Help Scout vs. HubSpot Service Hub: Deep-Dive Comparison

If you’re shopping for customer service software and comparing Help Scout vs. HubSpot Service Hub, this comprehensive comparison of features, pricing, use cases, support, and scalability will help you determine which tool is the best fit for your business.

Quick look: Who is Help Scout best for vs. who is HubSpot Service Hub best for?

HubSpot Service Hub is a good option for two types of teams/businesses:

1. Early-stage startups that qualify for HubSpot's startup plan and need CRM and marketing automation tools in addition to a help desk. The massive jump in pricing when the startup discount expires means you'll likely need to look for a new support tool within a year or two, but it can be a good option for a couple of years.

2. Sales-led companies with customer success teams doing more account-management type of work than traditional customer support. Service Hub has several features designed for customer success teams that are responsible for retention.

For all other teams and businesses, Help Scout is the better choice: 

• It's significantly more affordable than HubSpot Service Hub. Help Scout's highest-cost plan is $15/user per month less than HubSpot's Professional plan, which most teams will have to be on to get access to the features they need. 

• It's easier to use and set up, with higher G2 ratings than HubSpot Service Hub for ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin.

• It's built specifically for support teams. Its documentation focuses entirely on support use cases rather than splitting attention across support, sales, and marketing, and its 100+ integrations are focused on the tools support teams actually need to connect to their help desks.

Help Scout's free plan vs. HubSpot Service Hub's free plan

If you're a small business looking for a free platform to help you better organize and manage your requests from customers, both Help Scout's and HubSpot Service Hub's free plans are great options to consider.

Help Scout's higher user limit (five users on Help Scout versus two seats on Service Hub) makes it a good choice for larger teams. Help Scout also gives you access to features you won't find in Service Hub's free plan, such as tags, email snoozing, and a knowledge base builder.

However, HubSpot does offer a couple of channels you won't find in Help Scout’s free plan, namely live chat and Facebook Messenger. This makes it a better choice for very small teams who are more focused on delivering real-time support.

The table below shows what's included in Help Scout's and HubSpot Service Hub's free plans.

It's also worth noting that the support you'll get access to as a free plan customer differs between Help Scout and HubSpot. 

As a Help Scout free plan customer, you can reach out to our support team for one-on-one help, take one of our live classes, and access all of our self-service resources. HubSpot Service Hub's free plan customers only get access to community, self-service, and AI support.

For the remainder of this post, we'll be comparing Help Scout's and Service Hub's paid plans.

Help Scout vs. HubSpot Service Hub: Feature comparison

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub let you deliver support via email, live chat, self-service, and social. As for self-service, both platforms let you build external knowledge bases, launch an AI agent, and create customer portals.

Help Scout also offers SMS support. In Service Hub, you need to subscribe to Marketing Hub's Professional plan and purchase the Marketing SMS add-on to send and receive texts to and from customers.

For phone support, Help Scout offers integrations with providers like Aircall and Talkdesk. Service Hub offers phone support natively.

Channel pricing comparison

Conversation management features

Both Help Scout’s and HubSpot Service Hub’s shared inboxes centralize all support requests from all channels, giving your team a single place to see and manage all customer inquiries. 

Both tools also offer features that make it easier to route, manage, and respond to requests:

• Ticket assignments that let you assign specific tickets to specific agents.

• Customer profiles that show key information about the person requesting support.

• Internal notes that let you collaborate on replies privately.

• Round-robin and load-based routing that automatically assign incoming requests equally.

• Saved replies that let you create canned responses to frequently asked questions.

• Auto-replies that let customers know their requests have been received.

• Tags that let you label and report on specific types of requests.

• Views that group together conversations that meet specific criteria (tags, assignees, etc.).

• Workflows that automatically route, sort, and perform actions on requests.

• SLAs to help you ensure that you're meeting your commitments and getting back to customers in a reasonable timeframe.

It's worth noting that while some of the features above are available in Service Hub, they're much more complicated to set up and use than in Help Scout. For example, you need super admin permissions to create tags in HubSpot, and the help doc describing how to use them is so focused on the CRM use case that it's difficult to determine how they can actually be used in support.

Tags in Help Scout, on the other hand, can be created by anyone on your team in less than a second. If you do need to restrict access for specific users, you can, but it’s not the default.

Service Hub does offer one feature you won't find in Help Scout: skill-based routing. It lets you auto-assign requests to specific users based on custom skills you create in the system.

While at a glance, Service Hub's Starter plan looks more affordable than Help Scout's Standard plan, HubSpot's Starter plan significantly limits the features you get access to. Most support teams are going to need to be on HubSpot's Professional plan ($90/seat per month) to do what they need to do in the system.

The table below shows the lowest-cost plan you'll need to be on to get access to each platform's different conversation management features.

