Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform built around a shared inbox that keeps conversations looking like email rather than tickets. Around it sit live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, Docs knowledge base sites, the Beacon help widget, and reporting. Help Scout says more than 12,000 businesses use it, and its customer page names Buffer, Gusto, King Arthur, The New Yorker and AngelList. Its AI support agent is called Compass on Help Scout's product pages and AI Answers on the pricing page. It answers customers on a website or inside an app, learns from connected help centers, websites and Google Docs, follows topics a team excludes, and hands conversations to the team with full context when it should. Help Scout says it resolves 73% of requests on average and checks each response before it goes out. Teams can test it privately before launch and audit every AI conversation. Answering email is listed as coming soon. Inside the inbox, AI Assist edits and translates text on every paid plan, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize come with Plus and Pro. A Copilot assistant is marked coming soon. Help Scout lists more than 100 integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Linear, Slack, Shopify, Stripe and Zapier, and Aircall adds phone and SMS. Its API allows 200 to 800 calls a minute depending on plan, with webhooks and custom sidebar apps. Help Scout also runs an official MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI tools read conversations, customer details, mailbox data and Docs content. Access is read-only, each user connects with their own credentials, and report tools need Plus or Pro. Prices are in US dollars, per user per month. Standard costs $25 billed annually or $30 monthly for up to 25 users, Plus costs $45 or $54 for up to 50 users, and Pro costs $75 or $90 with unlimited users (minimum 10), unlimited workflows and SLA policies, SSO and HIPAA compliance. Pro is sold through a demo. AI Answers costs $0.75 per resolution on any plan, charged only when the customer does not ask for more help, with a monthly spending cap and three months free on new accounts. The Free plan covers 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site. Standard and Plus have a 15-day trial with no credit card, and annual billing saves 16%. Help Scout suits small and mid-sized teams that want email-style support with an AI agent for routine questions. Ecommerce teams running several brands should look at Re:amaze. Larger service teams that want support built on a CRM-style customer timeline should look at Kustomer. Current state Q4 2026: Help Scout is hosted on AWS and holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report for security and availability. It maintains HIPAA compliance, which the pricing page lists on Pro, and has self-certified to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. Its AI features run on OpenAI foundation models with light LoRA fine-tuning for tone and formatting. Help Scout says it never trains AI with customer data and does not send account data to OpenAI to train the foundation model.