HelpScout versus Olark

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

Founded in 2008, Olark has seen the rise of chat software for over a decade. After getting funding from the famous YCombinator incubator Olark launched their first live chat platform.

Olark is committed to developing accessible software and is actively testing improvements of assistive technologies. It’s awesome to see a provider care about this often overlooked aspect of customer service.

Besides live chat, Olark also markets as customer metrics company. Since putting a widget on your platform gives you a lot of valuable data.

To ensure that every user always gets the right answer, the chatbot can transfer to a human employee at any time. This Human Handover is possible via Live Chat or E-Mail.

Olark offers a free plan that offers little features and is limited to a single seat and 20 chats per month, which will not be sufficient for most use cases.

Their paid plans start at $29 per month per seat. Free trials are available. Unfortunately, credit card information is required for the trial and you will be billed automatically if you don’t cancel the trial in time.

As a customer-focused company, Olark may want to consider offering a no-credit-card-required trial so potential customers are more likely to fully experience all their features.

Additional subscriptions are available for “Powerups” like co-browsing, live chat translation, and visitor insights.