Knowledge base and self-service features

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub let you create customer-facing knowledge bases. On both platforms, you can customize the design of your help center, sort articles into categories, see revision histories, publish multi-language articles, optimize your articles for search engines, and access reports showing how your help center is performing.

Help Scout's knowledge base builder (Docs) is significantly less expensive than Service Hub's. You can create two Docs sites on the Standard plan ($25/user per month), three on the Plus plan ($45/user per month), and five on the Pro plan ($75/user per month). Additional Docs sites can also be added to any plan for $20/site per month.

HubSpot only includes its knowledge base builder on its Professional and Enterprise plans. You can create one knowledge base on the Professional plan ($90/seat per month) and up to 25 on the Enterprise plan ($150/seat per month).

Help Scout is also the better choice if you need to create both internal and external knowledge bases. While you can technically create an internal knowledge base on HubSpot by setting all of the articles to private, you have to do this for every single article you publish. In Help Scout, you can set entire collections to private, or you can make the entire site private with restricted docs.

Both platforms also let you create customer portals that aggregate all of the tickets from a specific customer into one interface where anyone at the customer's company can view them. Portals are available in Help Scout on the Plus plan ($45/user per month) and in HubSpot Service Hub on the Professional plan ($90/seat per month).

Reporting and analytics features

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub offer pre-built and custom reports — and report exporting — so you can easily track your KPIs and monitor volume trends overall and by channel. Both also offer office hours, which is a way to define the times when you offer support so your reports aren't negatively impacted by days/times when no one is working.

The key difference between Help Scout and HubSpot is HubSpot's custom dashboards capability. While Help Scout offers pre-built dashboards and the ability to create custom reports, Service Hub gives you the ability to add custom reports you've created to custom dashboards that serve as a one-stop shop for viewing all of the reports you care about the most.

AI features

Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub both have a number of AI features.

Both tools let you answer customers' questions automatically with AI agents. Help Scout's AI agent uses knowledge from your help center and website and works through its web widget (though AI agents for email are coming soon). HubSpot's AI agent uses data from your knowledge base articles and CRM, and it can be used to reply to requests from any channel.

The AI tools that Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub have for assisting your support team when they're helping customers work differently.

Help Scout offers an AI copilot that works with your team right in the queue and can be used to:

• Automatically draft replies to email requests using knowledge from your help center, website, and previous support conversations.

• Turn long conversation threads into summaries to get up to speed on conversations quickly.

• Adjust the tone, spelling, or length of an email reply or knowledge base article you've written — or translate a reply/knowledge base article into a different language.

You can click a button while viewing any conversation to instantly generate a draft, create a summary, or adjust content you've written.

There's also a Topics feature in Help Scout that automatically categorizes incoming support requests into themes. It's a useful addition to tags for identifying which types of requests create the most volume for your team and how volume for specific topics changes over time. 

In HubSpot, there's a Breeze Assistant that uses the information in your HubSpot platform to answer employees' questions through a chat interface. It can be used to help support teams draft replies, summarize long back-and-forth threads, and clean up their own copy, but you can't do it in a click like you can in Help Scout. You basically have to prompt it to do what you want like you would a typical LLM.

Service Hub also has a knowledge base agent (in beta at the time of writing) that identifies coverage gaps in your knowledge base and converts support conversations into knowledge base articles that your team can review and edit before publishing.

Customer success features

For customer success teams that are responsible for retention, HubSpot Service Hub offers a few features you won't find in Help Scout. You can view your entire book of business in its customer success workspace and generate customer health scores that increase or decline based on interactions you specify (e.g., a support request decreases the score while a positive NPS rating increases it).

Service Hub's default connection with HubSpot's CRM is also valuable for customer success teams because it allows you to view all conversations and meetings that sales had with a customer before the handoff, as well as share information, like signed contracts, easily across both systems.

Help Scout vs. HubSpot Service Hub: Pricing comparison

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub use hybrid pricing models. The base software for both products is user/seat-based, meaning your per-month price will increase as you add new users to your account. However, pricing for their AI agents is usage-based, meaning you'll pay more based on the number of requests that your AI agents resolve.

Help Scout has four pricing packages:

• Free: $0 per month for up to five users.

• Standard: $25/user per month.

• Plus: $45/user per month.

• Pro: $75/user per month.

As for usage-based pricing, Help Scout's AI agents are priced at $0.75/resolution after a three-month free trial. AI Assist and Topics are included in all paid plans at no additional cost, and AI Summarize and AI Drafts are included in Plus and Pro at no additional cost.

HubSpot Service Hub has four pricing packages:

• Free: $0 per month for up to two seats.

• Starter: $7/seat per month.

• Professional: $90/seat per month.

• Enterprise: $150/seat per month.

HubSpot's Breeze Assistant is included in all plans at no additional cost. The Knowledge Base Agent is included in the Professional and Enterprise plans. 

