7 Reasons Why Help Scout Is the Best Zendesk Alternative

At Help Scout, we believe our product is the best customer service software on the market. But we would never expect you to just take our word for it. That's why, in this post, we're going to give you all the reasons Help Scout is the best Zendesk alternative according to our customers. 

We've scoured reviews on third-party platforms like G2 and Capterra to put together this guide to why you should choose Help Scout over Zendesk or — if you're a current Zendesk customer — why you should make the switch to Help Scout.

1. Help Scout is much easier to use than Zendesk

If you're tired of struggling to perform simple tasks in Zendesk's complicated system — or if you want to stop spending weeks training new hires how to use your support tool — Help Scout will be a breath of fresh air. Help Scout is rated significantly higher by customers on G2 for ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin.

Zendesk is built for enterprise teams looking for deep customization to manage extremely high support volumes. Help Scout is built for small and mid-sized SaaS and ecommerce support teams that just want to deliver exceptional support as quickly and easily as possible. 

We haven't added features just because other tools offer them. We've added features based on what our own support team and our customers actually need in order to do their work efficiently. 

With Help Scout, you don't get a Frankenstein system slowing you down with endless options you'll never use — just a simple interface showing exactly what you need to get the job done.

What Help Scout customers say* about its ease of use

• “Some customer support tools have a lot of features that we rarely use in our day-to-day job. And most of them are just all over the interface, which can be too overwhelming for new users. But Help Scout is not one of these tools. It's just very easy on the eyes and not too overwhelming.” Read the full review.

• “Simple, easy to use. We've been running it for years, and I prefer the interface to Zendesk and Freshdesk.” Read the full review.

• “Very easy to set up and maintain a workflow. As a result, our customers are very happy with the human support and self-service received.” Read the full review.

• “The simplicity is what I love about Help Scout. I've tried other platforms, but for me, this is more comfortable for my eyes and user-friendly. Everything looks neat and organized so that even beginners will not be confused.” Read the full review.

*Some of the customer reviews quoted in this piece have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

2. Help Scout is much more affordable than Zendesk

With Zendesk, you pay per agent. With Help Scout, you pay based on the number of people reaching out to you for support. That means that you don't pay more for Help Scout as you grow your team; you pay more as you grow your business. You'll never see your bill increase simply because you needed a few extra hands to help support your customers.

Additionally, Help Scout includes all of its channels in all of its plans — even the free plan. With Zendesk, different channels are locked behind higher pricing tiers. On the base plan ($19/agent per month), you only get email and social support. To get chat or self-service, you'll have to upgrade to the $55/agent per month Suite Team plan.

Finally, unlimited use of all of Help Scout's AI features is included in every plan at no additional cost, so your bill won't go up because your chatbot answered a customer's question for you, translated a request into another language, or helped you draft a reply. 

With Zendesk, you have to purchase an add-on with an additional monthly per-user cost to get access to AI copilots, and you'll pay an additional rate per AI answer if you go over your very limited monthly allotment. On the Suite Team plan, you only get 5 automated resolutions per agent per month before the $1.50/resolution cost kicks in.

What Help Scout customers say about its cost

• “I like that the price is affordable — I really don't think you'll find a better bang for your buck.” Read the full review.

• “I love that you get so much included in the price but also the products offered are of high quality and an asset to the business.” Read the full review.

• “I like their clear and simple pricing. You can forecast and plan for your cost. Other tools like Intercom or HubSpot have very complex pricing.” Read the full review.

• “Even the cost is reasonable — we have 100% confidence that we are using a (THE) leader in the class.” Read the full review.

• “Help Scout offers all the features you want, but doesn't nickel and dime you for it like the bigger names do.” Read the full review.

3. The support you'll get from Help Scout's team is second-to-none

Sometimes you need to get great support to deliver great support, and when it comes to great support, Help Scout is the best in the business. With a 9.1 out of 10 rating on G2 for quality of support, Help Scout beats out:

• Zendesk with an 8.2/10 rating.

• HubSpot Service Hub with an 8.8/10 rating.

• Intercom with an 8.7/10 rating.

• Zoho Desk with an 8.3/10 rating.

• Kustomer with an 8.9/10 rating.

• Salesforce Service Cloud with an 8.3/10 rating.

• Dixa with an 8.7/10 rating.

Help Scout offers 24/6 support, along with a detailed help center, free resources and guides, and live classes hosted by Help Scout experts, so you'll have everything you need to support your customers day in and day out. 

While you can use our AI Answers feature to get an instant reply to your questions, the real humans on our support team are always there and easily accessible when you need them.

What Help Scout customers say about the support they receive

• “The customer support is over-the-top, amazing, above-and-beyond helpful. These are not clichés, they should be taken literally.” Read the full review.

• “Absolutely NO ONE beats Help Scout's own customer care approach and attention to detail.…Help Scout is a care desk that has been made by amazing professionals already in the customer care space — a service BY support teams FOR support teams.” Read the full review.

