Help Scout vs Shared Inbox by Canary

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.

Shared Inbox by Canary is a collaborative team inbox for organizing and responding to email together. Teams can assign messages and track conversation status, while AI can route incoming messages to the appropriate teammate based on their subject. The AI can also answer repeated questions using uploaded help documents and send follow-ups automatically. Other features include shared templates, internal chat and mentions, ticket status and assignment, issue tagging, thread merging, search, analytics and CSAT. Email connections include Gmail, Microsoft 365 and IMAP. The service is available on iOS, macOS, web and Windows. Starter costs $10 a month billed monthly and includes one shared inbox, a built-in helpdesk, assignment and status tools, and an AI chatbot with up to 100 training materials and responses. Business is $20 a month billed monthly; Scale is $30 a month billed monthly. The site lists a 14-day trial and no free plan. Canary says data is stored on its servers in Germany and encrypted in transit and at rest; it says user data is not used to train generalized AI models.