Switching From Help Scout: A Practical Migration Guide
What to export, what quietly breaks, what to test, and how long a Help Scout migration really takes.
The short version
- Two to three weeks, of which maybe three days is actual work.
- Articles and contacts export cleanly. Saved replies, tags and workflows get rebuilt.
- Run both tools for a fortnight before you cancel anything.
First, answer one question: where does the work arrive?
Every support tool is built around an assumption about how customers reach you. Help Scout assumes email. It is a shared inbox, meaning one address like support@yourcompany.com that a whole team answers from without stepping on each other. EzyConn assumes website chat: short bursts of conversation that start in a widget while the person is still on your pricing page, deciding.
Neither assumption is wrong. They just pull in different directions. So before you plan a migration, spend half a day counting. Go back thirty days and tally how many conversations started as email versus how many started as chat, or would have if you had a widget. Be honest at this step and you will save yourself a fortnight.
Where Help Scout shines, and where EzyConn fits
Help Scout is one of the best shared email inboxes on the market. Its collision handling, which is the bit that stops two people replying to the same customer at once, is excellent and genuinely hard to build well. Docs, its knowledge base product, is polished and pleasant to write in. It has a long reputation for support quality and an interface that stays calm when the queue is not.
EzyConn takes the widget, the after-hours questions and the AI replies. It answers from your own website pages and documents, shows the source, and hands the chat to your team when a visitor asks for a person. The side-by-side detail is on our Help Scout alternative page.
When the switch is worth doing
The clearest signal is a shift in where messages start: chat volume climbing, email flat, and you increasingly running an inbox product with chat bolted on the side. Close behind is billing shape. Help Scout prices per user with tiers based on how many contacts you have, so a weekend helper or a busy month both nudge the invoice upward. Then there is AI, which on most inbox products lives on the higher plans, so the automation you want arrives attached to a plan change. And finally, where your team sits all day. If that is Microsoft Teams or Slack, answering from inside the chat app instead of clicking through to a separate tab changes how fast small questions get handled.
What to export before you touch anything
Do this while your account is still active and fully paid. Exports are almost always easier before you have started cancelling things.
| What | Moves? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation history | Export and archive | Keep it as searchable files. It does not need to be imported to be useful. |
| Help articles and Docs content | Copy the text | This becomes the source your AI learns from, so it is the most valuable export. |
| Saved replies and snippets | Rebuild by hand | No shared format between tools, and most need shortening for chat anyway. |
| Customer list | Export as CSV | Straightforward. Check your data rules before moving personal details around. |
| Tags, folders and workflows | Rebuild | Treat this as a chance to delete the ones nobody uses. |
| Reporting history | Screenshot or export | Numbers do not carry over. Record your current baselines first. |
| Email forwarding rules | Reconfigure | This is the actual switch. Change it last, not first. |
| Widget or beacon embed | Swap the snippet | One line of code out, one line in. Five minutes. |
The row that matters most is your help content. Old conversations are an archive you will search three times and then forget. Your articles are the material the AI reads to learn how to answer, so the better they are, the better your first week goes.
The five steps, and what each one costs you
| Step | Time | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Audit | Half a day | Count where messages actually arrive: email, website chat, or somewhere else. |
| 2. Export | One afternoon | Conversations, contacts, articles, saved replies, and your current numbers. |
| 3. Train | One to two days | Point EzyConn at your help content and ask it your twenty most common questions. |
| 4. Parallel run | One to two weeks | Both tools live, split by channel or by page. Change nothing else. |
| 5. Cutover | One day | Swap the embed, move forwarding if you are moving it, cancel at period end. |
Notice how little of that is hands on keyboard. The two weeks in the middle are mostly waiting and watching, which is exactly why teams try to skip them.
Running both at once, without making a mess
The parallel run is where you find out whether the switch was a good idea, so it is worth doing properly. There are two clean ways to split.
Split by channel. Email keeps going to Help Scout. Website chat goes to EzyConn. This is the low-risk option. Nothing about your email setup changes, so there is no scary DNS step and no way to lose a message.
