Help Scout Reviews 

We’ve been using HelpScout for the last 7 years and it has been exactly what we were looking for, an alternative option to overpriced enterprise level EMS options. As a tool, HelpScout is flexible, intuitive, and has all the features we need, plus many more we’ve yet to take advantage of. The team is responsive, knowledgeable, and always willing to lend a hand or answer a question. Cannot recommend them enough. HelpScout will not disappoint.

In previous versions they had a usefull WYSIWYG editor, with HTML supported. Changed this to some weird block editor, which does't work at all. We cannot modify our existing articles, so our whole knowledge base is messed up. Their answer is to manually edit every article, even though they messed up.

Good and simple overall product, with some nice handy features out of the box.

My biggest gripes:

Unless you know a bit about coding your knowledgebase articles are going to look a little bland.

I didn't realize this until already "locked in" but if you want to export anything, good luck.

Since I can't include URLs, look up helpscout export options and you'll find below:

You need to know how to connect to an API to export your documents and ticket history (and on top of that it's rate limited). Don't know how to do that? You're out of luck.

Want a customer export (simple CSV)? You have to reach out to support.

In this day and age, why can you not provide simple exports? Seems pretty basic at this point in time with technology. Seems more like trying to lock you in.

And their new document editing "feature" released recently caused me more headache than it solved: would randomly SILENTLY delete elements on the page, remove bullet points (something had to do with bolded font, can't remember), it was a bit of a nightmare when they released that "feature" my ability to document came to a nervous standstill because I wasn't sure what might get deleted for a few weeks until they resolved it.

We're a large business that has used Help Scout for many, many years - but for some reason, they've totally ripped apart what was a perfect and feature-rich WYSIWYG editor for support docs to something lacking most of the features, have made it near impossible to use - for no good reason it seems. It's SO bad that we're now looking for a new host.

Help Scout recently announced a new integration with messenger, which is great news for their users. However, I find it disappointing that this integration is only available for their Pro and Plus plans. In a market where most ticketing and support services offer real-time chat with customers across all plans, it feels unfair to limit such a useful feature to the most expensive tiers.

As a customer, I believe that access to real-time chat should be a basic requirement for any support service. It's frustrating to see that Help Scout is putting such a critical feature behind a paywall, and it makes me question their commitment to customer satisfaction.

While Help Scout may still be a reliable choice for some businesses, I hope they will reconsider their pricing model and make this integration available to all users. Until then, I will be exploring other options that offer better value for my money

A useless service that doesn't do what it claims

We have used this service for a year and unfortunately we are not satisfied. We have lost so many emails, so many of our customers have been annoyed just because of Help Scout's incompetence.

We've been using Helpscout for several years. It's fine for basic support and constructing Help pages. But it's not cheap if you need to support multiple clients and it relies quite a bit on you doing your own coding to present attractive looking documentation. However, the biggest issue by far is the inability to export data without going to great expense and effort, effectively locking you into their platform. For that reason alone, we cannot recommend it and now regret using it.

There is a lot that is great about Helpscout.

Their UI, the docs, the ticket system, the Beacon used to provide help to users with an on-page help widget. It's a great product.

Their customer service for when something technical actually goes wrong is horrendous.

If they have technical issue and you report it, you'll spend at least a week trying to get a resolution because each person that looks at your latest response in the ticket doesn't review the full content of the previous ticket responses, so they start from "zero" each time.

Their responses to your messages are blatant attempts to get a response out and move on with their day. Nobody actually knows how to solve the problems and no engineers that actually know what's going on seem to get involved when a tech problem is reported.

I used to love this platform. But they've beaten me down with their apathy and inability to take me seriously.

When nothing is going wrong it's a very reliable platform and 1 that until now I'd have recommended. I can't any longer.

