Freshdesk vs Help Scout (2026)

Pick Freshdesk if your support runs on email tickets and you want a customer portal, a knowledge base and a large app catalog at the lowest paid price: Growth costs $19 an agent a month, billed yearly. Pick Help Scout if you are a small team that wants to start free, or wants chat, SMS and messaging apps in the same inbox without buying a second product: the free plan covers 5 users, and Standard costs $25 a user a month billed yearly with live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger included. Freshdesk is the better fit for phone support and for larger teams that need skill-based routing, a sandbox and audit logs. Help Scout charges less for AI on chat, at $0.75 per resolved conversation with the first three months free.

Pricing compared

Both vendors charge for each person on the support team, and both give a discount for paying a year ahead: 20% at Freshdesk and 16% at Help Scout. All prices here were checked on November 4, 2026.

Freshdesk lists Growth at $19 an agent a month, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89, all billed yearly. The pricing page has a monthly toggle, but it shows no monthly rates for the plans. Several things cost extra. Freddy AI Copilot is $29 an agent a month on Pro and Enterprise, more Freddy AI Agent sessions are $49 per 100 once the free 500 run out, and day passes for people who help out now and then cost $2 on Growth, $7 on Pro and $12 on Enterprise.

Help Scout is free for up to 5 users. After that, Standard costs $25 a user a month, Plus $45 and Pro $75 on yearly billing, or $30, $54 and $90 if you pay month to month. Pro needs at least 10 users and is sold through a demo. Extra inboxes cost $10 a month and extra Docs sites $20 a month on yearly billing, and the Scout AI agent costs $0.75 for each conversation it resolves.

Take a team of five paying yearly. Freshdesk Growth comes to $1,140 a year and Help Scout Standard to $1,500. That gap closes once you look at what each plan includes, because Help Scout Standard already has live chat, SMS and messaging apps. To get chat on Freshdesk you move to Freshdesk Omni Growth at $29 an agent, which is $1,740 a year for five. One tier up, Help Scout Plus costs $2,700 a year for five with AI Drafts and round robin routing included. Freshdesk Pro costs $3,300, and adding Copilot for all five agents takes it to $5,040.

If your five people answer fewer than 100 different customers a month from one inbox, Help Scout's free plan covers you at no cost.

Tickets, channels and routing head to head

Freshdesk is built around tickets. Every email to your support address becomes a ticket with an owner, a status and a history, and threads and tasks let agents discuss a ticket in private. Dispatch rules send each new ticket to the right group, and automations handle follow-ups and escalations. Pro adds multiple SLA policies, so you can promise faster replies to your biggest accounts, along with round-robin and load-balanced assignment. Enterprise matches tickets to agents by skill.

The main Freshdesk product covers email and social ticketing. Live chat, phone and messaging apps belong to Freshdesk Omni, a separate product priced at $29, $79 or $119 an agent a month billed yearly. Voice is a further add-on at $15, $39 or $69 an agent a month on those three plans.

Help Scout is built around a shared inbox of conversations. Collision detection shows when a teammate is already viewing or replying, internal notes hold the background, and saved replies cover the questions you answer every day. From Standard, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger arrive in the same inbox as email. Workflows tag, route and reply on rules you set: Standard allows 150 basic workflows, Plus 500 advanced ones that can trigger on customer properties, and Pro an unlimited number. Standard has one SLA policy and Plus has two. Phone calls come in only through integrations such as Aircall.

Freshdesk gives you finer control over who gets which ticket and how fast, and it is the one to choose if you want phone calls inside the same vendor's product. Help Scout gives a small team more channels for less money.

AI compared

Both vendors sell an AI agent that answers customers, and they point it at different channels.

Freshdesk's Freddy AI Agent answers email. Each account gets 500 sessions once, then packs cost $49 per 100 sessions. An email session is the 72 hours after a customer's first email, and every AI reply inside that window counts as one session. Freddy AI Copilot is a separate add-on for agents on Pro and Enterprise at $29 an agent a month billed yearly; it helps agents decide what to work on first and recommends next steps. You can buy it for some agents and not others, but day passes don't cover it. Enterprise adds Freddy AI Insights, which looks for trends and root causes across your tickets.

