If you're shopping for customer service software and comparing Help Scout vs. Zendesk, this comprehensive comparison of features, pricing, use cases, support, and scalability will make it easy to determine which tool is the best fit for your business.
Quick look: Who is Help Scout best for vs. who is Zendesk best for?
Help Scout is a simple and intuitive help desk solution. It's an affordable option for small- to medium-sized SaaS and ecommerce businesses, and its simplicity also makes it compelling for larger healthcare, logistics, education, and financial services businesses.
Zendesk offers a more comprehensive and robust suite of tools, making it ideal for large and enterprise businesses that need deep customization. It's built for handling complex support workflows, managing high ticket volumes, and organizing very large support teams.
Help Scout vs. Zendesk feature comparison

Both Help Scout and Zendesk let you deliver support on the major channels: email, live chat, self-service, and social. Help Scout includes these channels in all of its plans, including its free plan. Zendesk plans that include all of these channels start at $55/agent per month.
Zendesk also offers phone, SMS, and community support natively, while Help Scout supports these channels via integrations with other tools. Phone and SMS support are available on Zendesk's Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month (with additional usage fees for phone numbers, calls, texts, and more). Community forums are available on the Suite Professional plan at $115/agent per month.
If true omnichannel support is a must-have for your business, Zendesk will be the better option. If you don't need to offer phone, SMS, or community support, Help Scout is more affordable and easier to set up.
Channel pricing comparison
Channel | Help Scout's starting price | Zendesk's starting price |
---|---|---|
One shared inbox included in the free plan | Included in the Support Team plan at $19/agent per month | |
Live chat | One live chat widget included in the free plan | Included in the Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month |
Knowledge base | One help center included in the free plan | Included in the Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month |
Social media | Instagram and Facebook Messenger included in the free plan | Facebook and X included in the Support Team plan at $19/agent per month Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and more available in the Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month |
Phone | Available via integration on the Standard plan (starts at $25/month and includes unlimited users) | Included in the Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month plus additional usage fees |
SMS | Available via integration on the Standard plan (starts at $25/month and includes unlimited users) | Included in the Suite Team plan at $55/agent per month plus additional usage fees |
Community forums | Not available | Included in the Suite Professional plan at $115/agent per month |
Ticket management features

Both Help Scout's shared inbox and Zendesk's ticketing system centralize all support requests from all channels, giving your team a single place to see and manage all customer inquiries.
Both tools offer features that make it easier to route, manage, and respond to requests:
Workflows that automatically route and sort requests.
Tags that let you label and filter requests.
Views that group together conversations that meet specific criteria (tags, assignees, etc.).
Customer profiles that show key information about the person requesting support.
Auto-replies that let customers know their requests have been received.
Ticket assignments that let you assign specific tickets to specific agents.
Saved replies that let you create canned responses to frequently asked questions.
Zendesk also offers other enterprise-focused ticket management features that you won't find in Help Scout, such as SLAs and skill-based routing in the Suite Professional plan and automatic ticket routing based on agent status and priority in the Support Team plan.
Knowledge base and self-service features

Both Help Scout and Zendesk let you create customer knowledge bases. At least one help center is included in all of Help Scout's plans, while Zendesk plans that include a knowledge base start at $55/agent per month.
Both products let you create articles and sort them into collections. Both offer built-in search features, give you access to revision histories, let you customize the design of your help center, and are set up to be optimized for search engines.
Zendesk does have a couple of self-service features you won't find in Help Scout, such as approval/publishing workflows (available on the Suite Enterprise plan) and community forums (available on the Suite Professional plan).
Collaboration features
Both Help Scout and Zendesk offer lots of features that make it easy for your teams to collaborate on requests:
Collision detection to see when another agent is already working on a request.
Internal notes to provide additional context when assigning a request to someone else.
Mentions to tag teammates on requests and notify them that their help is needed.
Teams to create groups of agents who work on specific types of requests.
Zendesk also offers light agents — a way to bring non-support team members into the queue without having to pay per-user costs for them. Up to 50 light agents are included in the Suite Growth plan, and 100 light agents are included in the Suite Professional plan. You can also add light users to Zendesk’s lower-cost plans by purchasing the light user add-on.
Help Scout doesn't offer light users because all of its plans include unlimited users. You can add every single person at your company as a user at no additional cost.
Reporting and analytics features

