Help Scout vs. Fin by Intercom

Fin by Intercom

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Help Scout	Score 7.9 out of 10	N/A	Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…	$30 per month starts with 100 contacts
Fin by Intercom	Score 8.5 out of 10	N/A	Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.	$0.99 one-time fee per 1 resolution

Pricing

Help Scout

Fin by Intercom

Editions & Modules

Standard: $30
per month starts with 100 contacts
Plus: $90
per month starts with 200 contacts
Company: Contact sales team

Fin with your current helpdesk: $0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Copilot add-on: $35
per month per user
The Early Stage program: $65
per month (6 support seats)
Proactive Support Plus add-on: $99
per month
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk: from $39 + $0.99 per Fin resolution
per month per seat

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Help Scout	Fin by Intercom
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works: Use Fin in at least 250 conversations within the first 90 days after trial. If you're not satisfied, you can request a refund of up to $1M. Refund requests must be submitted within 90 days of starting the subscription.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Help Scout	Fin by Intercom
Considered Both Products	Help Scout Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout Help Scout is better for emails while Intercom is better for chats from what we found Incentivized Helpful? SS Shane Siever Director of Product Marketing Chose Help Scout Zendesk Suite Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout I also have used Zendesk previously, which is much more complicated; however, it can offer much more possibilities for customizing. Incentivized Helpful? AE Amanda Elias Customer Experience Advocate Chose Help Scout Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout We primarily chose HelpScout because they were an affordable, moderately robust, HIPAA compliant solution. All the other options (e.g. Zendesk, Freshdesk, Kayako, etc.) were out of our price range or did not provide the necessary features that our team has come to rely on. Incentivized Helpful? Leigh Malamphy Manager, Support Chose Help Scout Help Scout is more reasonably priced compared to our other options. Incentivized Helpful? Taylor Hansen Support Team Manager Chose Help Scout Help Scout is a way better looking product. In the last two years they have stepped up their game. I hope to use their live chat soon. Zendesk is clunky and the user interface is terrible. Incentivized Helpful? Santiago Valdés Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience Chose Help Scout This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout Help Scout easily plugs into Gmail and allows us to create reports based on our tagging. We found its price point for us as a nonprofit was a good fit. Customer service was also supportive. It also allows us to have an external help desk for our common questions from clients. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout We liked Help Scout better because of the help center integration and ability to split out multiple inboxes. Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Schneider Chief Operating Officer Chose Help Scout They all had their positives and negatives. For us, it came down to signing a BAA (Zendesk wanted $28,000 to sign one). We enjoy working with vendors who can support healthcare initiates such as we are building. Incentivized Helpful? Jeffrey Cheng Web Development Lead Chose Help Scout I've tried almost every single other live chat support tool. Most of them are easy to plug and play into the HTML page layout, but in terms of usefulness and cost, a smaller startup will always choose Help Scout no matter what. It's easily the best option for a bootstrapped … Incentivized Helpful? Kaitlin Rawley Director of Growth Chose Help Scout We did test out several other support desk tools before finally deciding to go with Help Scout. The main tipping point was the fact that Help Scout almost appeared invisible to the end user (our customer). To them, it just feels as if they are reaching someone via email, not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout It has been an ongong debate about whether or not we should switch to Zendesk. They are all about prioritizing customers, delaying response time, and treating the customer like cattle. I'm sure we will switch someday because key heads in the company used to use it, but the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout My team used Zendesk for years and then we switched to a lighter solution. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Help Scout DevRev, Fin by Intercom and HelpCrunch Incentivized Helpful?	Fin by Intercom Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom We're using another AI agent too. Fin AI is a little behind, as it needs to start learning from either testing or real conversations, so it can better advise users with accurate information - whereas the other AI agent is learning very fast and needs little to no adjustment of … Incentivized Helpful? SO Scott Olinger Application Support Analyst Chose Fin by Intercom I did not choose which platform our support teams used. But I did not like NetSuite because it sent out a lot of email updates and required the client to reply to the correct email in order to have everything tracked. ServiceNow was pretty similar. The reports in ServiceNow … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Zendesk Suite Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom I used Zendesk briefly but found it difficult to navigate — I often couldn’t tell what was going on or how to simply reply to a ticket. In contrast, Intercom is much more intuitive and user-friendly. Its clean interface and support for multiple communication formats like … Incentivized Helpful? Lorrayne Soares Líder de Produtos Chose Fin by Intercom As explained previously, most of these platforms were focused on tickets, most reports only work with tickets, there is no way to postpone a service without turning it into a ticket, and since our response time target is a maximum of 2 minutes, these platforms were unable to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Sprinklr Social, Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Clarabridge (discontinued), Engagor (discontinued) and Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Honestly, we haven't really looked at this, but we do use it for another team because a third-party works with it. Otherwise, I am extremely happy with Intercom and have not looked towards another software. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom It was a long debate before we switched from Crisp to Intercom, but we never regretted that decision. Intercom looks and looks sleeker, works smoother, and has the knowledge base feature, which was our main need to switch. The transition took very little time, so no bumps on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Way better than all of them - especially the workflow tool which I don't think Help Scout or Crisp even had. Really easy to manage capacity too through snoozing conversations and customers receiving emails after a response. With HubSpot, there was no way for our users to return … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Dialpad Support, Talkdesk and SnapEngage Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom This is the first one we tried. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom My main concern at the moment is how the integration looks to the users and Intercom just looks modern and up-to-date. HubSpot is missing this. In the background it always comes down to how you organize your team and processes. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Odoo was, in my opinion, terrible - a jack of all trades and master of none, which is why all teams in the business moved away to bespoke software. Freshdesk - an easier and more organisable way of creating and managing tickets. Although Intercom now has tickets, we're still … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom At the moment, I only use Supademo to record screen tours. It is very intuitive, has a browser extension, and is perfect for recording the onboarding of new features. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Intercom as a tool is well suited to manage our key metrics with the help of its reports. We have evaluated a lot of tools but Intercom remains the best in terms of report. It helps us maintain OKR's for the support team and track whenever needed. FinAI also has the reporting … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Personally I have not used any other platforms like Intercom and do not wish to search as of right now. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom The intercom is more intuitive and provides easier management and personalization of our conversations. It's been a while since I used Zendesk, so this might have changed, but Intercom provides a bigger catalog of functionality targeted to product marketing, such as emails, … Incentivized Helpful? Barry Pepper VP of Customer Experience Chose Fin by Intercom Noone has been able to standup to the level of service and product that Intercom gives us. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom To compete with Salesforce, the main point is the pricing. Intercom has a very different budget when it comes to start ups and up and coming companies, which helps. To compete with other platforms, Intercom has a more developed interface and a super completa arrange of tools, … Incentivized Helpful? Ray Zwankhuizen Product Manager Chose Fin by Intercom No idea, see above. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom Several factors as pricing, customisation, ease of use, popularity, user-friendly and the continuous online support as well improvements helped us make this choice. Onboarding new colleagues to Intercom does not even take one day, it is so efficient and intuitive. If the … Incentivized Helpful? Agne Caunt Head of Customer Success Chose Fin by Intercom Intercom is much more flexible and modern than Zendesk, UI is better. Zendesk is better at multiple brand experience and localisation. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom All tools that we used in the past, have a lot of problems on the chat app, our the syncing data between integrations, Intercom has too, but is very less than others. Incentivized Helpful? Samuel Linge Senior Sales Associate Chose Fin by Intercom Intercom has more polish. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Fin by Intercom We used Aircall for many years and it was a great tool, however as we scaled down our phone support usage it became expensive and cumbersome. Intercom phones offered a cheaper solution that turned out to be more efficient for our team to use as well. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Help Scout

