HelpScout versus Rocket.Chat

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

Rocket.Chat is a SaaS and genuine Free Open Source Software platform. They are developing an impressive range of communication and collaboration solutions for a wide variety of organizations, catering to industries like financial services, healthcare, and governments.

Rocket.chat, being Open Source, lets you review the code yourself or contribute to the project in their GitHub Repository. Unlike most providers, Rocket.Chat holds an MIT license, granting you full ownership and control over your code, data, privacy, and security. Detailed documentation for developers is available on the Rocket.Chat website, allowing you to build upon their framework and customize integrations.

One of their core products is Team Collaboration which you can set up as a privately hosted alternative to Slack. Of course, the use case for their software highlighted here is Customer Service and Engagement.

With Rocket.Chat you can manage live chat, email, SMS, and social media channels in a single security oriented hub. The options and features at hand are mostly limited by your imagination.

Setting up, self-hosting, and maintaining your own server is free. However, you will need technical prowess or hire developers to leverage most of the possibilities of their stack. Some Enterprise Edition features are only available with a subscription, which you can try out with a 30 day free trial.

A 30 day free trial is also available for their robust and scalable cloud hosted SaaS Enterprise solutions. If your organization requires more strict control, the entire infrastructure can be hosted on premise.