Leodesk vs Help Scout.

The short version

Help Scout is one of the most quietly well-made products in this category. A shared inbox that behaves like email rather than a ticketing system, Docs for a public knowledge base, and Beacon to put both in your product — designed so a small team is productive on day one without an administrator. At the time of writing it prices per user; details change, so check helpscout.com. That restraint is a design achievement, not a gap.

Leodesk overlaps heavily — shared inbox, live chat, customer portal, web forms, per-user pricing — and diverges in two places that tend to decide it. The first is how mail leaves the building: with BYODKIM you sign replies with your own key and send through your own AWS SES account, so customers see your domain rather than a shared vendor sender. The second is automation depth: unlimited rules on Pro across 17 action kinds, round-robin assignment, and SLA policies with at-risk and breached states.

Pricing: same shape, different inclusions

Both products price per person, so this is not a structural argument — it is a question of what each seat includes. Help Scout’s current tiers are on helpscout.com; we do not restate a competitor’s price, because list pricing changes and a stale figure is worse than none.

Ours, in full:

• Free — $0 for up to 3 agents, 1 mailbox, 3 automation rules, 100 outbound emails/24h.
• Pro — $15 per agent per month billed annually ($19 monthly). Unlimited agents, mailboxes and automation rules, plus AI assist, integrations, BYODKIM, a custom portal domain, advanced reports, custom ticket fields and chat attachments.
• Scale — $35 per agent per month billed annually ($45 monthly). Adds custom roles and an audit log.
• Enterprise — custom.

The comparison worth doing is total against total: take your seat count, add whatever each vendor charges separately for AI, and check whether the tier you need is the entry one. There is no per-ticket or per-resolution fee on our side, and AI assist is not a line item. The calculator on the pricing page does the seat arithmetic.

Deliverability and automation depth

These are the two places the products genuinely diverge, and both are easy to underrate until they bite.

Sending as your own domain

Most help desks send your replies through shared vendor infrastructure, at two costs. One is cosmetic and customers notice it: Gmail shows a “via” line naming the vendor next to your company. The other is not — the sending reputation deciding whether your mail reaches the inbox is shared with the vendor and everyone else in the pool.

BYODKIM is the alternative, included from Pro. You bring your own DKIM signing key and send through your own AWS SES account, with automatic SMTP fallback. Replies are then signed as your domain: the “via” line disappears, DKIM aligns with the From address customers see, and the reputation you build is yours to keep — including if you leave us. In practice it is a few DNS records: the signing key, the sending path in your SPF record, and a custom return-path.

When the routing becomes the hard part

A shared inbox works beautifully until the queue outgrows the people watching it. The symptoms are consistent: tickets unassigned because everyone assumed someone else had them, no view of which conversations are about to miss a promise, and a manual triage ritual each morning.

Leodesk’s answer is unlimited automation rules on Pro across 17 action kinds — status, priority, assignee, team, tags, internal notes, notifying the assignee, applying a macro — plus round-robin assignment that fires at ticket creation, filtered to agents who are available and online, so nothing lands on someone who logged off an hour ago. Above that sit SLA policies with first-response and resolution deadlines, surfacing at-risk and breached states before a customer has to chase.

One honest caveat: those SLA deadlines are wall-clock. They count continuously and do not pause outside business hours — fine with weekend coverage, but a nine-to-five desk needs targets that allow for the clock running overnight.

What migrating actually involves

The honest version, because the alternative gets found out fast. There is no vendor-specific Help Scout importer. No button clones a Help Scout account into Leodesk, and we would be sceptical of anyone claiming one.

What we do have is a historical email import over IMAP that works against any provider. Point it at the mailbox, choose a date range and folders, and it pulls the mail in — de-duplicating as it goes and preserving threading, including forwarded chains, which is what migrations break most often.

Tags and saved replies are recreated during onboarding, not imported. Often an improvement, since most macro libraries are part stale — but it is work done with a person rather than a script, so budget for it. Knowledge-base articles are content you own; plan on moving them yourself.

The sequence we recommend is boring and holds up. Get live mail into Leodesk first; backfill history second. Publish DNS and DKIM changes before the flip. Then run both in parallel, Help Scout read-only, and flip forwarding or MX fully after a couple of clean days.

What Leodesk deliberately doesn’t do

A comparison page that wins every row is not a comparison page. The gaps we would want to know about:

• No standalone knowledge-base product. We have a white-labelled customer portal on your own domain. If a large public help centre is central to how you deflect volume, Help Scout’s Docs is the more complete answer.
• More to configure. Rules, SLA policies and routing are power you must spend time on; Help Scout’s appeal is that there is less to set up.
• No vendor-specific importer. Historical email comes over IMAP; tags and saved replies are rebuilt during onboarding.
• A smaller integration catalog. Slack, Jira, Linear, GitHub, Shopify and webhooks compatible with Zapier and Make. Salesforce, Stripe, HubSpot, Segment and Zoom are in progress — and “in progress” is not “available”.
• SLAs are wall-clock. Deadlines never pause outside business hours.
• Four channels, not ten. Email, live chat, customer portal and web forms — no telephony, no social messaging.
• Governance sits on higher plans. Custom roles and the audit log are Scale, and the free plan caps you at three agents, one mailbox, three automation rules and 100 outbound emails per 24 hours.

If none of those are dealbreakers, run both tools on your own tickets for two weeks and see which queue your agents reach for.