Fin by Intercom

Incident and problem management

Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 8.8 Ratings 9% above category average	Fin by Intercom - Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets	9.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications	10.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission	8.10 Ratings	00 Ratings
Ticket response	8.10 Ratings	00 Ratings

Self Help Community

Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 8.5 Ratings 8% above category average	Fin by Intercom - Ratings
External knowledge base	9.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base	8.00 Ratings	00 Ratings

Multi-Channel Help

Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
	Help Scout 8.0 Ratings 3% above category average	Fin by Intercom - Ratings
Email support	8.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration	8.00 Ratings	00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Help Scout	Fin by Intercom
Small Businesses	Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued) Score 9.0 out of 10	LocaliQ Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued) Score 9.0 out of 10	Piper the AI SDR by Qualified Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises	SysAid Score 9.1 out of 10	Conversica Score 9.9 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Help Scout	Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend	7.1 (0 ratings)	8.3 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	7.0 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Availability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	5.7 (0 ratings)
Online Training	- (0 ratings)	7.4 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	6.6 (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Help Scout	Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend	Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly. Incentivized SS Shane Siever Director of Product Marketing Read full review	While Fin is an awesome investment, the setup and tuning of responses to meet brand alignment and delivery have taken some time. If you prioritize not just resolution rate and accuracy, but style and delivery, it's a bigger lift. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the step and its impact on resource management are a worthy investment. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers). The email newsletter. They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way. Incentivized Hammad Bin Idrees Acting Project Manager Read full review	Great UI - everyone has their own inbox but can still see all incoming messages. Fin AI - we love the AI functionality, it saves tons of time of the team. Automated emails - we configured Intercom in a way that it uses a lot of information we have about our users (e.g. their subscription, date of upgrade, etc.) so that we can use it to automate communication. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	It is a bit slow sometimes, but not very often. I've noticed more network errors with their server in the past year. Small annoyance - they use a lot of lightbox popups and if you click outside the box all of your work is lost. Incentivized PR Padraic Ryan Community Manager Read full review	Some things are repetitive. Ex: If you provide guidance to ask a follow-up question, it'll ask that follow-up question each time. It'd be cool to have a "vibe" check for auto-sorting. Ex: We have responses to our outreach feed into Intercom. It'd be cool to have a way to auto-sort based on if they ask a detailed question or just a plain "interested" response. It'd be cool if Fin by Intercom flagged conversations, like it a customer seemed agitated, for the team to review. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ Incentivized Ariana Thompson Support Operations Read full review
Usability	Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It takes a bit of getting used to. It's easy to start off with simple pieces of answering queries, etc. The real part is when one tries to use workflows with triggers and automation. Then, it can be a whole different experience. I would love to see it being much simpler in terms of usability there. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Reliability and Availability	No answers on this topic	always there Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	works perfect Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them. Incentivized LW Lukas Washack Operations Manager Read full review
Online Training	No answers on this topic	Easy to know the learning path Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times. Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers. Incentivized Santiago Valdés Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience Read full review	In my experience, what Intercom has done with Fin by Intercom is far more innovative and forward thinking than other tools I've used. It's intuitive, easy, and they are always releasing new things to make Fin by Intercom even more powerful. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents. Incentivized Leigh Malamphy Manager, Support Read full review	I like how I don't feel like I need to constantly be monitoring support, especially on weekends It's great that the user will get some response right away, I just need to hope that the response they do get is good enough if I'm awk Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Help Scout Screenshots	Fin by Intercom Screenshots