HelpScout versus AcornChat

Founded in 2011, Help Scout has been a promotor of fully remote companies long before it reached mainstream popularity in mid-2020. With over 12.000 customers, they are a prominent player in the support-desk space. Help Scout is also a certified B-Corp.

Help Scout is a communication platform that helps teams across an organization have better conversations with their customers. Quick to set up and easy to use, companies use Help Scout to create email inboxes like support@ and info@, put live chat on their websites, build help centers, and more. All of those customer interactions flow into a single view that looks just like an inbox but offers powerful collaboration and automation tools under the hood.

Help Scouts offers an extensive collection of free templates, guides, courses, and resources in the Support Toolkit on their website. They also have a range of open source tools and APIs created by the community in the Help Scout GitHub repository

AcornChat is a dedicated Live Chat integration for Slack. It is intended for companies with fewer than 15 employees. AcornChat does not have its own dashboard, all conversations are managed in your Slack workspace. If you are already a Slack power user this might be a perfect fit for you.

The app is straightforward and has one other functionality than routing all messages through Slack; you can enable the email capture function when you are not online to answer any incoming queries. Set up the chat widget and create a dedicated channel or select an existing one in Slack. A new thread is created for each visitor that contacts you, providing a clear overview.

Read more about the pros and cons of Acorn Chat in our analysis of the best live chats with Slack integration of 2023.