As far as usage-based pricing, Service Hub's AI agent (available only on the Professional and Enterprise plans) works on a credit-based system. You get 3,000 credits each month on the Professional plan and 5,000/month on the Enterprise plan. Resolutions cost 50 credits each, so you get 60 resolutions/month included in the Professional plan and 100 resolutions/month in the Enterprise plan.

If you need the AI agent to handle more conversations than what's included in your plan, you can buy additional credits for $10 per 1,000 credits, making the usage-based price $0.50/resolution.

Finally, HubSpot does offer a startup plan for businesses that have received pre-seed, seed, or Series A funding. It includes HubSpot's Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub products and gives teams a discount of up to 90% in year one, 50% in year two, and 25% in year three on either the Professional or Enterprise plans for each product. 

However, keep in mind that the jump in pricing may make continuing to use the product untenable if your business doesn't grow rapidly. As one HubSpot customer writes:

"We are on the Pro plan for most HubSpot features. We received a 90% discount the first year, a 50% discount the second year, and we will be paying full price next year. Those discounts have been a big help, but our HubSpot expenses are growing much faster than revenue. At this 50% discounted rate, HubSpot is more than twice the expense of our entire technology stack (over 100 services) on Azure."

In general, Help Scout is much more affordable than HubSpot Service Hub. While HubSpot Service Hub's Starter plan has a lower cost than Help Scout's Standard plan, it offers far fewer features, and the cost of upgrading to get access to the features you're missing will cost you $15/user per month more than Help Scout's most expensive plan.

* Customer quotes featured in this post have been lightly edited for clarity.

Ease of use and setup

When comparing Help Scout and Service Hub on ease of use and setup, Help Scout is the clear winner. 

As one Help Scout customer writes: “What I like most about Help Scout is the ease of use. 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!”

It is worth keeping in mind that HubSpot's tools all use the same interface, which can make it fairly intuitive for teams that already have experience using HubSpot's Marketing Hub or CRM.

Integrations

Help Scout offers more than 100 integrations with the tools that support teams most often need to connect to their help desks, including phone and SMS support software, CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and ecommerce platforms like Shopify.

The overall HubSpot platform offers more than 2,000 integrations, though most of those integrations are more sales- or marketing-focused. If you filter the list by "essential apps for customer service," there are only 19 integrations listed.

Of course, if you're using HubSpot's marketing or sales platforms, one big advantage is the native integration between those systems and Service Hub, though Help Scout does have a HubSpot integration you can use to connect data between it and HubSpot.

Scalability

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub have the basic features that teams need while they’re small and the more advanced features they’ll need as they grow, so scaling the size of your team on either platform is seamless. However, Help Scout is the much more affordable option when scaling.

While HubSpot's base plan is affordable at $7/seat per month, it doesn't include fairly baseline features like a knowledge base builder, ticket assignments, collision detection, inbox views, and automated workflows. To add those features, you'll have to jump up to the next-tier plan, which is more than 12 times the cost at $90/seat per month.

All of Help Scout's plans include all of those features — even the $25/user per month Standard plan — and the cost of its plans scale more reasonably ($25 → $45 → $75 per user). Help Scout's highest-cost plan costs less than HubSpot's Professional plan ($90/seat per month) and half as much as HubSpot's Enterprise plan ($150/seat per month).

Customer support

Both Help Scout and HubSpot are highly rated for their customer support. They offer email and live chat support to customers on all paid plans (HubSpot's free plan customers get community and self-service support only), and both have detailed help centers.

Help Scout vs. HubSpot Service Hub: Which tool is right for you?

If all of the information above didn't make it clear which platform is the best for your team, here's a final summary to help you choose the right option:

• Help Scout is custom-built for support teams. It offers more must-have features in its lower-cost plans, its documentation is all about how to use its different features for customer support (not some support, some sales, and some marketing), and its integrations are focused on the tools support teams need to connect to their help desks.

• HubSpot's startup plan is worth considering if you're a funded software company that also needs CRM and marketing automation tools. The discount of up to 90% in year one makes it affordable, though you may need to plan on switching systems in year two or three when the price increases.

• Help Scout is the more affordable option overall. Its highest-cost plan is half the per-user cost of HubSpot's highest-cost plan, and you won't run into issues where your per-user price increases by more than 1,100% because you need a basic feature like a knowledge base or workflow.

• With tools for marketing automation, customer relationship management, customer support, content management, data management, and payment processing, HubSpot is the better choice for businesses that would rather have a single, central platform for multiple business functions than several different tools specialized in individual functions.

Both Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub are leaders in the customer support space, and you really can’t go wrong with either choice. Consider the differences between the two platforms, select the platform that looks like it will best support your business’s unique needs, and then start a trial to make sure that it works for you both in theory and in practice.