Help Scout vs. Front

Customers expect options for how to get support, and Help Scout gives you the tools to provide it. From self-service Docs to live chat and proactive messages, Help Scout goes beyond the inbox to let customers choose their preferred methods of interaction.

Help Scout can be as simple or powerful as you need it to be. As your needs get more complex, Help Scout is ready to meet the challenge with features like workflows, tags, custom fields, and reporting. They all work together to let you focus on what matters most — talking with your customers. Though Front does offer a few additional features beyond their shared inbox, it’s still a pretty limited offering.

Charting your path forward is much easier when you know where you’re starting. With Help Scout, you have access to reports out of the box on all plans, such as average response time, ticket volume by channel and time of day, and much more. You’re also able to create custom reports if you need to take a deeper dive. With Front, you’re only able to generate reports on higher-tier plans.

The last thing you need is a lengthy set up and onboarding process to start supporting your customers. You can set up Help Scout and start supporting customers in minutes. You’ll also have access to our top-notch support team and robust library of self-service documentation for any questions that may come up along the way. Even though Help Scout is a more feature-rich product, we still regularly outrank Front in ease-of-setup categories across review sites like G2 and Capterra.

At Help Scout, we’ve been supporting support teams for over a decade. In that time, we’ve learned a lot, which helps us provide truly outstanding support to our customers. Not only do we offer 24/6 email and chat support, we offer semi-weekly live Help Scout classes you can attend. We also have an extensive knowledge base for those who prefer self-directed learning.

If having your personal work email in the same tool as your shared inbox is a true priority, Front may be right for you. While we can do it at Help Scout, our focus is using shared inboxes for team collaboration and customer support. Introducing personal email into this experience doesn’t bring value to shared inboxes and can cause confusion — and won’t be a focus for us moving forward.