HubSpot Service Hub vs Helply (2026)

TL;DR

• Pick HubSpot Service Hub if you want support, sales, and marketing data unified in one CRM — especially if your team already runs on HubSpot.
• Pick Helply if you want AI agents resolving part of your tickets and prefer paying for AI work in credits to paying per seat. Skip it if you need a fixed monthly cost.

The core difference

HubSpot Service Hub is a helpdesk module built on top of a CRM. Every support interaction lives on the same contact record as sales deals, marketing emails, and website visits. Agents see the full relationship history — not just the current ticket. This is genuinely powerful for B2B teams where support context overlaps with sales context.

Helply is an AI-native help desk. The team behind it rebuilt the product from scratch so AI agents and human agents work in the same inbox. A Support Agent talks to customers, background agents (Churn, Knowledge, Revenue, Feature Request, Insights) watch conversations and act, and an Assist Agent helps human agents investigate and draft replies. It is not a CRM, though it connects to Salesforce and HubSpot.

Pricing

Helply: Starter is $49/mo, Pro is $199/mo, Scale is $449/mo, and Enterprise is custom. Every plan has unlimited users, so seats cost nothing. AI work is billed in credits: a draft or summary costs 1, a task touching one or two systems costs 4, and a multi-system investigation costs 12. Plans carry 500 to 32,000 credits depending on tier. The 14-day trial includes 1,000 credits and needs no card, and annual billing is 15% cheaper.

HubSpot Service Hub: Starter at roughly $20/seat/mo is the entry point, but most serious deployments run on Professional ($100/seat/mo) or Enterprise ($150/seat/mo). Bundle pricing with Marketing and Sales Hubs can improve the per-product cost, but standalone Service Hub at Professional is a significant step up in per-seat terms.

For a 15-agent team, Helply Pro lists at $199/mo, about $2,400/year, versus HubSpot Service Hub Professional at ~$18k/year. The gap narrows if your AI usage pushes you into a larger credit tier, since 1,000 multi-system investigations use 12,000 credits. The HubSpot premium is worth it only if you're actively using the CRM layer.

Ticketing and workflow

HubSpot's ticket object is a first-class CRM record — it can have properties, associations to contacts/companies/deals, pipeline stages, and automation triggers that span the full HubSpot platform. Workflow automation at Professional and Enterprise is mature and flexible.

Helply's model is conversations in a shared inbox, with AI agents doing part of the work. Background agents flag churn risk, feature requests and knowledge gaps without an agent opening the ticket. SLAs start at Pro, and skills-based routing and audit logs at Scale. The workflow depth comes from the agents rather than from CRM objects.

AI and productivity

HubSpot has invested heavily in Breeze, its AI layer, in 2025. Breeze Copilot surfaces in Service Hub as reply drafts, ticket summarization, conversation intelligence, and AI-suggested knowledge articles. The AI pulls from the full CRM context, which makes suggestions more relevant than helpdesk-only AI.

AI is the center of Helply rather than an add-on. The Support Agent can resolve conversations with customers, and the Assist Agent helps your team investigate and draft replies. The trade-off is metered cost: every draft, task and investigation consumes credits.

Knowledge base

Both platforms include a knowledge base. HubSpot's is more polished — SEO tools, performance analytics, and the ability to tie article reads to contact records and support ticket deflection metrics.

Helply includes unlimited knowledge base articles from the Starter plan, and its background agents flag gaps in the content based on what customers ask. It suits teams that want the knowledge base fed by conversations.

Omnichannel

HubSpot Service Hub handles email, live chat (via HubSpot Chat), and Facebook Messenger natively, with phone available via integrations (Aircall, JustCall, etc.). The channel list is adequate but narrower than Zendesk or Freshdesk on native integrations.

Helply puts email, chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram and Discord in one inbox. That is a wider native channel list than HubSpot's, which matters if your customers reach you on messaging apps.

Verdict

The decision comes down to whether you're buying a CRM-connected helpdesk or an AI-first one. If support is one slice of a larger HubSpot investment, Service Hub's unified CRM data is a differentiator worth paying for. If you want AI to resolve part of the queue and prefer paying per unit of AI work to paying per seat, Helply is the better fit, as long as you check the credit tier your monthly volume lands in before buying.