COMPARE · HELP SCOUT
TriageDesk vs Help Scout: no autonomous path, no per-resolution bill
Every tool in this category can put a message in front of somebody. The question worth asking is what happens before a human sees it: does anything answer on its own, and what does that cost if it does?
What Help Scout is
Help Scout is a shared-inbox and help-desk product with an AI Answers add-on that responds to customers directly and bills per resolution.
$25 per user/mo for Standard, $45 per user/mo for Plus, $75 per user/mo for Pro, with AI Answers as an add-on at $0.75/resolution.
What TriageDesk is
TriageDesk reads every message that arrived in your shared inbox since the last time it ran, works out what each one is, and writes one drafted reply per thread. Nothing sends until a person taps approve.
- 3 categories, including complaints, legal threats and cancellations, are never drafted at all. They are handed to a human undrafted, as a branch in the routing code rather than a confidence threshold.
- The pass resumes from a watermark and asks the provider once for a bounded window of unread mail, up to 60 messages, rather than polling.
- The dispatcher moves at most 20 due replies per tick, and every approved reply still waits 120 seconds behind a kill window before it sends.
- $9/month per inbox, priced per mailbox rather than per person reading it, with no per-resolution or per-outcome charge on top.
What its own page publishes
| The question | TriageDesk | Help Scout |
|---|---|---|
| The price on its own pricing page | $9/month per inbox. | $25/user/mo Standard, $45/user/mo Plus, $75/user/mo Pro. Free tier: 5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site. |
| What the price is per | Per inbox, not per seat. | Per user, plus per-resolution for the AI add-on. |
| How you get the number | It is on the page. | It is on the page. |
| What the page says about autonomous replies | Nothing sends without a human tap. There is no autonomous path at all. | AI Answers responds to the customer directly, billed per resolution. |
| What a resolution or outcome costs beyond the base price | Nothing. There is no per-resolution or per-outcome charge. | $0.75 per resolution, on top of the seat price. |
Choose Help Scout when
- You want a help desk with a free tier to start on.
- You want an AI feature that answers the customer directly, not one that only drafts for a human.
- You are comfortable with a per-resolution charge stacked on top of the seat price.
Choose TriageDesk when
- You never want the AI answering a customer directly. Every draft in TriageDesk waits for a human tap before anything sends.
- You want one flat price per inbox rather than a seat price plus a metered add-on.
- You want the never-drafted categories fixed in code, not a setting somebody could change.
What moving involves
Help Scout's AI Answers bills per resolution, so leaving it removes a metered cost as well as a seat cost. TriageDesk replaces the metering with a flat $9/month per inbox and adds no per-resolution charge of its own. What does not come across is Help Scout's Docs product and its free tier, since TriageDesk is a triage pass rather than a full help desk.
Questions
Does TriageDesk answer customers the way Help Scout's AI Answers does?
No. Help Scout's AI answers the customer directly and bills per resolution. TriageDesk never answers anybody. It drafts, and a person on your team approves every reply before it leaves the mailbox.
How much does Help Scout cost?
$25 per user/mo for Standard, with AI Answers as an add-on at $0.75/resolution. TriageDesk is $9/month per inbox, flat, with no per-resolution charge.
Every tool on the shortlist, in one grid
If the job is genuinely collaborative, several people reading and assigning the inbox together, Front is the right buy. If you are ready to move support out of the mailbox into a dedicated ticketing system, Zendesk is the right buy. If you want an AI agent that resolves conversations autonomously, Help Scout's AI Answers or Intercom's Fin is the right buy, and TriageDesk has no autonomous path to offer instead. TriageDesk is the right answer for one shape of problem: a mailbox that should stay a mailbox, triaged overnight, with every reply waiting on a human tap.