Help Scout vs. Intercom: A Deep-Dive Comparison

If you’re shopping for customer service software and comparing Help Scout vs. Intercom, 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 Intercom best for?

Both Help Scout and Intercom are popular customer support platforms. The features you’ll find in both platforms are nearly identical — either tool will give you access to everything your team needs to support your customers. The decision on which platform is better for your team comes down to three key factors:

1. Budget: Help Scout is much more affordable than Intercom; you’ll pay between $29 and $57 less per user/month on Help Scout’s plans than Intercom’s. Additionally, Help Scout’s AI agent has a lower per-resolution cost of $0.75/resolution, compared to Intercom’s $0.99/outcome.

2. AI features: While both platforms offer AI agents that answer customer questions for you and AI copilots that help your team create faster, better replies, Intercom has a lot of additional AI features you won’t find in Help Scout.

3. Channel coverage: Both tools let you deliver email, self-service, live chat, SMS, and social support. For phone, Help Scout integrates with other SaaS products, while Intercom offers the channel natively (with additional costs).

Help Scout vs. Intercom feature comparison

Both Help Scout and Intercom let you deliver support on the major channels: email, live chat, self-service, SMS, and social (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Customers can also track their conversations with your company using a customer portal.

For phone support, Help Scout offers integrations with providers like Aircall and Talkdesk. Intercom offers phone natively, though it's priced separately rather than being included in any of the platform’s base plans.

If you’re looking for a platform that will let you manage text and voice support channels in a single, central system, Intercom is the better choice. If you’re not offering phone support (or are willing to integrate with other systems to add the channel), Help Scout is much more affordable.

Conversation management features

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

Additionally, both tools offer an almost identical feature set when it comes to routing, managing, and responding to requests, though you’ll pay different amounts on the different platforms to access those features.

Knowledge base and self-service features

On Help Scout’s and Intercom’s paid plans, you can create public and private knowledge bases, add an unlimited number of articles, and sort those articles into collections. The design of the knowledge bases on both platforms can also be customized to match your company’s brand, and both let you create multilingual help centers.

One key difference between the two platforms is that you can only create multiple help centers on Intercom’s Expert plan ($132/seat per month). All of Help Scout’s paid plans come with multiple help centers: Standard ($25/user per month) comes with two, Plus ($45/user per month) comes with three, and Pro ($75/user per month) comes with five.

Collaboration features

Both Help Scout and Intercom 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.

• Features to manage mail from several email addresses in a single shared inbox.

• Multiple inboxes for businesses with multiple brands or privacy requirements.

Collision detection (called “teammate presence” in Intercom), internal notes, @mentions, and managing several email addresses in one inbox are all available on all plans that both platforms offer.

Teams (called “segments” in Intercom) are included in all of Intercom’s plans and they’re included in Help Scout’s Plus and Pro plans.

Help Scout offers one inbox on its free plan, two on its Standard plan ($25/user per month), five on its Plus plan ($45/user per month), and 10 on its Pro plan ($75/user per month). Multiple inboxes are only available on Intercom’s Advanced plan and higher, with pricing for those plans starting at $85/seat per month.

Both Intercom and Help Scout also offer light seats/users — a role with limited permissions that allows support to collaborate with other teams (engineering, finance, product management, etc.):

• Up to 20 light seats are included in Intercom's Advanced plan, and 50 light seats are included in its Expert plan. 

• Five light users are included in Help Scout's Plus plan, and 15 are included in the Pro plan. You can also purchase additional light users if needed.

Reporting and analytics features

Both Help Scout and Intercom 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.

AI features

When it comes to AI features, Help Scout has everything your team needs, and Intercom has everything your team could ever possibly want. The tables below show you how the AI features each platform offers are similar and different — as well as how their pricing compares.

AI agents

One additional unique feature of Intercom's is that you don’t have to subscribe to an Intercom Suite (its help desk) plan to use its AI agent, Fin, so if you already have a support platform that you like but aren’t happy with its AI agent features, you can purchase Fin separately. Help Scout's AI agents can only be used with Help Scout's help desk.

AI copilots

Other AI features

Proactive support features

In addition to all of the features that let you support users when they ask for help, both Help Scout and Intercom also offer several proactive support features that let you offer support before someone has to ask for it or identify issues before they start impacting customers. You can:

• Pop up a message on your website or in your app when a user meets certain conditions you set, such as viewing a specific page, spending a certain amount of time looking at a page, or looking at a page multiple times.

• Add a banner to the top of your website or app to get a message in front of all users in a prominent space.

• Send surveys to collect NPS® ratings from customers or to ask a custom-written question.

• Create webhooks (i.e., event listeners) to get notifications when specific events occur.

Both products also let you view metrics showing how your messages are performing.

Intercom also has a few additional proactive support features you won’t find in Help Scout. You can use it to:

• Build product tours inside of your app to walk customers through how to use specific features.

