Help Scout vs Maxdesk

Help Scout is customer support software that brings email, SMS, social, chat, and voice into a shared Inbox. It also provides ticket automation, SLA management, a customer portal, and Docs sites for searchable, branded help centers or knowledge bases. Teams can manage visibility and access with permissions at company, team, or user level, and connect the service to more than 100 tools or apps. Help Scout offers API access and a mobile app. Its Free plan costs nothing and includes five users, one Inbox, and one Docs site, with 100 contacts per month, 10 saved replies, and 10 tags. Paid plans start at $25 per user per month; annual pricing is shown as 16% lower than monthly pricing. Standard and Plus plans offer 15-day trials without a credit card. New accounts receive three months of unlimited AI Answers resolutions. Help Scout states that it is HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliant. Support options include email, onboarding, customer success management, and priority support on paid plans.

Maxdesk is a hosted, web-based help desk and ticketing system for customer support and internal IT. Each workspace receives a support address that turns incoming email into threaded tickets. The ticket view brings conversations, priorities, statuses, assignments, internal notes and attachments together. SLA targets can vary by priority and business hours, with countdowns and breach alerts. No-code rules use triggers, conditions and actions to route, tag, escalate or auto-reply. Its dashboard reports ticket counts, SLA breaches, CSAT, response time, trends and live activity. Custom roles, groups, a permission matrix and ticket-scope controls manage access. The Free plan includes unlimited agents and tickets within fair use, basic SLA policies, templates, a knowledge base and limited active automations. Pro costs $20 a month; Elite costs $99 a month and adds AI capabilities.