Zoho Desk vs Chatbase vs Helply: Features and Pricing Compared!

Zoho Desk is part of Zoho's broader ecosystem, offering omnichannel ticketing with AI capabilities baked into a traditional help desk structure.

Chatbase takes a different approach, letting you build custom AI chatbots trained on your own documents.

Helply sits in between, providing AI agents that answer support questions and create tickets in your existing help desk when they cannot resolve an issue.

Each tool solves a different problem. This guide breaks down features, pricing, and real user feedback so you can find the right fit.

Quick Comparison

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is the customer service arm of the Zoho suite. It handles support tickets across multiple channels and includes AI features through Zia, Zoho's assistant.

The platform works best when paired with other Zoho products like CRM, though it can function as a standalone help desk.

Zoho Desk Features

Omnichannel Ticketing

Zoho Desk consolidates over 10 channels into a single interface, including email, phone, instant messaging, social media, live chat, and web forms.

Agents work from one queue regardless of how customers reach out.

Zia AI

Zoho's AI assistant offers generative response drafting, conversational support, and predictive capabilities.

The full AI agent and answer bot features are available on the Enterprise tier, with regional availability restrictions.

Lower tiers can access generative AI by connecting their own OpenAI API key.

Ticket Management

Agents can merge, clone, and split tickets as needed. Parent-child ticketing lets you break complex issues into subtasks while keeping them linked.

The system includes collaboration tools and feedback management for team coordination.

Self-Service Portal

You can build a knowledge base, set up guided conversations, embed an ASAP widget for in-app help, create a community forum, and offer a multilingual help center.

An employee self-service portal is also available for internal IT support scenarios.

Automation and Workflows

Assignment rules route tickets automatically based on criteria you define. SLA policies track response and resolution times.

Blueprint lets you map out multi-step processes, and workflow rules trigger actions when conditions are met.

Analytics

The platform includes 30+ built-in reports and 10+ dashboards covering metrics like first response time, resolution time, and SLA compliance.

Custom reports are available on Standard tier and above.

Customization and Integrations

Multi-department setups let different teams share one Zoho Desk instance with separate workflows.

The platform offers APIs, SDKs, custom functions, and an integrations hub. Mobile apps for agents (Desk) and managers (Radar) are included.

Zoho Desk Pricing

Chatbase

Chatbase provides a platform for creating AI chatbots that learn from your content.

You feed it documents, website pages, or other data sources, and it generates a bot that can answer questions based on that material.

The focus is on speed to deployment rather than deep help desk functionality.

Chatbase Features

Document-Based Training

Upload PDFs, text files, or connect data sources to train your chatbot.

The platform runs on the OpenAI API and states that your content is not used to train their models.

This approach lets you create a bot that speaks specifically to your product or service.

Training Material Limits

Chatbase meters both the size and number of documents you can use for training. The free plan caps storage at 400KB, which fills up quickly with detailed documentation.

Paid tiers raise these limits but still impose caps, meaning complex products with extensive docs may need higher plans than expected.

Live Data Connections

Beyond static documents, Chatbase can connect to CRMs and order management systems.

This gives your chatbot access to real-time customer data like subscription status or recent orders, enabling more personalized responses.

Custom Actions Without Native Escalation

The platform supports task execution through custom actions, but it lacks built-in human handoff.

If a customer needs to speak with a person, you must construct the escalation path yourself by building a form, wiring it to Zapier, and routing the data to your inbox or ticketing system.

This process trips up non-technical users and takes even experienced developers 20 minutes or longer to configure.

Tiered Analytics

Reporting is split across pricing levels. Lower tiers see basic metrics, while advanced analytics require upgrading.

This means you pay more to understand how your chatbot is actually performing.

Branding and Compliance

A whitelabel option removes Chatbase branding from the widget. The platform advertises SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance for organizations with regulatory requirements.

Chatbase Pricing

Chatbase Pros

• They have a free tier which removes barriers to testing.
• Users who invest time in learning the platform report satisfaction with core chatbot functionality over the long term.

Chatbase Cons

• Billing issues where charges continue after cancellation, refund requests that go nowhere, and support tickets that sit unanswered for days.
• Timeouts, API failures, and broken integrations.
• Poor training quality. PDFs don’t get read correctly and it often ignores knowledge base content.

Who Chatbase Is For

• Technical teams who enjoy building and troubleshooting their own solutions.
• Organizations that want to prototype an AI chatbot quickly without spending money upfront.
• Developers comfortable integrating Zapier and custom webhooks to fill gaps in native functionality.

Who Chatbase Is Not For

• Support teams that need reliable production performance without babysitting.
• Anyone who expects timely help from the vendor when things break.
• Non-technical users who need escalation to humans without stitching together multiple tools.

Helply

We created Helply to fill a gap neither traditional help desks nor standalone chatbot builders address well.

Our AI agents answer customer questions using your knowledge base, and when they hit their limits, they create tickets in your existing help desk automatically.

Helply Features

Dedicated AI Agents

You can create multiple AI agents, each with its own training data, personality, and behavior rules.

