A Help Scout alternative for people who do not have a team

What each one costs for one person

Annual billing, per seat where seats apply. Verified 2026-08-22.

The gap is real but it is not the argument. At this scale the difference is roughly $192 a year, which is not the reason anyone switches support tools. The reason is below.

The features you are paying for, and the ones you use

Help Scout’s per-seat price is honest about what the product is: A shared inbox for support teams who want their replies to look like ordinary email rather than tickets. Look at what the seat buys and how much of it applies to one person.

• Assignment and ownership. Deciding which agent handles a conversation. With one agent, this is answered before it is asked.
• Collision detection. Stopping two people replying at once. There is no second person.
• Internal notes and @mentions. Talking to a colleague inside a thread. You are the colleague.
• Team reporting. Volume per agent, resolution times per agent. One row, and you already know what is in it.
• Saved replies and a knowledge base. Genuinely useful, and the part of the seat you will actually open.

That is not a criticism of Help Scout. It is a good product being used for a job it was not shaped around, which is what a per-seat price for one seat always means.

Where your mail lives, and why it matters

This is the difference that outlasts any price comparison. Forwards your address into their inbox: you point your support address at Help Scout, and the conversation history accumulates in their database. That is exactly what you want when a team needs one shared record.

Moorline connects over IMAP to the mailbox you already own and sends replies back into the same threads over your own SMTP. Two consequences follow. Your mail app keeps working, because Moorline is reading the same mailbox rather than intercepting it. And cancelling costs you nothing, because the conversations were never anywhere else.

It works with any host that speaks IMAP and SMTP: Gmail and Google Workspace, iCloud, Fastmail, Zoho, Spacemail, Migadu, or your own domain. Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com are the exception, because Microsoft has retired password-based IMAP on both.

The problem neither shared inbox solves

A shared inbox tracks whether a conversation is open or closed. That is one axis, and support for a software product has two: whether the work is done, and whether the customer has been told.

The expensive state is the one where those two disagree. You reproduce the bug, you fix it, you ship it three days later, and the person who reported it hears nothing. In an inbox that thread was archived the moment you started working, and it looks identical to a thread that was genuinely finished. Moorline calls that state “reply owed” and refuses to let it look finished. A customer only leaves your list when they have been handled and told.

Questions people actually ask