Both Help Scout and Zendesk offer pre-built and custom reports — as well as 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.
Zendesk does offer a couple of features you won't find in Help Scout, such as benchmarks (a way to compare your performance to other companies like yours, available on all plans) and custom data explorations, available on the Suite Professional plan.
AI features

Help Scout has four AI features, all of which are included in all plans — even the free one — with no additional usage fees:
AI Answers: A generative AI-powered chatbot that automatically replies to customer questions over chat by using information from your knowledge base.
AI Drafts: Lets your agents use AI to create a draft response to a query by using information from your knowledge base, previous support interactions, and websites.
AI Assist: Uses AI to refine what you've already written in a support reply or knowledge base article, making it shorter/longer, translating it into another language, or adjusting the tone/voice.
AI Summarize: Uses AI to create a summary of a long back-and-forth support conversation, either for your historical records or to help agents working on the request get up to speed quickly.
Zendesk offers AI Agents, which gives you the same features as Help Scout’s AI Answers. You get five to 15 automated resolutions/agent per month included in your plan, with additional resolutions starting at $1.50 per month.
Zendesk offers features that are comparable to Help Scout’s AI Drafts, AI Assist, and AI Summarize with its Copilot add-on, which costs $50/agent per month and requires you to be on the Suite Professional plan or higher.
Zendesk also offers a couple of AI features you won't find in Help Scout. Its Workforce Management add-on ($25/agent per month) lets you use AI to forecast support demand and automatically schedule agents, and its Quality Assurance add-on ($35/agent per month) lets you use AI to analyze support interactions and identify knowledge gaps/training opportunities.
Help Scout vs. Zendesk pricing comparison
Help Scout and Zendesk have different pricing models — Help Scout's pricing is based on contacts (the number of customers helped) while Zendesk's is based on users (the number of individuals providing support).

Help Scout has four pricing packages:
Free: $0/month for up to 100 contacts* per month.
Standard: Starting at $25/month for up to 100 contacts* per month.
Plus: Starting at $75/month for up to 200 contacts* per month.
Pro: Contact for pricing.
* A contact is someone who received a reply from your team or had their question resolved by AI in a given month. Multiple conversations with the same person during a billing period only count as one contact.
All of Help Scout's plans let you deliver support across email, live chat, self-service, and social media (Instagram and Facebook Messenger).

Zendesk has five pricing packages, divided into two pricing pages for Customer Service Suite plans and Employee Service Suite plans:
Support Team: Starting at $19/agent per month.
Suite Team: Starting at $55/agent per month.
Suite Growth: Starting at $89/agent per month
Suite Professional: Starting at $115/agent per month.
Suite Enterprise: Contact for pricing.
To deliver support over live chat or create a knowledge base, you'll need to be on one of Zendesk's Suite plans. The basic Support Team plan only lets you deliver support via email, X, and Facebook.
With that in mind, since Help Scout's Standard plan and Zendesk's Suite Team plan are the most similar in terms of features, we'll use those two plans to compare the price you'd pay for several different numbers of users and contacts:
# of Agents and Contacts | Help Scout Price | Zendesk Price |
---|---|---|
5 users and 50 contacts | Available on the Free plan; $25/month on the Standard plan | $275/month |
5 users and 100 contacts | Available on the Free plan; $25/month on the Standard plan | $275/month |
5 users and 500 contacts | $185/month | $275/month |
10 users and 200 contacts | $65/month | $550/month |
10 users and 500 contacts | $185/month | $550/month |
10 users and 2,000 contacts | $785/month | $550/month |
25 users and 500 contacts | $185/month | $1,375/month |
25 users and 2,000 contacts | $785/month | $1,375/month |
25 users and 5,000 contacts | $2,000/month | $1,375/month |
50 users and 2,500 contacts | $985/month | $2,750/month |
50 users and 5,000 contacts | $2,000/month | $2,750/month |
50 users and 10,000 contacts | $2,400/month | $2,750/month |
Unless you have a small number of agents who are able to support a very large number of customers each month, Help Scout is much more affordable than Zendesk.
It's also worth noting that having an unexpected or seasonal influx of requests won't send your Help Scout price skyrocketing. To keep your monthly bill predictable, Help Scout determines your contact tier based on your trailing three-month average.
Pricing for AI features
If you're planning to use the AI features available in either Help Scout or Zendesk, you'll also want to factor AI usage into your pricing comparison.
In Help Scout, all AI features are included in your general monthly costs; there are no additional AI usage fees. You get unlimited access to AI Answers, AI Drafts, AI Summarize, and AI Assist on every single plan — even the free plan.
Zendesk gives you a handful of AI resolutions for each agent each month. On the Suite Team plan, you get five automated resolutions per agent per month. Additional automated resolutions start at $1.50/resolution. Other Zendesk AI features are only available as add-ons with additional costs:
Copilot costs an additional $50/agent per month.
Workforce Management costs an additional $25/agent per month.
Quality Assurance costs an additional $35/agent per month.
What customers say about Help Scout's and Zendesk's pricing
Help Scout has a higher rating on Capterra for “value for money” with a 4.4 out of 5 stars versus Zendesk's 4.2 out of 5 stars. As one Help Scout customer writes:
"I love that you get so much included in the price, but also that the products offered are of high quality and an asset to the business: knowledge base, live chat with Beacon, the email management system, plus all the ways you can organize and sort your incoming messages.”
Ease of use and setup

