Front vs. Help Scout

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Front
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$19
per month per user
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
FrontHelp Scout
Editions & Modules
Starter
$19
per month per user
Growth
$49
per month per user
Scale
$99
per month per user
Standard
$20
per user/per month
Plus
$35
per user/per month
Company
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FrontHelp Scout
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsWe're happy to talk you through what would work best for your business — just reach out at sales@frontapp.com.
More Pricing Information
Features
FrontHelp Scout
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Front
-
Ratings
Help Scout
9.8
18 Ratings
20% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings10.010 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings10.017 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings10.018 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Front
-
Ratings
Help Scout
8.5
16 Ratings
7% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings9.015 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Front
-
Ratings
Help Scout
7.8
18 Ratings
1% below category average
Email support00 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings6.510 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FrontHelp Scout
Small Businesses
EZ Texting
EZ Texting
Score 8.8 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 9.4 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 9.4 out of 10
SAP Service Cloud
SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FrontHelp Scout
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(27 ratings)
10.0
(18 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FrontHelp Scout
Likelihood to Recommend
Front
I had a customer who has an urgent concern about their account. They already reached out to different departments but their resolution is unsatisfactory. [Its] good thing they tried to reply to our email campaigns and when a member of our team received it, it was answered and resolved quickly. Fronts really is a good tool to ensure timely resolution.
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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
Front
  • Even if you are just trying to compose a single email, Front gives a smart system that has options such [as] organized templates, tags, alerts, [and] changing your outbound dpt email.
  • Tasks- with Front you will not miss any interaction. When you are required to get assistance from a coworker, you only need to mention him/her and that notification will appear automatically in their inboxes.
  • Smart Notifications- sometimes we are just overwhelmed about the several notifications on our devices that we tend to miss some of them, but Front offers a new way to notify every email, discussion, mentioning, or tag that you really would not want to miss.
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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
Front
  • Their integration to Salesforce is lacking. As the owner of our productivity tools and how they are used, I have very little control over what things to enforce, or even change what objects are available. For example, we don't use Cases in Salesforce but with the Salesforce integration the Cases object shows up. There's no need to have that there. I've heard there is a roadmap improvement forthcoming.
  • One of our uses is for our sales development reps to prospect with visitors. Because of the high volume of inquiries it's difficult for our reps to efficiently manage all their follow ups. It would be nice if we could run a "scheduled campaign" where a predesigned cadence of email follow ups can be sent automatically. To be clear, they do have a scheduling capability, but it just can't be used as a prebuilt option.
  • Integrations to other systems require you have a user account to those systems. We have SSO and therefore we don't always have a user account. For example, out integration to Jira uses SSO so we don't each have individual Jira logins. This is an outage for us.
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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
Front
No answers on this topic
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
Front
It's very easy to understand and use by new customer support agents as well. Be it a technology, product, or marketing person, we have trained most of the company folks to read and respond to customer conversations in their free time with the help of the Front app. It is also easy to set up for an admin and manage his/her team with communication rules.
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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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Support Rating
Front
The support is good, and it's definitely prompt, but still lags when it comes to technical requirements, as I guess they are slow in developing newer features fast. So no complaints in terms of responsiveness, but yeah, at times it's not very helpful when you need certain features or are blocked on things which can't be unblocked.
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Help Scout
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Front
I have only used Gmail in the past and Front is any day better than Gmail in terms of the interface and ease of usage. The ability to send scheduling links and comments between the email threads makes it better than Gmail. The shared inbox also makes it easier for the entire team to understand the kind of email each CSM is receiving and sending
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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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Return on Investment
Front
  • Saved our executive team considerable amount of time chasing support questions through different channels.
  • Gave our team clear accountability for who was lead on a support issue and how to escalate.
  • Customer regularly say our support is the best in the industry.
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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.
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ScreenShots

Front Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

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.