Help Scout vs Zendesk

With the growth of any organization comes the responsibility of satisfying customers so as to build a better reputation in the market. These tasks if done manually consume a lot of time and human resources so to do this in an effective way, companies use helpdesk software. Help desk softwares are used to serve customer support activities. A wide variety of tasks like organizing messages, exchanging data, collecting feedback, etc. can be done using a single point of contact. Zendesk and Help Scout are quite popular so let’s compare them to find the best one.

Help Scout is a help desk solution system that helps companies in managing customer relationships. It was developed by Nick Francis, Jared McDaniel, and Denny Swindle in the Help Scout company in Massachusetts founded in 2011. It is an email-based customer service system that helps in resolving customers’ problems.

Advantages of Help Scout

• It comes with query categorization, routing, and tagging features.
• It has auto-responder functionality for situations when a query is not resolved within the given time frame.
• It provides multi-language support.
• It provides security by spam blocking and SSO features.

Disadvantages of Help Scout

• It does not provide social media integration features like Instagram integration.
• It lacks calendar management functionalities.

Zendesk is a help desk software that provides customer support in a convenient manner. It uses tickets for each problem and is also known as a ticketing system. It was first released in 2007 by Zendesk company located in San Francisco, California. It made customer management easy by providing various features like a self-service portal, query dashboard, and customer feedback. 

Advantages of Zendesk

• It has an easy and interactive UI.
• It provides a unified workspace that provides all the data in a simplistic manner.
• It allows the admin to create rules and regulations for different tasks like assigning time periods for each ticket on a certain level.
• It provides analytics about customer satisfaction based on received feedback, comments, likes, etc.

Disadvantages of Zendesk

• It lacks marketing automation features.
• It does not have to sort feature on tickets.

Below is a table of differentiation between Help Scout and Zendesk:

Category	Help Scout	Zendesk
Definition	It can be understood as a customer relationship management platform for solving the queries of customers.	It can be understood as a ticketing system for customer services.
Rating	It has a G2 rating of 4.3 on the scale of 5.	It has a G2 rating of 4.2 on a scale of 5.
Typical Customers	Customer of Help Scout are Small businesses and Mid size businesses.	Customers of Zendesk are Freelancers, Small Businesses, Mid-size businesses, Large enterprises, etc.
Community Forum	It does not have a community forum.	Zendesk has a community forum for discussing all the problems.
Installation	It is easy to install and configure with a  step guide.	Installation is complex and the installation guide is too long.
Subscription	Its subscription starts at $20 per month.	Its subscription starts at $19 per month.
Integrations	It can be easily integrated with SurveyMonkey, Asana, Jira etc.	It provides integration with Slack, Trello, Zoom, WordPress, etc.
Plans	It has 3 pricing plans:- Standard, Plus and Company.	It comes with 5 pricing plans:- Support Only, Suite Team, Suite Growth, Suite Pro, and Support Only Pro.

Conclusion/Summary

On comparing both help desk systems Zendesk and Help Scout, it is clear that Zendesk is a good choice as it is budget-friendly, has a community forum, and provides services to all types of customers. On the other hand Help Scout is easy to install and provides good services but has only 3 pricing plans and does not provide any community forum.