A complete Helpcrunch overviews: Features, pricing, and AI explained

What is Helpcrunch? A brief Helpcrunch overview

At its heart, Helpcrunch is a tool that brings all your customer conversations together. It mixes a shared inbox, live chat, a knowledge base, a simple chatbot, and email marketing into a single platform. The goal is to let you ditch some of your other software subscriptions, save a bit of money, and manage every customer interaction from one dashboard.

It’s an attractive promise. A quick scroll through Capterra reviews shows it’s a hit with startups and smaller businesses that want a lot of features without a hefty price tag. They’re trying to cover all their bases, support, marketing, and sales, from one spot.

A Helpcrunch overview of core features

The biggest draw for Helpcrunch is that everything comes in one package. You’re not just buying a live chat widget; you’re getting a whole set of tools designed to work together. Let’s look at the main parts you’ll be using day-to-day.

A Helpcrunch overview of live chat and shared Inbox

The shared inbox is the control center of the platform. It’s where every conversation ends up, whether it’s from your website’s live chat, a support email, or connected apps like Facebook Messenger and Instagram. This gives your team one place to see and respond to every customer message.

To help your team work together, you can:

• Assign conversations to specific agents or departments to make sure the right person handles the query.
• Leave private notes for your teammates to add context on tricky issues without the customer ever seeing them.
• Use saved replies to answer common questions with a couple of clicks instead of typing the same thing over and over.
• Snooze conversations to temporarily clear them from your inbox until you’re ready to follow up.

This setup gives you a single view of a customer’s history, which helps prevent different teams from sending mixed messages.

A Helpcrunch overview of the knowledge base and self-service

Helpcrunch also gives you a knowledge base tool, so you can build a public, SEO-friendly help center. The idea is that customers can find their own answers without having to contact you. The editor is a simple “what you see is what you get” interface, and you can organize your articles into easy-to-navigate categories.

One neat feature is that the knowledge base is connected to the live chat widget. This means customers can search for help articles right from the chat box before they even start a conversation, which is great for heading off simple questions. There is one catch, though: you can only have a knowledge base in multiple languages if you’re on the “PRO” plan or higher. If you’re on the “Basic” plan and have a global audience, being stuck with a single language is a real downside.

A Helpcrunch overview of email marketing and popups

To complete its all-in-one pitch, Helpcrunch adds tools for email marketing and popups. You can send one-off email blasts to your customers or set up automated email sequences for things like welcoming new users or checking in with inactive ones. The popup builder is a straightforward way to capture emails or post announcements on your site.

While these features are handy for simple campaigns, they don’t have the power of specialized tools like Mailchimp or HubSpot. If your team needs to do complex audience segmentation, A/B testing, or get deep reporting, you’ll probably find these tools a bit basic. It’s the classic trade-off: you get convenience, but you sacrifice some of the more advanced capabilities.

Evaluating AI capabilities: A Helpcrunch review

This is where you need to pay close attention. In today’s market, “AI” can mean anything from a grammar helper to a bot that handles tickets all by itself. Helpcrunch has started adding AI features, but it’s important to know exactly what they can and can’t do.

The AI editor in this Helpcrunch overview

The main AI feature Helpcrunch talks about is its “AI Editor.” This tool is built into the shared inbox and is designed to help agents write replies faster. According to their site, it can:

• Turn short notes into a full, professional-sounding message.
• Change the tone of a reply to be more formal or friendly.
• Condense a long block of text into a quick summary.
• Translate messages into other languages.

This is helpful, for sure, but it’s an assistant for your agents, not an automation tool. It can’t resolve tickets on its own. The biggest problem, though, is the usage limit. On the “Basic” plan, your entire team only gets 20 uses of the AI Editor per month. The “PRO” plan gives you 50. For any team with a steady flow of tickets, those limits are so low the feature is more of a nice-to-have than something you can rely on to boost efficiency.

The chatbot in this Helpcrunch overview

The Helpcrunch chatbot is a no-code, rule-based builder. This means you can create automated chat flows to handle simple, predictable questions. You might use it to qualify leads by asking for their name and email, answer basic FAQs with pre-written text, or route a chat to the right team based on a customer’s menu selection.

Here’s a simple example of how it works:

The weakness here is pretty clear: it’s a rigid chatbot. It works perfectly as long as customers ask questions exactly how you programmed it to expect. The moment someone phrases a question differently or asks about something you didn’t plan for, the bot gets stuck, and the customer gets frustrated. It can’t learn from conversations or understand context.

Limitations of bundled AI: A Helpcrunch overview

When you add it all up, Helpcrunch’s AI features are a decent starting point but don’t offer true automation. They’re built to help agents, not to take work off their plate. They can’t understand complex questions, learn from how you’ve solved tickets in the past, or do anything beyond their pre-set rules.

For businesses that need to seriously scale their support without just hiring more people, a better option is often to add a specialized AI platform like eesel AI on top of a help desk. This lets you get sophisticated AI without having to switch away from the tools your team already uses.

eesel AI gets around the limits of bundled AI by providing:

• Autonomous resolution: eesel’s AI Agent learns directly from your real knowledge sources, like your past tickets, a Confluence wiki, or internal Google Docs. It uses that knowledge to resolve customer issues from start to finish, just like a human agent would.
• Advanced actions: Unlike a rule-based bot, eesel can connect to other apps to perform real-time tasks. It can check an order status in Shopify, look up a customer’s subscription details, or update a record in your CRM.
• Intelligent triage: eesel’s AI Triage automatically reads, categorizes, and routes incoming tickets based on what they’re actually about, not just keywords. This keeps your support queues organized and saves your team from hours of manual sorting.

A Helpcrunch overview of its pricing

Getting a handle on the pricing structure is key to figuring out if Helpcrunch makes sense for you. The costs can add up fast depending on how many people are on your team and which features you need.

Pricing plans in this Helpcrunch overview

Helpcrunch has three main plans: Basic, PRO, and Unlimited. All are priced per person, and you get a discount if you pay for a full year upfront.

Note: Pricing is based on information from Helpcrunch’s website and is subject to change.

Is it worth the cost? A Helpcrunch overview verdict

For new startups and small businesses that just need an affordable all-in-one tool, Helpcrunch offers pretty good value. It bundles several tools into one subscription, which can simplify things a lot.

But if automation is your main goal, the pricing model can be a problem. The best automation features, like unlimited chatbot flows and unlimited AI requests, are only available on the “Unlimited” plan, which is a big price jump. You could end up paying for a bunch of marketing tools you don’t even need just to get better automation.

This is different from eesel AI’s pricing model, which is based on AI interactions. An interaction is a single AI-powered reply or action. This way, your cost is tied directly to the work the AI is actually doing for you. It’s a more predictable investment for teams that are serious about using AI to scale.

Is Helpcrunch right tool for you?

Helpcrunch is a solid choice for startups and small businesses that want to get all their customer communication tools under one roof. It does a good job of combining chat, email, and a knowledge base into a user-friendly platform. For many teams, that’s all they need to get started and grow.

The main trade-off is its AI. The features are mostly assistants for your human agents, built on simple rules. They’re designed to give your team a little help, not to really change how you deliver support. For teams whose goal is to cut down on ticket volume and deliver instant, accurate answers 24/7, Helpcrunch’s built-in tools will probably leave you wanting more.

If you’re looking to go beyond basic bots and give your team a true AI partner, think about adding eesel AI to your existing help desk. It works with platforms like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom to provide real, autonomous support without forcing you to change the tools you already have.

You can book a demo to see exactly how it works.