ConnectWise PSA vs. Help Scout

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
ConnectWise PSA
Score 7.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
Help Scout
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…
$20
per user/per month
Pricing
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$35.00
Per Tech Per Month
Standard
$20
per user/per month
Plus
$35
per user/per month
Company
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
4.5
82 Ratings
55% below category average
Help Scout
9.8
18 Ratings
22% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets5.282 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Expert directory3.647 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications5.755 Ratings10.010 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation3.962 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission4.082 Ratings10.017 Ratings
Ticket response4.981 Ratings10.018 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
4.1
76 Ratings
62% below category average
Help Scout
8.5
16 Ratings
9% above category average
External knowledge base3.362 Ratings9.015 Ratings
Internal knowledge base5.072 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
ConnectWise PSA
4.6
79 Ratings
50% below category average
Help Scout
7.8
18 Ratings
2% above category average
Customer portal4.374 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR4.520 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration4.427 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support4.974 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration4.770 Ratings6.510 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Small Businesses
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
SAP Service Cloud
SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Likelihood to Recommend
2.8
(113 ratings)
10.0
(18 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(25 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.4
(25 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
1.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.5
(20 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
5.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
1.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
1.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ConnectWise PSAHelp Scout
Likelihood to Recommend
ConnectWise
You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
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Help Scout
Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
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Pros
ConnectWise
  • Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
  • Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
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Help Scout
  • Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
  • The email newsletter.
  • They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
  • Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
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Cons
ConnectWise
  • I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
  • A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
  • Better Knowledge base section.
  • We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
  • Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
  • A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
  • The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
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Help Scout
  • Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
  • Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)
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Likelihood to Renew
ConnectWise
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
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Help Scout
We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
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Usability
ConnectWise
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
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Help Scout
It is simple and intuitive. I haven't run into difficulty using any of the features that I have wanted to use. Additional help in the form of documentation or support is available as needed, and their response times are pretty good :)
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Reliability and Availability
ConnectWise
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Performance
ConnectWise
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
ConnectWise
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Online Training
ConnectWise
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
ConnectWise
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
ConnectWise
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
Read full review
Help Scout
Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.
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Scalability
ConnectWise
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
Read full review
Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
ConnectWise
  • The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone.
  • The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them.
  • The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at
Read full review
Help Scout
  • We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
Read full review
ScreenShots

ConnectWise PSA Screenshots

Screenshot of Service Ticket ExampleScreenshot of Ticket TemplateScreenshot of Work Plan TemplateScreenshot of Calendar TimeScreenshot of Meeting InvitesScreenshot of My Calendar

Help Scout Screenshots

Screenshot of Build better relationships with your customers, and work together better as a teamScreenshot of Tools designed specifically for team collaboration on customer supportScreenshot of Docs Knowledge Base provides self-service that sets your customers up for successScreenshot of The conversation report can change the conversation with your customers from problems to praise by pinpointing what they write in about and when.Screenshot of Productivity Reports track your team's customer-helping velocity and identify sticking points to push through with even greater momentum.Screenshot of Happiness Reports are the closest you can get to your customer's true feelings without hiring a telepath.