HelpScout versus Trengo

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

Trengo, a Venture Capital backed scale-up from the Netherlands, has been growing at an impressive rate since their conception in 2015. They have developed an impressive customer service and engagement platform that unites all your channels and conversations on a single platform.

Trengo has a wide variety of customers, focusing on companies such as eCommerce shops, retailers, service companies, and educational organizations. Their setup enables you to efficiently scale your customer service and maintain a high-quality customer experience.

Trengo has found a clever way to include an omnichannel platform, with their automated flow- and chatbots, to man customer support channels for their customers. Their shared inbox makes it easy to assign incoming messages to colleagues or teams. They even thought of an automated fallback system so no incoming messages are left behind. Messages will always be routed to a designated agent if they are not assigned within a specified period. 

Trengo offers 3 plans, ranging from $20 to to $45 per seat per month. All plans has a minimum of 5 seats.

The lowest price is $20 per seat per month for the Grow plan, effectively starting their plans at $100 per month with 5 seats. This plan includes live chat and a team inbox for 5 communication channels (ex. WhatsApp).

The Scale plan starts at $33 per seat per month and can be easily scaled up to 100 users. This plan includes nearly all features, 50 channels, team chat, chatbots, customer satisfaction surveys, and statistics.

Add-ons are available for additional functionalities. For some add-ons you pay a fixed price per month like screen sharing and Observer. For other adds-ons the costs are based on the number of conversations like the flowbot, WhatsApp Business, and phone and SMS (prices depending on the country).