Zendesk vs. Help Scout vs. Helply: a B2B support buyer's comparison (2026)

Key takeaways

• Zendesk Suite Professional lists at $115 per agent per month. Copilot adds $50, so a working seat costs $165.
• Help Scout lists at $25, $45, or $75 per user per month. Its AI Answers chatbot bills separately at $0.75 per resolution.
• Help Scout's documentation says Slack is not a support channel. Zendesk's Slack Connect path is 1:1 only, and thread replies do not sync.
• Help Scout dropped per-seat pricing in April 2025, then brought it back. The model has changed twice since April 2025.
• Helply charges $1 per ticket with unlimited seats, every AI capability included. The bill tracks support volume instead of headcount.

Zendesk is a full customer service platform sold per agent. Suite Professional lists at $115 per agent per month, and Copilot adds $50, so a working seat is $165. Zendesk carries native voice, 1,800+ marketplace apps, and the deepest reporting of the three.

Help Scout is a shared inbox and knowledge base sold per user. Help Scout charges $25, $45, or $75 per user per month, plus $0.75 per AI resolution. Help Scout sets up fastest of the three and costs least at small headcount.

Helply is an AI-native B2B support platform sold per ticket. Helply charges $1 per ticket with unlimited seats and every AI capability included. Helply runs Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, and Discord natively, which neither incumbent does.

Zendesk: The Widest Platform and the Highest Seat Cost

Zendesk carries the broadest feature set of the three. It also carries the highest total cost of ownership for a team under fifty agents. Native voice, skills-based routing, multi-brand help centres, and 1,800+ apps all sit inside it.

For teams running high volume across phone, social, and email at once, that infrastructure is battle-tested. The trade-off is that the breadth is priced in layers, and the layers stack.

How much does Zendesk cost?

These are the published rates on Zendesk's pricing page, billed annually, as of 6 August 2026.

• Support Team, $19 per agent/month. Email and ticketing, routing, prebuilt dashboards, automations and triggers.
• Suite Team, $55 per agent/month. Adds AI agents, omnichannel routing, messaging and live chat, and telephony.
• Suite Professional, $115 per agent/month. Adds Admin Copilot, App Builder, AI writing tools, skills-based routing, and IVR.
• Suite Enterprise + Copilot. No public price. Sales quote only.

Three add-ons carry their own per-seat charges, also billed annually. Copilot is $50 per agent/month, the Workforce Engagement Bundle is $50, and Contact Center is $83.

That produces the number that matters. Suite Professional plus Copilot is $165 per agent per month. Zendesk publishes annual rates only, so a month-to-month buyer has to ask sales.

There is no Suite Growth plan on Zendesk's pricing page today. The lineup is Support Team, Suite Team, Suite Professional, and Suite Enterprise.

Pros

• Native voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and social in one platform, with no integration layer to maintain.
• More than 1,800 marketplace apps, so most connectors already exist.
• Multi-brand help centres and sandbox environments that hold up past fifty agents.

Cons

• Per-seat billing collides with how B2B support runs. When a backend engineer needs one thread, that is another $165 a month.
• Three more capabilities bill on consumption above plan allowances: App Builder, Action Builder, and Voice. Zendesk's pricing FAQ names them, but does not publish the allowances.
• Customers report renewal friction. One r/Zendesk renewals thread notes the vendor requires thirty days' notice of any change.

Best for: teams over fifty agents running voice and social at volume, with an admin who owns the platform.

Help Scout: Clean, Quick to Start, and Priced per Person

Help Scout does fewer things than Zendesk, and the things it does are clean. Conversations read like email rather than tickets, and most teams are live the same afternoon. The interface stays out of the way.

Teams that choose Help Scout like the software. The friction shows up in the billing model, not the product.

How much does Help Scout cost?

From Help Scout's pricing page, billed annually at a 16% discount, as of 6 August 2026. Paid monthly, the same tiers cost $30, $54, and $90.

• Free, $0. Five users, one inbox, one Docs site, 100 contacts per month, ten saved replies.
• Standard, $25 per user/month. Up to 25 users, two inboxes, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, basic workflows.
• Plus, $45 per user/month. Up to 50 users, advanced workflows, unlimited AI Drafts, secure customer portal, round robin routing.
• Pro, $75 per user/month. Unlimited users with a ten-user minimum, SSO and SAML, HIPAA compliance, dedicated onboarding.

The AI Answers chatbot sits outside all of that, at $0.75 per resolution on every tier. Help Scout counts a resolution only when the customer does not escalate or ask a follow-up.

Spending caps are supported, and new accounts get three months of unlimited resolutions. Smaller line items add up too. Extra inboxes cost $10 a month, and extra Docs sites cost $20.

SSO or SAML is a paid add-on below the Pro tier. Reporting history is capped at two years on Standard.

Contacts are unlimited on every paid plan. The 100-contact cap belongs to the Free plan alone.

Why Help Scout's pricing model changed twice in fifteen months

In April 2025, Help Scout dropped per-seat pricing after fourteen years. It moved to contact-based billing instead. CEO Nick Francis explained the reasoning in an interview.

