Help desks, AI agents, live chat, knowledge bases, QA and phone support. Each tool gets a plain line we wrote ourselves and a link to its official site.
What a featured listing costs · from $199 a month
Zendesk is one of the most widely used help desks. Requests from email, chat, phone, social messaging and web forms become tickets in one workspace, where agents can assign, tag,…
Freshdesk is the ticketing help desk from Freshworks. It turns email, web forms, chat and social messages into tickets, with automations for assignment, service level timers and canned responses. A…
Help Scout is a help desk designed to feel like a shared email inbox, aimed at small and mid-size support teams. Conversations stay as threads, customers see normal emails rather…
Gorgias is a help desk built for online stores, with deep links to Shopify and other e-commerce platforms. Each ticket shows the customer's orders, so agents can check order status,…
Front is a shared inbox that treats each email, chat, SMS or social message as a conversation the team can assign, comment on and close. Many teams use it for…
Fin is the AI agent from Intercom. It reads your help center articles, past conversations and other content you connect, then answers customer questions in chat, email and other channels.…
Makers submit tools, or we add products support teams already use.
We open the official site and confirm the product and what it does.
One plain line, our words, with no copied marketing text or scores.
Details we can't confirm show as not enough info, never a guess.
HelpStories lists tools that support teams use to answer customers: help desks, AI agents, chat, knowledge bases, quality review, phone systems and translation. We add each tool by hand after checking its official site, and we write every description ourselves. If we can't confirm that a tool is live, it stays unpublished until we can.
There are no star ratings, review counts or rankings here, because we would have to invent them. Plans and prices change often, so each listing links to the official site instead of quoting a price.
Makers can submit or claim a listing. A person checks every request. Published by Zwings LLC.
Start with the problem, not the product. Write down where your support team loses time today: answering the same questions over and over, searching for the right policy, switching between inboxes, writing notes after calls, or not knowing which issues are growing. Each of those points to a different kind of tool, and most teams get more from fixing one clear problem than from adding AI everywhere at once.
Look at your channels next. If customers mostly email you, a help desk or shared inbox with reply drafting may be enough. If they chat on your site, a chat tool with an AI agent for common questions can cover the evenings. If the phone rings all day, call summaries and smarter routing may save more time than anything on the email side.
Check what the tool can see. An AI agent or reply assistant is only as good as the content and data behind it. Before you compare vendors, make sure your help articles are current and that the systems agents need, such as orders, accounts or bookings, can connect. A strong tool on top of outdated articles will give confident wrong answers.
Read the pricing model closely. Help desks usually charge per seat. AI agents often charge per conversation or per resolution, and the definition of a resolution varies. Ask how charges are counted, how you can review them, and what happens to the bill when volume spikes.
Think about the people who will use it every day. Agents spend hours a day inside a help desk, so a cluttered screen or slow search costs real time. Let the people who answer tickets try the shortlist and listen to what they say about speed, shortcuts and how much clicking a simple reply takes.
Ask hard questions about data. Support conversations contain names, addresses, order details and sometimes health or payment information. Find out where data is stored, whether conversations are used to train models, how long they are kept, and how you can delete them. Check that the vendor's terms fit any rules your industry follows.
Then test on real work. Run a trial with a few experienced agents on actual tickets for a week or two, read the AI answers yourself, and compare results with your current numbers for first reply time, repeat contacts and customer satisfaction. Keep a person in the loop for sensitive topics such as refunds, cancellations and complaints, and give customers an easy way to reach a human at any point.
Plan the rollout as carefully as the purchase. Import a few months of past conversations, set up the views and tags agents need, train the team on a short list of changes, and keep the old system readable for a while in case you need to look something up.
No. Listing is free. Makers can pay for a featured placement, which is always marked Sponsored and does not change what we write about the tool.
We don't host reviews, and we won't publish scores we can't back up. Each listing describes what the tool does in plain words and links to the official site so you can judge for yourself.
Support software pricing changes often and depends on seats, channels and usage, so an out-of-date price would mislead you. Each tool page links to the official site, where current plans live.
It means we couldn't confirm that detail, such as a free plan or an API, from the tool's own site. We leave it unknown rather than guess.
Use the submission form to suggest a tool or claim an existing listing, or email us with a correction. A person reviews every request before anything changes.
In practice they take on repeat questions and paperwork, such as summaries and tagging, while people handle complex, sensitive and upset customers. Teams still need people to keep help content accurate and review what AI says.