When comparing Help Scout vs. Zendesk in terms of ease of use and setup, Help Scout is the clear winner. You can learn how to use Help Scout in a day and become a power user in a week, and it's so intuitive that very little training is required for agents.
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!”
Zendesk’s wide range of features makes setting it up, using it, and training new agents on it much more cumbersome. In fact, one of its partners estimates that implementing Zendesk takes a minimum of four weeks, plus an additional week for every 10 agents on your team.
Zendesk customers also report that IT support is also frequently needed to set up some of the platform's more complex features.
Integrations

When it comes to integrations, while Help Scout has a higher customer rating (8.6/10) on G2 than Zendesk (8.1/10), Zendesk offers far more integrations overall.
Help Scout has around 100 integrations with the primary tools teams want to connect to their support systems: Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Aircall, Shopify, Jira, Linear, etc. Zendesk's Marketplace, on the other hand, has nearly 2,000 different integrations with both the big-name tools and smaller, more niche systems.
Scalability
Zendesk is built to scale no matter how large your organization grows. However, it's best if cost isn't a concern as you scale: Getting access to many of its more complex features will require you to upgrade to higher-cost plans or purchase add-on products.
Help Scout is also highly scalable and a strong choice for teams of any size that prioritize simplicity. It will help you scale as much as you need to without breaking your budget or degrading the support experience.
Customer support

When it comes to quality of customer support, Help Scout is the clear winner. It's rated much higher for quality of support on both G2 and Capterra, with customers writing glowing reviews like this one: “The customer support is over-the-top, amazing, above-and-beyond helpful. These are not clichés, they should be taken literally.”
Every user at your company can contact Help Scout's support team 24/6 via email or live chat, there are live training classes offered every week, and if you want to self-serve, you can access the platform's comprehensive knowledge base.
Zendesk's support isn't always rated highly, and it can take a long time to get a reply to a question. Given its steeper learning curve, this often means teams have to purchase Zendesk's professional services add-on to get the help they need or pay for consulting from one of Zendesk's partners.
Help Scout vs. Zendesk: 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:
If you value simplicity or expect your business to stay small or medium-sized, choose Help Scout. If you're expecting massive growth or need enterprise-grade features, choose Zendesk.
If you plan to do most of your support over email, live chat, and self-service, choose Help Scout. If you need to deliver phone, SMS, or community support, choose Zendesk.
If you're looking for a more affordable system with transparent, predictable pricing, choose Help Scout. If budget is less of a concern for you than system customizability, choose Zendesk.
If you need a system that's quick to set up and easy for your team to use, choose Help Scout. If you have dedicated IT resources or don't mind paying for outside help to set up and customize the system, choose Zendesk.
If you want access to quick, helpful support when you need it, choose Help Scout. If you're more of a figure-it-out yourself organization, choose Zendesk.
Both Help Scout and Zendesk 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 feels 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.