Per-resolution AI pricing felt too subjective, he said, and contacts looked like a cleaner unit. Existing customers reacted hard, and the r/SaaS thread on the switch ran past thirty comments.

Developer Michael Tsai modelled the impact in "Whither Help Scout?". He concluded that larger customers faced much steeper increases.

Today the pricing page is back on per-user billing, with contacts unlimited on paid plans. Legacy accounts on the contact model still exist. Help Scout keeps a support article for managing them, last updated June 2026.

Seats, then contacts, then seats again. A support platform is a three to five year commitment. The billing model is the part being committed to.

Pros

• Setup takes hours, not weeks, which matters on a team with no full-time tooling owner.
• AI Assist and AI Drafts are included rather than sold as a per-seat add-on.
• Contacts are unlimited on paid plans, so support volume does not trigger a surprise invoice.
• The free tier runs five users indefinitely, rather than expiring after fourteen days.

Cons

• Per-seat billing on a product designed to be invited into. Every CSM, AE, and engineer who joins costs another $45.
• Voice and SMS run through third-party integrations, so the transcript lives somewhere else.
• Reporting answers how the queue is doing, not which accounts are generating it.
• No Slack, Teams, or Discord as support channels, covered next.

Best for: small teams handling mostly email and chat, with headcount that is not about to double.

Helply: Pay for the Work, Not the People

Helply is a B2B support platform built for software companies whose customers are technical and known by name. It charges for tickets rather than seats. That one change removes the calculation both incumbents force on you.

On a per-seat plan, every invitation costs money. The backend engineer who wrote the failing endpoint stays out of the inbox because a licence is $165 a month. The account manager who knows the customer reads a forwarded screenshot instead of the thread.

Helply takes the meter off the door. Seats are free and unlimited, so the engineer, the CSM, and the AE all work the ticket. You pay for tickets, and your customers decide how many of those there are.

How much does Helply cost?

Helply costs $1 per ticket. Every seat is free and unlimited, and every AI capability is included in that dollar. The minimum is 250 tickets a month against a $3,000 minimum annual contract, with volume discounts for larger teams.

A ticket means any customer conversation processed through Helply. AI actions, workflows, and integrations sit inside the ticket price rather than on top of it. There is no per-agent charge at any headcount and no separate AI line.

A team handling 1,500 tickets a month pays $1,500, whether four people or forty work the inbox. That is the whole price list, verified on 6 August 2026.

Each ticket arrives with an AI teammate already working. It drafts the reply with sources and full account context. It also resolves the straightforward requests on its own.

The AI reads every conversation for churn risk, upsell intent, competitor mentions, and feature requests. Each signal routes to whoever owns it. Churn alerts reach the CSM, and competitor mentions reach the AE the same day.

Because seats are free, the whole company can sit in the inbox. The backend engineer who wrote the failing endpoint can answer the thread directly.

Pros

• No seat fees at any headcount, so inviting engineering or customer success costs nothing.
• Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, and Discord run as native ticket queues with assignment, status, and SLAs.
• Account context arrives from Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Gong, Linear, and Mixpanel.
• Revenue signals are produced per ticket, and tied to dollar figures in the profit centre dashboard.

Cons

• No native voice channel, so phone-heavy teams need a separate tool.
• The 250-ticket floor and $3,000 annual minimum rule out very low volume teams.
• Annual contracts only, with no month-to-month option.
• Scoped to technical B2B companies that sell software. Services businesses, agencies, and marketplaces are outside the fit.

Best for: B2B software companies whose customers reach support through Slack and Teams as well as email.

Can Zendesk or Help Scout Handle Customer Support in Slack?

Partly, and the difference between them matters. Help Scout has no Slack support channel at all. Zendesk has one narrow path, with a limit that rules out most B2B use.

Help Scout's Slack integration documentation states that Slack is not a Help Scout support channel. Conversations cannot be created or managed from Slack through it. The integration only pushes notifications into a channel.

Zendesk offers two separate things, and they are easy to confuse. The agent-side Slack for Zendesk Support integration is internal. Its documentation rules out installing it on a shared workspace you joined as an external user.

The customer-facing one is the Slack Direct Messages channel. An end user direct-messages a handle, and Zendesk turns that into a messaging ticket. Zendesk's documentation lists "Partnership support via Slack Connect" as a supported use case.

So Zendesk does reach Slack Connect. The limits are the problem, and Zendesk documents them itself.

The channel is 1:1 only, and one-to-many is not supported. Thread replies do not come through to Zendesk at all. In a shared customer channel, threads are where the work happens.

A shared Slack channel with a customer is a queue with many people in it, and almost all of it is threaded. Helply treats that channel as a native ticket queue, with assignment, status, and SLA timers.

The demand is not hypothetical. In r/CustomerSuccess, one poster who spent three months fixing Slack Connect chaos named the cause:

Another thread on managing support across ten or more Slack Connect channels ran past fifty comments.

An entire product category now exists to patch this gap, including ClearFeed, Unthread, Thena, and Pluno. Teams end up buying a fourth tool to make the second one work.

Native means something different. In Helply a Slack Connect channel behaves like any other queue, with assignment, status, and SLA timers. Microsoft Teams and Discord work the same way.

