SupportBee vs Helply (2026)

TL;DR

• SupportBee: $17/seat/month on Startup, $21 on Enterprise (annual); $20 and $25 monthly. Unlimited email inboxes, unlimited tickets, no metering of anything except seats. No live chat, no AI. Rated 3.9.
• Helply, formerly Groove: $49 / $199 / $449 a month on Starter, Pro and Scale, plus custom Enterprise pricing. Unlimited users on every plan, with AI work billed in credits. 14-day trial. Rated 4.3, and Helply says 1,400+ companies use it.
• Helply's plan price does not move with headcount; SupportBee's does. At $17 a seat, SupportBee passes Helply Starter's $49 at three agents and Pro's $199 at twelve. What varies on Helply is AI use, a cost SupportBee does not have because it has no AI.

Seats versus credits is where these two fundamentally disagree

SupportBee charges per seat and includes unlimited email inboxes and tickets on both tiers. The bill is seats times a number. Helply charges a plan price with unlimited users, so seats cost $0 and a 40-agent team pays the same as a 4-agent team.

What Helply meters is AI work. A draft or summary costs 1 credit, a task touching one or two systems costs 4, and a multi-system investigation costs 12. Starter includes 500 to 32,000 credits, Pro 2,000 to 32,000 and Scale 4,000 to 32,000. At 12 credits per full investigation, 1,000 of them use 12,000 credits.

That makes the comparison a question about your own numbers. A ten-agent team pays $170 a month on SupportBee Startup. The same team pays $49 for Helply Starter, and the AI bill depends on how much work the agents run. Teams that want a fixed monthly cost should lean towards SupportBee; Helply's total follows usage.

The full ladder, side by side

At ten seats on annual billing: SupportBee Startup is $2,040 a year and SupportBee Enterprise $2,520. Helply does not change with seats: Starter is $588 a year at monthly rates, Pro $2,388 and Scale $5,388. Annual billing is 15% cheaper, which brings those to roughly $500, $2,030 and $4,580.

Two structural notes complicate that comparison. Helply's annual billing also pools credits across the year, so a quiet month does not waste its allowance. SupportBee offers monthly billing at an 18–19% premium over annual.

SupportBee's tier decision is not about scale at all. Startup allows one knowledge base and one team, and puts business hours and the customer portal in Enterprise. A four-person team supporting two brands with a response-time commitment is on $21 from day one. Business hours in particular is the sleeper requirement: without it your SLA clock runs against wall time and a Friday-evening ticket accrues breach all weekend. Helply's tier decision is about features. SLAs, CSAT surveys and custom reports start at Pro ($199), and skills-based routing, audit logs and HIPAA compliance start at Scale ($449).

What Helply has and SupportBee simply does not

Live chat, for a start, plus Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram and Discord alongside email in the same inbox. Then integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Linear, Jira, Notion, Snowflake and BigQuery.

The AI side is the larger gap. Helply's Support Agent talks to customers. Background agents (Churn, Knowledge, Revenue, Feature Request and Insights) watch conversations and act without anyone opening the ticket, flagging churn risk, feature requests and knowledge gaps. An Assist Agent helps human agents investigate and draft replies. Each of those draws on the credit meter described above.

Unlimited users is the other difference worth pricing. Where engineers and account managers get looped into support conversations constantly, adding them to Helply costs nothing per person, and the Linear and Jira integrations give them somewhere to work. SupportBee has no cheaper seat class, so each of them is another $17.

When less product is the right product

SupportBee's case is narrow and legitimate. The interface looks and behaves like email, so a new hire is productive immediately. Snippets handle repeat replies without a macro engine to configure. Unlimited tickets and inboxes mean the bill is seats times a number and nothing else: no conversation caps, no AI meter, no channel add-ons. KBee provides a branded self-service help center without a separate subscription.

The missing AI matters less than it sounds for one profile: technical B2B support, professional services, complex products where nearly every ticket is bespoke. Deflection rates are low there, and an AI layer adds cost without removing work. That is precisely SupportBee's market. Everyone else should notice that competitors in the same price band offer automation it does not.

Portability and commitment

Helply is a rebuild rather than an update, so features and workflows from the earlier product may not carry over one to one. Test your real setup before committing. The 14-day trial includes 1,000 credits and needs no card, which is enough to run a slice of live volume through it and see where you land on the credit tiers.

SupportBee's monthly option, by contrast, means you can leave on thirty days' notice, and it has no usage meter to estimate in advance.

Who should pick what

• Two agents or fewer, email only → SupportBee. Two seats cost $34 a month against Helply Starter's $49.
• Three or more agents wanting the lowest plan price → Helply Starter at $49, provided the AI credits fit your volume.
• Team that needs a fixed, predictable bill → SupportBee, where cost is seats times $17. Helply's bill depends on how much AI work you run.
• Support that needs live chat, WhatsApp, SMS or other messaging channels → Helply. SupportBee is email only, by design.
• B2B or technical support where every ticket is bespoke → SupportBee. The absent AI costs you nothing you would have used.
• Company with engineers and AMs who need to join conversations → Helply, where every plan has unlimited users.
• Anyone with a contractual response-time commitment → SupportBee Enterprise at $21 a seat (business hours) or Helply Pro at $199 (SLAs). Not the cheapest tier of either.
• Teams that want AI to resolve tickets and want to test it first → Helply, using the 14-day trial with 1,000 credits and no card.

Bottom line

Helply is the more capable product and the better-rated one, and with unlimited users it is cheaper on plan price than SupportBee once a team passes about three agents. The catch is that its bill follows AI use: a full investigation costs 12 credits, and SLAs and CSAT surveys need Pro at $199. SupportBee is deliberately smaller (email, snippets, a knowledge base, unlimited inboxes, a flat bill) and it does not pretend to be growing into anything. For a handful of agents on an email-only workflow that want a predictable invoice, that restraint is worth paying for. Past that, or the moment chat matters or you want AI resolving tickets, shortlist Helply and run your monthly conversation volume through its pricing estimator before you buy.