HelpScout versus Hubspot

Help Scout is an all-in-one support service with live-chat being one of it’s many features.

Founded in 2011, Help Scout has been a promotor of the fully remote companies long before it reached mainstream popularity mid 2020. Help Scout is also a certified B-Corp.

With over 12.000 customers, they are certainly one of the bigger players in the support-desk space.

Notable customers of Help Scout include GrowSurf, Springboard and Zapier

Hubspot has a wide range of tools and products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They offer 5 Hubs for each respective suite.

The idea for Hubspot was conceived in 2004 by two graduate students at MIT who saw the need for a more helpful, less interruptive, customer service platform. Nowadays, Hubspot can be seen as one of Salesforce’s main competitors.

Hubspot’s products and plans are sorted into Hubs for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations. You can combine the Hubs to create your own bundle or choose the complete Hubspot suite. Their Live Chat is included in the free tools of the Service Hub. This suite also includes the free features of their CRM Hub.

In 2017 Hubspot acquired a company named Motion.ai, a company purely focused on creating the best chatbots. Motion.ai is now known as Hubspot’s Chatbot Builder, in their CRM hub.

The Service Hub has integration options for more than 50 apps, most of them paid.

Free plans, with limited functionality for most tools, are available for all Hubs for an unlimited number of agents. The paid plans for the Service Hub start at $18 per month for 2 agents to use the included paid tools and features.

Hubspot has over 140,000 customers in 120+ countries.