Company has no decent way to export data, other than to write your own script and invoke their API's through the script for every conversation you ever had, and for every note you added to that conversation. And when you do, you have to worry about their API being rate limited. In order to use their API you have to be a coder. I am not sure if this is legal, considering the GDPR legislation. A bulk export through their user interface is what they should offer. Right now its a lock-in into using their services/system.

Good software but experience undermined by constant woke messages when you clear your emails. Just stick to providing great customer support software!

HS has improved so much our productivity when it comes to manage support on our services.

I'd highly recommend this tool!

I have tried a few support tools in over 10 years of supporting software and SaaS, and this is hands down the best.

We were previously with Intercom who increased our prices massively after we finished integrating everything. Really shady stuff...

Helpscout has been great, adding new features usually without extra charges, or for a small extra fee.

The core product is fantastic. Simple, clean, efficient.

The mobile app works great, live chat works perfectly, the knowledgebase is not just an afterthought and the reports are top-notch.

Well done guys and thank you for an awesome product!

The design behind the ticket system is really good, assigning to people, adding notes, creating automatic workflows, etc., so it could be something everyone would love to use. But it is not, and here is why:

- It becomes really slow very often. There isn't a week where I can just really focus on my work, as I have to wait sometimes 20-30 minutes for one email or attachment to load in.

- Their developers do not support, nor care about actual problems in their code.

When you contact their support, these people are not the developers of helpscout, maybe they have some basic knowledge about website development, but not that much. They can only tell you basic debugging ideas, what you have already gone through.
Once you finally get to a stage where they realize that there is an actual problem in their code, they are putting it into their to do list, where it might never will be solved. There were issues, where I was contacted years after reporting it, that "yay we solved it".

I sent them a recording about a 100kb attachment how slowly gets downloaded from their servers (about 30 minutes, if it gets downloaded at all), so if you are a web developer, you already know that zero codes are involved in this process, it is just pure server speed. And they just couldn't do anything about it, but this speed doesn't only affects attachments, but their entire system.

So instead of a smooth experience it is often a struggle to work with them.

Our vessel has a few different email addreses we need to keep in check. We use HelpScout so that several of our crew can keep an eye on multiple inboxes.

The notes and tags features are very useful to us, allowing for great organisation. We'll continue to use.

Reason for 4 stars is that the Android app needs an update - we use workflows in the online version however we cannot do this on the Android version.

Platform works fine, I used it for a year or so with the "Free forever" plan. It would be a 5 stars if it wasn't that the "Free forever" plan at some point became a "sorry we changed our mind it's now 30$/month" plan. I don't mind paying and I understand things can change to pursue a sustainable business model just don't advertise it with "Free forever", that's lying. I moved to a competitor for 5$/month and I get what I need, a simple support ticket inbox.

Great company to deal with. Don't bother with expensive products like Intercom, use this instead.

I'm sure the FAQ hosting is fine but that's a waste of money when page design is so easy and their design is so rudimentary, it becomes demonstrous when you consider it circumvents your bug reporting and puts a monkey between the user and anyone who can fix anything when it actually does go wrong and is not already in the knowledge base. See FAQs kinda develop from good communication between users and company. What you will find with this company is that its staff are tasked with making it your fault or no ones, I believe this is because they can't understand the problems to relate them. One way or the other they can't relate the issues in ways that your team understand and feature braking errors go unfixed, your product fails because its not working for anyone and people get sick of hearing "It's normal." If its normal for a product to not work by design then then It's a bad product. Do you have an Exit ICO? Ruining some other scam? Maybe this company is for you...

Super basic helpdesk software that works - Can onboard personnel very quickly. Zendesk seems to have more features at the same price points but it is generally more complex and has a higher learning curve. On the other hand, Zendesk just came out with a $5 per seat per month plan that seems to be at par with Helpscout.

I was lucky enough to be on a free plan, which they honoured even when they stopped offering free plans, however we've been so impressed with the software that we ended up paying for our users to get the extra features.
Really simple to use and set up, been using it for 2 years, never had a problem, never missed an email. Really happy customer here.