• Add tooltips inside of your product to provide brief explanations of features.

• Create checklists to provide users with to-do lists for accomplishing tasks.

• Add a news feed inside of your product.

Additionally, you can also A/B test your proactive messages in Intercom.

Intercom’s messaging, banner, and tooltip features are included in all of its plans. All of its other proactive support features are part of its Proactive Support Plus add-on, which costs $99/month and includes 500 messages sent per month. If you exceed 500 messages sent, you'll be charged additional usage fees.

Help Scout's proactive support features are included in all of its paid plans. Up to 2,000 unique views per month are included for free. If you need more than 2,000 unique views per month, you can buy additional views, with pricing starting at $20 per 2,000 unique views.

Help Scout vs. Intercom pricing comparison

Both Help Scout and Intercom use hybrid pricing models. The base software for both products is user-based, meaning your per-month price will increase as you add new users to your account. However, pricing for each platform's AI agent is usage-based, meaning you’ll pay more based on the number of requests that your AI agent resolves.

Help Scout has four pricing packages:

• Free: $0/month for up to 5 users.

• Standard: $25/user per month.

• Plus: $45/user per month.

• Pro: $75/user per month.

As for usage-based pricing, pricing for Help Scout's AI agent starts at $0.75/resolution after a three-month free trial.

Intercom has three pricing packages:

• Essential: Starting at $29/seat per month.

• Advanced: Starting at $85/seat per month.

• Expert: Starting at $132/seat per month.

As for usage-based pricing, the cost of Fin is $0.99/outcome. Additionally, if you want to use Intercom for phone or SMS support, you’ll be responsible for additional per-message/per-minute fees.

Overall, Help Scout is much more affordable than Intercom. It has a free plan that’s perfect for small teams and startups, and its paid plans run between $4 and $57 less per user/month than Intercom’s plans.

What customers say about Help Scout’s and Intercom’s pricing

Help Scout has a higher rating on Capterra for “value for money” with a 4.4 out of 5-star rating versus Intercom’s 4.0 out of 5 stars. 

Customer reviews of Intercom — even those that praise every other aspect of the platform — frequently cite Fin’s high resolution costs and the steep jump in price from its base plan to the mid-tier plan as big downsides of the platform:

• “The main drawback is cost. Compared to other AI chatbot solutions we’ve evaluated, Fin’s pricing feels high, especially for teams handling large ticket volumes.” Read the full review.

• “The biggest downside is pricing — it can scale up quickly as your user base or contact volume grows. Some features that feel core (like advanced reporting or certain automation tools) are gated behind higher-tier plans.” Read the full review.

• “Once you exit the 95% discount of the startup program, the pricing becomes quite hefty. This has led us to downgrade some of the amazing tools and features in order to save costs, which is a bit disappointing given how valuable they were for our operations.” Read the full review.

Ease of use and setup

When it comes to customer reviews on G2, Help Scout scores higher than Intercom for ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of admin.

Help Scout is well-known for its ease of use. You can learn how to use it in a day and become a power user in a week, and it’s so intuitive that very little training is required when adding new team members to the system. 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!”

Integrations

When it comes to integrations, Intercom has a slightly higher score than Help Scout on G2, with an 8.7/10 rating versus Help Scout’s 8.5 out of 10. 

Intercom offers more integrations than Help Scout, but both tools offer integrations with the primary tools teams want to connect to their support systems, such as Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, Jira, and Linear. Additionally, both tools also offer an API that lets developers connect the platforms to any tool they want, even if a specific integration isn’t available (e.g., company-built apps).

Scalability

Both Help Scout and Intercom have the basic features that teams need while they’re small and the more advanced features they’ll need as they grow, so scaling your team on either platform is seamless. 

With that said, smaller teams that plan to sign up for Intercom's Essential plan should consider the steep price jump if you need to upgrade to Advanced in the future. The Advanced plan is more than twice the cost of Essential — an additional $56/user per month. Pricing tiers for Help Scout increase in a much more manageable way, with its Plus plan costing only $20/user per month more than Standard.

Customer support

Help Scout has a higher G2 rating for its customer support than Intercom, with a 9/10 compared to Intercom’s 8.6/10. It’s not uncommon for Help Scout’s customers to write 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, there are live training classes offered every week, and if you want to self-serve, you can access the platform’s comprehensive knowledge base.

Help Scout vs. Intercom: 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’re a small or mid-sized business (up to 500 employees) that’s looking for a support platform that’s easy to use and affordable, choose Help Scout. If you’re already a large company (500+ employees) that’s expecting even more growth and doesn’t have budget constraints, choose Intercom.

• If you plan to do most of your support over email, live chat, social, self-service, and SMS, choose Help Scout. If you need to deliver phone support, choose Intercom.

• If you want access to AI features that help your teams save time and deliver better support, choose Help Scout. If you want to automate as much as you possibly can, choose Intercom.

Both Help Scout and Intercom 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.