• “Their own support team, blog, and support content have been incredibly useful and valuable, both personally and professionally. You can tell these people care about people!” Read the full review.

4. Help Scout helps you deliver exceptional customer support, too

Help Scout was born from our founders' frustrations trying to find a support tool that aligned with their customer-centric values. All of the tools on the market turned customers into ticket numbers and added unnecessary friction to the process. 

So they set out to build a better solution — one that actually helped teams deliver exceptional support rather than hindered it — and that early philosophy has been baked into every product decision we've made over the last 14 years.

The features we've built, the design of our product, the friendly and helpful people on our support team, and our newsletter, podcast, and blog (created by support professionals for support professionals) are all intentionally designed to help you deliver the same exceptional support that we strive to achieve ourselves.

What customers say about their support before and after Help Scout

• “We have delivered more exceptional customer service to our startups every year by relying on Help Scout's quick and painless product and by learning to expect and trust its continual improvements.” Read the full review.

• “Honestly, this product has made customer support so easy for our company. We tag customer questions and can see what is working and not working monthly. Our response time has improved significantly.” Read the full review.

• “Help Scout is easy for our team to use, helps us provide better support to our customers quicker, and is a tool that we enjoy, not one we're only forced to use.” Read the full review.

• “Not only do they provide a killer product, but they also provide education for our customer service reps so we can service our customers better.” Read the full review.

5. You don't need development support to use Help Scout

Zendesk's marketplace lists 400+ third-party partners that you can pay to help you get it set up. This highlights the technical burden of using Zendesk; it's so complicated that there are entirely separate businesses thriving solely on providing technical support to Zendesk's customers.

If you don't use one of its partners, you'll likely have to rely on internal IT, engineering, or operations support to help implement, customize, and maintain the system. Consider these reviews from Zendesk customers:

• “The learning curve for setting up workflows and automation can be steep without technical support or detailed guidance.” Read the full review.

• “Some customization options, like dashboard reporting or UI changes, require more technical knowledge or developer support than expected.” Read the full review.

• “Zendesk can be tricky to learn, especially for new users. Setting it up and customizing it can be complicated, and you might need some technical help.” Read the full review.

Help Scout doesn't have an implementation partner marketplace because you don't need one. Anyone on your support team can set up Help Scout and customize it to be exactly what you need. If you need help doing it, our own support team — not a third-party company you have to pay — will walk you through the process.

What Help Scout customers say about setting up and using the software

• “Easy and fast setup. Need live chat? Need docs? If you've got 10 minutes, you could set up both in less than that.” Read the full review.

• “Help Scout is easy to set up, and in most cases, you can avoid working with your IT team. Help Scout also has a very intuitive interface which makes training your team easy! The Help Scout team got it right!” Read the full review.

• “Having worked with Zendesk before, the difference was night and day. Our team enjoys Help Scout because of the ease of use, user-friendly platform, reporting, and more! Most accessible to set up and quick to go live (within minutes)!” Read the full review.

You’ve heard from Help Scout users why they prefer Help Scout to Zendesk. Here are two more reasons we know you’ll love Help Scout, from the perspectives of those who know it best.

6. It's easy to migrate from Zendesk to Help Scout

As our own Mathew Patterson says, switching help desks can “feel like performing surgery on a moving roller coaster.” At Help Scout, we understand that, so we've made it as easy as possible to migrate from Zendesk to our product. 

While a lot of the Zendesk alternatives out there force you to pay third-party tools to migrate your data from one help desk to another, Help Scout offers automatic migration from Zendesk to Help Scout using Import2, and the service is completely free for most customers. 

Import2 will migrate all of your support tickets/emails, tags, and customer profiles from Zendesk to Help Scout, and Help Scout also has a separate tool you can use to migrate your help center articles over.

7. Help Scout is customer-first, not AI-first

At Help Scout, we like AI. We use AI. We've built many AI features into our platform. But we haven't crammed AI into the platform in every possible way, because we're a customer-first platform — not an AI-first platform.

We released our AI features slower than Zendesk did. Our support team tested them exhaustively to make sure the final product was something that actually helped us deliver better support. It gave us confidence that those features would also help our customers deliver better support.

AI may be changing the world, but our founding belief is as true now as it was 14 years ago: Great customer support is great for business. 

Zendesk and other AI-first customer support platforms are building endless AI features that are designed to help you reduce the cost of your support team. 

At Help Scout, we're building AI features to help your support team do more engaging and impactful work because we believe that great customer support is a revenue driver — not a cost center.

It's time for a better experience for your team and your customers

The evidence from our customers is clear: For small and mid-sized teams that value ease of use, affordability, and world-class support, Help Scout is the superior Zendesk alternative.

You don’t need more complexity, more features you’ll never use, or more line items on your bill. You need a partner that helps you work more efficiently and keep your customers happy. That’s exactly what we built Help Scout to do.

Ready to make the switch? Get started for free today.