Help Scout's Scout agent answers chat on your website or inside your app, using your help centers, chosen web pages and Google Docs, in more than 50 languages. When it can't help, it hands the customer to your team with the conversation intact. You pay $0.75 only when it resolves a conversation, new accounts get three months of resolutions free, and you can set a monthly spending cap. Help Scout marks email answering as coming soon. For your own team, Standard includes the AI Inbox assistant, and Plus and Pro add unlimited AI Drafts, which writes replies from past conversations and help content, and AI Summarize, which turns a long thread into a few bullet points.

If most of your volume is email and you want an AI agent replying now, Freshdesk has it. If you want AI on a chat widget, or reply drafts for agents without a separate add-on, Help Scout costs less.

Help center and self-service

Freshdesk includes a customer portal and knowledge base on Growth, so customers can search your articles and submit tickets in one place. Pro adds community forums, where customers help each other, plus article versioning and a multilingual help desk. Enterprise adds an approval step before an article goes live.

Help Scout's Docs is a branded help site you can make public or keep private, with custom CSS if you want to restyle it. The free plan includes 1 Docs site with 10 articles, Standard has 2 sites and Plus has 3. The Docs report shows your most-viewed articles, article ratings and the searches that found nothing, which tells you what to write next. The chat widget shows articles on your site or in your app, so a customer can find the answer before starting a chat or sending a message. A secure customer portal starts on Plus.

For a help center in several languages or a customer forum, Freshdesk Pro is the choice. For a small team that wants help articles to answer questions inside a chat widget, Help Scout does that from its first paid plan.

Ease of use and setup

Help Scout lets you start on the free plan without a payment method and stay there while you fit within 5 users and 100 contacts a month. Trials of Standard and Plus last 15 days and need no credit card. Pro has no self-serve trial: you book a demo, and the plan includes a dedicated onboarding specialist.

Freshdesk's 14-day trial starts you on Enterprise, so you see every feature, including some you would lose on Growth or Pro. Note which ones you depend on before you pick a plan. When the trial ends you choose a plan and pay by card, or Freshdesk suspends the account. The six-month Free program for 2 agents is something you switch to from Plans and Billing inside your account, and it covers Freshdesk only, not Omni.

Freshdesk asks you to build more structure up front, such as groups, dispatch rules, SLA policies and portal settings. That suits a team with one person who owns the help desk. Help Scout's inbox, with assignment, internal notes and saved replies, works much like a shared email account, which makes it the easier move for a team leaving Gmail or Outlook. Both have iOS and Android apps for answering on the go.

Support compared

Freshworks lists a support phone line and email address, a customer community, and the Freshworks Academy for training new agents. Its help center promises 24x5 email support on the Free program, and the support page doesn't state hours for paid plans.

Help Scout offers email support on every plan, with priority email from Standard up. Pro adds a dedicated onboarding specialist and a strategic account manager. The pricing page lists no phone or chat support for Help Scout's own customers, so if you want to be able to call your vendor, Freshworks is the one with a published number.

Who each one suits

Freshdesk suits an email-first support team of several agents that wants tickets with owners and statuses, a customer portal from the first paid plan, and room to grow into multiple SLA policies, skill-based routing, a sandbox and audit logs. It also fits teams that want phone calls handled by the same vendor through Freshdesk Omni, and teams whose sales staff already use Freshsales.

Help Scout suits a small team that wants to start free, answer email, chat and messaging apps from one inbox, and put help articles inside a chat widget. It costs less for several channels at the entry level and for AI on chat, and it publishes its monthly prices.

If your support inbox sits beside your email marketing, Platformly includes a shared inbox for email, chat and SMS, a chatbot trained on your own site and help articles that hands over to a person, and a public help center, all on the same contact records as your broadcasts and automations. Its inbox is one part of a marketing platform, so a team that works tickets all day will get deeper routing and reporting from Freshdesk or Help Scout.