HelpScout versus Tawk.to

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

Tawk.To is different. It offers the full app for free. Yes, there is no bullsh*t, a free chat widget.

Tawk.to is the centipede among the chatwidget providers. They offer many features and add-ons. Their Agent software runs on mobile phones as well ask native desktop applications.

The level of supoort on Tawk.to’s website is excellent, especially considering the app is free. For most questions the Help Center will cover you and you can find extensive documentation and code snippets for developers who want to leverage Tawk.to’s JavaScript API and Webhooks.

Free comes often at the price of performance, although this is not necessarily noticeable when top-notch developers integrate the widget.

The few paid add-ons are Video + Voice Chat for $29 per month and to remove the “Powered by tawk.to” branding. The white label will set you back $19 per month.

Tawk.to also has Chat Agents for hire to man your chat for $1 per hour. You can try this service for 7 days for free.