AI: What Each Platform Does, and What Each One Bills For

Zendesk includes AI agents in every plan, but bills them per Automated Resolution. The charge applies only when the AI resolves a request without escalating to a human. Zendesk does not publish a rate anywhere on its pricing page.

Its help centre directs customers to their own Admin Center subscription page. Third-party analyses and Zendesk customers report $1.50 per resolution committed, $2.00 pay-as-you-go. Copilot, the agent-side assistant, is the separate $50 per agent add-on.

Help Scout includes AI Assist for rewriting and translating on every paid tier. AI Drafts and AI Summarize start on Plus. AI Answers costs $0.75 per resolution on every tier, with spending caps available.

Helply includes all of it in the $1. Drafts, autonomous resolutions, summarisation, the ask-anything assistant, and the revenue signals. There is no AI line to forecast, because there is no second line.

Take a team resolving 300 conversations a month with AI. That is $450 on Zendesk, $225 on Help Scout, and nothing extra with Helply's AI assistant.

Account Context: What Your Agent Sees Before Replying

In B2B, the answer to most tickets lives outside the ticket. It sits in the CRM, the billing record, the usage data, or last month's sales call.

Zendesk surfaces account data through marketplace apps configured per integration. Help Scout shows a customer sidebar, and adds Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot on Plus. Both approaches work, and both are integrations somebody has to maintain.

Helply loads the context by default. ARR, renewal date, product usage, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Gong, Linear, and Mixpanel arrive with the ticket. The same data layer feeds the AI.

That is why the drafted reply already knows the account is sixty days from renewal. A frustrated message near renewal reads differently than the same message from a new trial. Churn detection routes it to the CSM before anyone flags it.

What Does Zendesk Actually Cost for a 12-Person Support Team?

Sticker prices are per seat. Bills are not. Take a B2B software company handling 1,500 tickets a month with twelve people in the inbox.

Six work in support full time. The rest are engineers, CSMs, and AEs who read and reply. Assume a 20% AI resolution rate, which is 300 resolutions a month.

At twelve seats, Help Scout is the cheapest of the three by a wide margin. The slope is what changes that.

Helply holds flat as headcount grows, because the price attaches to tickets. Help Scout climbs with every person you add.

At thirty people in the inbox, Help Scout Plus costs $1,350 in seats plus $225 in AI. That is past the same $1,500 flat rate.

Pick the line that matches the team you will have in eighteen months. Teams that put engineering and customer success in the inbox cross that threshold first.

The ROI calculator runs the same model against real numbers. Request access if the seat column is the one that keeps growing.

Knowledge Base and Self-Service

Zendesk's help centre is the most configurable of the three, with multi-brand support, community forums, and full theme control.

Help Scout Docs is faster to stand up, with two sites on Standard, three on Plus, and five on Pro. Additional sites cost $20 a month each.

Helply writes the knowledge base from the ticket queue. Recurring patterns become drafted articles. Questions the knowledge base could not answer get flagged as gaps.

Reporting: Tickets Closed, or Revenue Protected

Zendesk reports on operations in depth: volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT, and agent performance. Help Scout reports on conversations and happiness, with history capped at two years on Standard.

Both answer the same question well. How is the queue doing?

The B2B question is different. Which accounts generate the most volume, and which show risk language close to renewal? What did support contribute to retention this quarter?

That reporting ties support activity to account outcomes, which is the version a board asks about.

Migration: What Switching Costs

All three platforms support data export and import, so the conversation history moves. The cost sits elsewhere.

Zendesk to Help Scout is documented, with a caveat that terminology does not map cleanly. Tickets become conversations, macros become saved replies, and some structures need rebuilding by hand.

The expensive part is the rebuild. Workflows and routing rules, agent retraining, and re-pointing help centre URLs so existing links survive. Budget for that, not the data transfer.

Helply teams are typically live within two weeks. Most of that time goes to connecting channels and the context layer. The migration playbook covers the sequence.

Which One Should You Choose?

Choose Zendesk if support runs across voice and social at volume, and someone owns platform administration. Skip it if a per-seat line item started this search.

Choose Help Scout if support is mostly email and chat, and the team is small and stable. Skip it if inbox headcount is growing, or if customers reach out through Slack.

Choose Helply if you sell software to businesses and customers arrive through Slack Connect and Teams. It fits teams that want everyone in the inbox without paying per head.

The Verdict

In Zendesk vs. Help Scout, Help Scout wins on price for a small, stable team. Zendesk wins on breadth for a large one. Pick either and the model underneath stays the same.

You pay per person. Add someone who needs to help a customer, and you pay again. Support headcount is the one line on the budget that only moves up.

A per-seat contract taxes every one of those moves. Next year's renewal is the same conversation, with a bigger number on it.

Helply charges $1 per ticket. Every seat is free, every AI capability is included, and Slack Connect runs as a native queue. Most teams are live within two weeks, so switching costs a fortnight rather than a quarter.

Bring your last ninety days of ticket volume. One multiplication shows what Helply would have cost. The same number shows what the seats are costing now.