collaboration tools in Help Scout is task or ticket assignment, which allows reps to delegate issues to the best agent. You also get collision detection. This makes sure that no two agents are simultaneously replying to the same user or dealing with the same ticket without knowing about the other one.

Winner: Zendesk

Overall, Zendesk is simply built for more team communication and collaboration than Help Scout.
 

Help Scout or Zendesk: AI

Both of these systems offer some degree of artificial intelligence to boost productivity. With Help Scout, the AI is called Beacon. Beacon can offer intelligent suggestions to agents and users. It works directly with the Help Scout shared inbox and live chat, and can be used for simple ticket escalation. Beacon also helps enrich customer profile data.

Zendesk AI includes macro predefined responses, and you can set up custom business rules with triggers. There is intelligent article recommendation, AI-powered content cues, intelligent triage, and insight-based suggestions. Zendesk also lets you do business rules analysis. 

Winner: Help Scout

Beacon is one of Help Scout's signature AI features. It is very well regarded by users and agents. However, Zendesk also has some pretty decent AI functionality.
 

Zendesk vs Help Scout: Workflows and automation

Workflows and other automation capabilities are seriously baked into the Zendesk system. You can set up triggers and share them between Zendesk accounts. Other workflows let you do conversation routing, although this is based on agent status and capacity. You can set up multiple ticket form workflows, conditional ticket fields, skills-based routing, and finally, SLA workflows. 

Help Scout offers basic workflow automation tools. You can set up automations to do things like filter your emails, create custom folders, and many other actions. Tags can also be used to trigger workflows. 

Winner: Zendesk

This could be considered a close category. But in the end, when we tally up all the points, Zendesk gets the crown for workflows and automations.
 

Help Scout vs Zendesk: Analytics and reporting

Help Scout has a reporting API that uses advanced filters, conversational drill-downs and data comparisons. There is also user-specific reporting data. The reporting dashboards can be customized too, and it is a snap to export reports to CSV or XLSX. All analytics reports are very printer-friendly. 

Zendesk has a prebuilt analytics dashboard that looks great and is simple to read. Data exports are no problem, and you can do data comparisons with a benchmark feature. Zendesk analytics integrates with Google analytics as well. You can also create custom reporting dashboards and easily share them with your team. There is a live agent activity dashboard for real-time analytics and visual data alerts.

Winner: Tie

When measuring the pros and cons of Zendesk vs Help Scout's analytics and reporting features, in the end, we have to declare this category even.
 

Zendesk or Help Scout: Integrations

The Zendesk Marketplace is where you get all the good Zendesk native integrations. Popular apps to connect with your Zendesk include Mailchimp, Google apps, and Salesforce. For more integrations that are not native, you can use connector tools like Zapier.

Help Scout offers their own integration library, which is pretty comparable to Zendesk. Some examples include Hubspot, Jira, Salesforce, Slack, Google apps and Shopify.

Winner: Help Scout

While you will never feel limited regarding integrations with Zendesk, Help Scout’s premiere integration library is just a tad more robust.

A note on Help Scout Zendesk integration

Sadly, there is no native Zendesk Help Scout integration, as these apps overlap too much in terms of their functionality and features. However, it is possible to do so by using a third-party connector platform such as Zapier. By creating a "Zap" (an automated workflow), you can connect Help Scout with Zendesk and define specific triggers and actions. For example, when a new ticket is created in Help Scout, a corresponding ticket could be created in Zendesk.

Is Help Scout better than Zendesk? Our conclusion

And so, now you know which one is better, or, at least according to this article. Zendesk beats out Help Scout. But sometimes, these things are a matter of personal preference. You can always get both free trials and toggle your experimentation back and forth to see which one you like best.

Ultimately, both of these can easily be comfortable entries in any article looking at the best help desk software on the market today. They both offer similar self-service functionality, and both have amazing mobile apps.