Six alternatives, priced
Per seat, per month, annual billing. Verified 2026-08-22.
| Tool | From | Your mailbox | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Help Scout (baseline) | $25 | Forwards your address into their inbox | You are happy and just checking the market. |
| Missive | $14 | IMAP, synced to their cloud | You want the same thing for less. |
| Moorline | $9 | IMAP, data stays on your Mac | You are one person on a Mac. |
| Freshdesk | $19 | Forwarded into theirs | You want six free months and full ticketing. |
| Front | $25 | IMAP, synced to their cloud | Collaborative drafting is central. |
| Zendesk | $19 | Forwarded into theirs | You are becoming a support department. |
| Intercom | $29 | Chat-first, email secondary | You need an in-app chat widget. |
The two questions that decide it
- How many seats will you really buy? Multiply the per-seat price by the headcount you will have in twelve months, not today. At two people, Help Scout at $25 and Missive at $14 are $600 and $336 a year respectively, and the feature gap is smaller than that difference suggests.
- Does your support address move? Forwarding into a vendor mailbox (Help Scout, Zendesk, Freshdesk) gives a team one clean shared record and gives you an export to do if you ever leave. Connecting over IMAP (Missive, Front, Moorline) leaves the mail where it is. Only Moorline also keeps the derived data on your own machine.
What none of them do
Every tool above tracks whether a conversation is open or closed. None of them, Help Scout included, distinguishes “I finished the work” from “I finished the work and the customer knows”.
For a support team that gap is covered by process: the person who fixes it is not the person who closes the ticket, so someone has to write back. For a solo founder both people are you, the thread was archived when you started debugging, and nothing in the system ever asks.
Questions people actually ask
Why do people leave Help Scout?
Two reasons dominate. The per-user price at $25 a month on the entry tier adds up for a small team, and AI Answers is billed separately per resolution on top. The other is that it wants your support address forwarded into their mailbox, which some people would rather not do.
What is the closest thing to Help Scout but cheaper?
Missive at $14 per user per month is the nearest like-for-like: a shared inbox that keeps replies looking like email, with your own mailbox connected over IMAP. Freshdesk is cheaper still but is a ticketing help desk rather than a shared inbox, which is a different working experience.
Is there a Help Scout alternative for one person?
Moorline, at $9 a month flat. It is not a shared inbox at all: no assignment, no roles, no team. It is a native Mac app that reads your own mailbox and tracks whether each customer has actually been told what happened.
Can I keep my email address if I switch?
Always. Your address belongs to your mail host, not to a support tool. What changes is whether mail is forwarded into a vendor mailbox (Help Scout, Zendesk, Freshdesk) or read from your own over IMAP (Missive, Front, Moorline).
Prices read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-08-22, including Help Scout’s.