Split by page. Put the new widget on a slice of your site, say the pricing and documentation pages, and leave the rest alone. The one hard rule is never to run two chat widgets on the same page. Visitors will pick whichever is prettier, you will end up with two half-watched queues, and the comparison you were trying to make becomes meaningless.
While it runs, watch four things: how many chats the AI closes without a human, how often it hands over cleanly when it should, how long people wait for a reply, and whether your team actually answers from Slack once they can. That last one is behavioural, not technical, and it is usually the number that decides the outcome. If you want the mechanics of how conversations land in one place first, our shared inbox page covers the routing side in more detail.
What breaks, honestly
Your saved replies read wrong. Email templates are three paragraphs with a greeting and a sign-off. In chat that lands like a form letter. Expect to rewrite most of them into one or two sentences.
Threading changes shape. An email thread is a tidy chain you can read top to bottom weeks later. Chat is bursty: three messages in a row, then a gap. Not worse, but people who love a clean thread feel it in the first week.
Your reporting baseline resets. Historical numbers do not travel. Take screenshots of your current response times and volumes before you start, or you will have nothing to compare the new tool against and every argument becomes a vibe.
Habits move slower than software. The tool takes an afternoon. Getting everyone to stop checking the old inbox out of muscle memory takes about three weeks. Plan for it and pick a date when the old tab actually gets closed.
The money, stated plainly
Help Scout charges per user, with tiers based on how many contacts you hold. We are not going to quote a figure at you, because published prices change and a stale number is worse than none. Go and read their current pricing, multiply by your seat count, then add whatever tier your contact list puts you in. That is your real monthly number.
Ours works differently. The free plan is zero dollars forever: the owner plus 1 agent seat, 500 messages a month and one chatbot. Paid plans run Starter at $25 and Professional at $95 per month, with 20% off if you pay annually. Starter includes 3 agent seats plus the owner and Professional includes 10, so a weekend helper fits inside the plan price. AI runs on GPT-4o and Claude and is included on every plan, with no per-resolution and no per-seat fees. The thing to size on is messages per month: 500 free, 5,000 on Starter and 25,000 on Professional. Full detail sits on our pricing page. Replies also work from a Slack thread, which is worth counting as saved time rather than saved money.
Frequently asked questions
How long does switching from Help Scout take?
Two to three weeks for most small teams, and only two or three days of that is real work. Exporting takes an afternoon. Feeding your help content to the AI takes another. The rest is a parallel run, where both tools are live at once and you are simply watching. Very small sites can compress the whole thing into a weekend, but the parallel run is the step worth keeping.
Will I lose my Help Scout conversation history?
Not if you export before you cancel. Pull your conversations, your customer list and your help articles out while the account is still active, and keep the files somewhere searchable. History does not need to be imported into the new tool to be useful. In practice teams search the archive a handful of times in the first month and then almost never again.
Can I run EzyConn and Help Scout at the same time?
Yes, and a lot of teams never stop. The clean split is by channel: email keeps flowing into Help Scout, while website chat and AI replies run through EzyConn. The one rule is never to put two chat widgets on the same page, because visitors pick the wrong one and both queues end up half answered.
What does EzyConn cost compared with Help Scout?
EzyConn has a free plan at zero dollars forever with the owner plus 1 agent seat, 500 messages a month and one chatbot. Paid plans are Starter at 25 dollars and Professional at 95 dollars per month, with 20 percent off on annual billing. AI is included on every plan with no per-seat or per-resolution fees. Help Scout prices per user with contact-volume tiers, so check their current published rates and multiply by your seat count before you compare.
Start the parallel run, not the migration
The free plan gives you the owner plus 1 agent seat and 500 messages a month, forever. Put it on a few pages, leave Help Scout exactly as it is, and let two weeks of your own traffic settle the argument.
Start freeEzyConn plan prices and limits are ours and current as of October 2026. We describe Help Scout's pricing model rather than quoting figures, because published rates change. Always check the vendor's own pricing page before you budget.