A marketing-focused agent on your public site might be friendly and sales-oriented, while an in-app support agent stays focused on troubleshooting.

This separation keeps conversations appropriate to context and prevents your support bot from pitching features to frustrated customers.

No Limits on Training Content

We made a deliberate decision not to meter your knowledge base. Upload your entire documentation library, sync hundreds of help articles, scrape your full website.

We do not track document count or file size. Chatbase restricts free users to 400KB and charges for more. We simply removed the limit.

Multiple Training Methods

Point us at a URL and we scrape up to three levels deep, with filters to exclude sections like blogs or marketing pages.

Connect Groove, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Crisp, or Front to import help articles directly, with automatic updates when you publish changes.

Notion works too for teams who keep docs there. Or just paste text if that is easier.

During signup, we scrape your KB link immediately so training data is ready before you finish onboarding.

Built-In Escalation

When our AI cannot help, customers need a path to your team. Chatbase makes you build that path yourself through forms, Zapier, and data routing.

We built escalation into the core product. Enable it, and customers see a contact form that emails you by default.

Connect your help desk, and we create tickets there instead. Setup takes two or three clicks.

Our onboarding walks you through it, so you leave with a working chatbot that handles both AI responses and human handoffs within 15 minutes of signing up.

Actions Beyond Answering Questions

Our agents can do more than talk. The Calendly integration collects scheduling preferences and sends booking links.

Stripe integration is read-only by design, letting the agent check subscription plans, pull up invoices, and link customers to their billing portal without risking accidental refunds.

Custom API actions let you ping Slack when someone mentions canceling, query your product catalog, or trigger any endpoint you expose.

Preset response actions handle common requests like job inquiries with a standard reply.

Conversation Starters

When someone opens your widget, they see suggested topics. These are more than labels.

Configure them to return a canned response without using AI credits, jump straight to escalation for urgent issues, open a submenu for guided navigation, or ask the AI a preset question.

Guidance

Guidance rules stay active across every conversation, unlike training data that gets retrieved situationally.

Use guidance to handle edge cases your docs do not cover, enforce behavioral rules, or provide context the agent should always have.

One customer sells two products with confusingly similar names. Their guidance tells the agent to always ask which product the customer means before proceeding.

Customer Identity Tracking

When users are logged into your product, pass their details to us. We link conversations to individual customers and accept custom attributes like plan tier, company name, or account age.

The AI uses this context to give relevant answers without interrogating the customer. Your support team sees full conversation history when handling escalated tickets.

Native Help Desk Connections

We integrate directly with Groove, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, and Crisp.

These integrations do double duty:

• Syncing your KB articles as AI training material
• Creating tickets when conversations escalate

Updates to your help articles flow through automatically. Notion integration serves teams who document there instead of a traditional knowledge base.

Messaging Platform Deployment

Deploy your agent beyond your website. WhatsApp integration lets customers chat with your AI through the messaging app they already use, though escalation works via links rather than direct ticket creation.

Slack deployment brings your agent into workspaces for internal support or B2B scenarios.

Documentation Gap Analysis

Our Gap Finder reviews recent tickets from your connected help desk and compares them against what your AI knows.

It surfaces questions your human agents answer that the AI could handle with better training material.

Instead of guessing where your docs fall short, you get specific topics to address.

Straightforward Metrics

We track conversations, escalations, and resolution rate without splitting features across pricing tiers.

Our analytics are simpler than Chatbase's advanced tier, but everyone gets the same data. No paying extra to see how your AI is performing.

Visual Customization

Match the widget to your brand with custom colors, your logo, personalized welcome messages, positioning options, and icon choices.

Persona settings control whether your agent sounds formal or casual.

Per-Message Billing

We count individual messages, not conversations. Five questions in one session uses five credits.

Conversation starters that return preset responses consume zero credits since they never invoke AI.

This keeps costs predictable and rewards efficient prompt design.

Helply Pricing

Helply Pros

• Escalation works immediately without external tools.
• Knowledge base limits do not exist.
• Multiple agents let you tailor experiences to different audiences.
• The path from signup to functional chatbot with human handoff takes about 15 minutes rather than the hours some platforms require.

Helply Cons

• We focus exclusively on customer support, so teams wanting lead capture or sales automation should look elsewhere.

Who Helply Is For

• Support teams who want AI handling common questions without building the infrastructure themselves.
• Non-technical operators who need deployment without developer involvement.
• Product companies with sprawling documentation.
• Organizations already using Groove, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, or Crisp who want their AI to plug directly into existing workflows.

Who Helply Is Not For

• Marketing teams focused on lead generation rather than support.
• Developers who want API access immediately rather than waiting for our public release.
• Online stores needing native Shopify or WooCommerce connections.

The Verdict

Zoho Desk gives you a complete help desk where AI assists human agents.

Chatbase lets you build a chatbot but leaves the support infrastructure to you.

We built Helply to deliver AI that handles what it can and smoothly hands off what it cannot, without requiring you to become an integration specialist.

Try Helply for Free to see how fast you can go from signup to a working AI support agent with built-in escalation.