4.8
on G2
Common Questions
Q: Is Confluence cheaper than Help Scout?
A: Yes, significantly for documentation-only use cases. Confluence Standard starts at $5.42/user/month with Rovo AI included, while Help Scout Standard starts at $25/user/month. However, Help Scout bundles a full shared inbox help desk alongside its knowledge base, so the comparison depends on whether you need both features. For pure documentation needs, Confluence is 4–5x cheaper per seat.
Q: Does Help Scout's free plan include a knowledge base?
A: Yes. Help Scout's free plan includes 1 Docs site with a Beacon widget but limits you to 25 contacts per month and 1 shared inbox. It is suitable for very small teams evaluating the platform but not practical for production knowledge base deployments. Confluence's free plan is more generous — up to 10 users with unlimited pages and basic Rovo search.
Q: Are there hidden costs with Confluence pricing?
A: The most significant hidden cost is ecosystem dependency. Confluence's full value is realized when combined with Jira, Bitbucket, and other Atlassian products — each with their own per-user fees. A team running Confluence plus Jira Software at 50 users can easily spend $800–$1,000/month before Enterprise discounts. Atlassian also implemented 5–8% price increases in 2024–2025, reducing long-term budget predictability.
Q: What is Help Scout's most expensive plan and what does it include?
A: Help Scout's Pro plan costs $65/user/month (annual billing only, minimum 10 users), giving you 25 shared inboxes, 10 Docs sites, SAML SSO, HIPAA compliance, increased API rate limits, and dedicated onboarding. At 20 users, that's $1,300/month. The 10 Docs site cap on the highest plan is a notable limitation for teams needing to serve multiple product lines or client audiences.
Q: Can Confluence and Help Scout be used together?
A: Yes, and some teams do use both — Confluence for internal technical documentation and Help Scout for customer-facing support and help center articles. They integrate directly (Help Scout appears in Confluence's connector ecosystem via Rovo). However, running both adds per-seat costs from two vendors, which can become expensive quickly for teams over 20 people.
Q: Is there a better alternative to both Confluence and Help Scout for documentation?
A: Docsie addresses the gaps both tools share. Neither Confluence nor Help Scout can convert existing training videos or real-world footage into structured documentation, offer multi-tenant portals for delivering knowledge bases to multiple clients, or provide built-in LMS with certifications. Docsie does all three on a flat workspace pricing model — $199/month for up to 15 users — avoiding the per-seat cost inflation that makes both Confluence and Help Scout expensive at scale. If your documentation needs extend beyond internal wikis or simple help centers, Docsie is worth evaluating before committing to either platform.
Deep Dive
An in-depth analysis across value for money, scalability costs, and hidden limitations for both platforms.
Confluence's Standard plan at $5.42/user/month is compelling when Rovo AI is factored in — 20+ pre-built agents and 80+ connectors represent genuine value, especially for Atlassian-heavy teams. Help Scout's $25/user Standard plan bundles a full help desk with its KB, which is fair value if you need both features. But buyers who only need a knowledge base will overpay significantly on Help Scout — the help desk overhead adds cost without utility. Confluence delivers better raw documentation value per dollar; Help Scout delivers better value only if you need the shared inbox.
Both tools use per-user pricing, which creates compounding cost as teams grow. A 50-person team on Confluence Standard costs $271/month; on Help Scout Standard that same team costs $1,250/month — a 4.6x difference. Confluence's Enterprise tier serves up to 150,000 users with custom pricing, making it genuinely enterprise-scalable. Help Scout's Pro plan requires a minimum of 10 users and annual billing, limiting flexibility. For customer support teams, Help Scout's per-seat model punishes growth. Confluence's recent 5–8% annual price increases also erode long-term budget predictability for large deployments.
Confluence's hidden cost is ecosystem lock-in — its full value materializes only when combined with Jira, Bitbucket, and other Atlassian products, each carrying their own per-user fees. Teams running the full Atlassian stack at 50 users can easily exceed $500/month before Enterprise discounts. Help Scout's hidden limitation is its Docs site cap — even the $65/user Pro plan restricts you to 10 Docs sites, blocking multi-product or multi-client documentation delivery. Neither tool offers video-to-docs conversion, multi-tenant portals, or built-in LMS, meaning teams with those needs must purchase additional platforms on top of either tool.
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