Help Scout is a friendly shared inbox with a free plan and a help centre, Docs, that your team writes. Ellie Desk writes the help centre from your product and keeps it current when you ship. Before replying, Ellie checks the customer's account and the errors they hit, and hands your team the evidence when a person is needed. No per-user fees and no charge per AI answer.
Help Scout's Docs are written by your team. Ellie writes yours, checks each customer's account and errors, and hands over the evidence.
No card needed. Your trial includes Support, three products and your whole team.
you want support that checks the customer's account and errors before replying and hands your team the evidence, nobody on your team has time to write and update help articles, you run more than one product and pay extra for each inbox and Docs site, or you'd rather not pay for every AI resolution.
you want a free plan with a working human inbox (Ellie Desk's Free plan has no support inbox after the trial), your team likes writing its own articles, or you have one product, a small AI bill and a team that's happy where it is.
Help Scout details from helpscout.com, checked 3 November 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.
When a customer writes in, Ellie looks at what a good support person would: their plan and billing in Stripe, what they did just before in PostHog, and, when they report a problem, the errors they hit in Sentry and your logs. She answers knowing all of that. When a person needs to step in, they get an investigated brief: who it is, what's wrong, the evidence, what Ellie told them and a reply ready to send. Customers never see your stack traces.
With Help Scout, Docs is a good editor, but the writing and the upkeep are yours. Ellie writes your help centre from your website, your current articles and, once connected, your code, with screenshots captured from your app. When you ship, she checks the affected articles and drafts the changes for you to approve.
Help Scout's AI costs $0.75 per resolution. Ellie Desk includes a monthly allowance of conversations with Support and never charges automatically for going over. A conversation counts once, however long it runs.
Help Scout's free plan gives up to five people a working inbox and a Docs site at no cost. Ellie Desk's Free plan is a help centre only; support is part of the 14-day trial and the paid plans. If you need a free human inbox, Help Scout is the better choice today.
Like for like: three products, two people answering, about 300 AI-answered conversations a month. List prices as of November 2026, excluding tax.
Starter with two extra products ($29 each) plus the Support add-on, billed yearly ($216 billed monthly): three products, email and website chat, and enough seats and Ellie conversations for this example. No seat fee and no charge per answer.
2 users at $25 ($50), 2 extra inboxes at $10 ($20), 2 extra Docs sites at $20 ($40) and 300 AI resolutions at $0.75 ($225), as of November 2026.
With one product and few AI answers, Help Scout's free plan or a single paid user costs less than Ellie Desk.
Give Ellie your website and your Docs site's address: she imports every article as a draft and writes the gaps from your product. Then forward your support email to Ellie. Customers keep writing to the same address, and once you add two DNS records, replies come from it too.
Ellie Desk's Free plan is a help centre on an Ellie address, without a support inbox. Every new workspace gets 14 days of Growth with Support included, no card needed; after that, support is on the paid plans.
Yes, from your Docs site's public web address. Each article comes across as a draft next to the ones Ellie writes, so you can keep, improve or replace it. Past conversations stay in Help Scout.
A conversation counts once in a month if Ellie replied to your customer at least once, however long it runs. Spam, drafts and notes for your team, and conversations handed to a person before Ellie replied don't count. At your plan's limit Ellie keeps drafting for your team and stops replying to customers until next month. You're never charged automatically; top up or move up a plan if you want.
Start free for 14 days. Support, three products and your whole team included. No card.
Start free for 14 days