Helpwise Review
Shared inbox for handling customer email and messaging channels in one place.
- From:
- $15/agent/mo
- Founded:
- 2019
- HQ:
- Palo Alto, US
Helpwise started as a shared inbox for Gmail and Microsoft 365 addresses and has grown outward into live chat, social, SMS, WhatsApp and calling. Its pricing page pitches it to finance, HR and procurement teams as readily as to support, and that tells you what it is: a collaborative inbox with help desk features added on top, not a ticketing system built around the order. For a small DTC team that is both the appeal and the limit.
Is it right for your team?
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Points for
Points against
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What it does
- One inbox for team email addresses plus live chat, Facebook, Instagram, SMS, WhatsApp and calling (pricing)
- Standard gets email, live chat and Facebook only; SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and calling are listed from Premium (pricing)
- Notes, mentions, shared drafts and collision detection on every plan (pricing)
- Rules for assignment, tagging and auto-replies. Assignment is rule-based on Standard, round robin on Premium and load-balanced on Advanced (pricing)
- Help center on every plan (1, 2 or 5 depending on tier); CSAT and forms from Premium (pricing)
- Shopify integration shows the customer's contact details and orders inside the inbox (Shopify page)
- Web app plus iOS and Android apps (homepage)
- Missing: order actions. The Shopify page lists viewing contacts and orders and nothing else, so cancelling, refunding or editing an address still happens in Shopify admin (Shopify page)
Pricing at a glance
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $15 | $12 | Minimum 2, Maximum 10 users. |
| Premium | $29 | $23 | Minimum 2 users. |
| Advanced | $49 | $39 | Minimum 3 users. |
Prices are an agent a month, in US dollars. Source: helpwise.io/pricing, checked .
- Per user, per month, three published plans, 7-day free trial with no credit card (pricing)
- Standard $15 per user per month billed monthly, $12 billed annually. Minimum 2 users, maximum 10
- Premium $29 per user per month billed monthly, $23 billed annually. Minimum 2 users
- Advanced $49 per user per month billed monthly, $39 billed annually. Minimum 3 users
- Floors at monthly billing: $30 a month on Standard, $58 on Premium, $147 on Advanced
- Standard's 10-seat cap is where it gets expensive: an 11th agent moves the whole team to Premium, and the bill goes from $150 to $319 a month, billed monthly
- Standard is tight even under the cap: 3 shared inboxes, 3 automation rules, 15 saved replies. Three rules runs out quickly once auto-assign, auto-tag and an out-of-hours reply are set up
- Ecommerce integrations (Shopify included), API access, SMS, WhatsApp and CSAT start at Premium. A Shopify brand is realistically paying $29 per user per month billed monthly, not $15
- SLA rules start at Advanced, $49 per user per month billed monthly
- Add-ons: extra inboxes $49 for 3 per month; chatbot $10 per user per month; cloud phone $5 per active user per month. The page does not say whether the annual discount applies to add-ons
- The pricing page offers no enterprise tier; Advanced is the top published plan
AI pricing (no meter, but no agent either)
- No per-resolution or per-interaction AI fee is published; AI comes with the plan (pricing)
- Standard: no AI features listed
- Premium: "AI Assist and Summarize"
- Advanced adds "AI Auto Prioritization"
- What the AI does, per Helpwise's AI page: drafts replies from conversation context, pulls from your help center and past conversations, rephrases for tone, and writes outbound sales emails (AI page)
- Conflict: the AI page lists the thread summarizer as "Coming Soon", while the pricing page sells Summarize on Premium. Ask to see it working in the trial
- What it can't do: nothing on the AI page describes the AI answering customers by itself or acting on a Shopify order. It drafts replies for an agent and does not resolve tickets on its own
Before you commit
- SSO is contradicted on the same page: the Advanced card lists single sign-on as included, the comparison table marks SSO/SAML as an add-on on Advanced, and no add-on price is published (pricing)
- Chatbot and calling are contradicted too: the Premium card lists "Chatbot, Calling and Whatsapp", while the table shows the chatbot as an add-on on Premium and the add-on list prices both chatbot ($10 per user per month) and cloud phone ($5 per active user per month). Advanced says "Free chatbot and calling". Get your Premium line items in writing
- Per-minute call and per-message SMS costs are not on the pricing page. The status page lists SMS via Twilio, JustCall, Plivo, Dialpad and RingCentral, and WhatsApp via 360dialog, Twilio and the WhatsApp Cloud integration. Ask whether you need your own provider account and who pays the carrier (status)
- "Unlimited*" on rules, SLAs and saved replies carries an asterisk with no footnote we could find
- The security page describes AWS hosting, encryption in transit and at rest, and a penetration-test report on request from dev@helpwise.io. It names no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA attestation and no choice of data region (security)
- Support is same-day email response on every plan, live chat support from Premium and an account manager on Advanced. No 24/7 or phone support is listed (pricing)
- No uptime percentage was readable on the status page; it reported no incidents from 2026-09-23 to 2026-10-07 (status)
- The pricing and AI pages carry a "Last updated on 2024-01-30" stamp and a 2024 copyright line while live in October 2026, so confirm the figures at checkout
Who should buy it, and who should skip it
Who should buy
- DTC teams of 2 to 10 agents who currently share one Gmail or Microsoft 365 login
- Shops that want to see the order next to the conversation and are fine making changes in Shopify admin
- Teams that want a per-seat bill with no AI meter attached
Who should skip it
- Brands that want AI to resolve tickets or change orders without an agent
- Teams past 10 agents hoping to stay on the cheap plan
- Anyone who needs SLA tracking for less than $49 per user per month billed monthly
- Buyers whose security review requires a SOC 2 report or a chosen data region
- Shopify brands planning to run on Standard, which has no ecommerce integration
How we checked this
Prices, plan limits and add-ons were read from Helpwise's pricing page on 2026-10-07, and both billing bases were taken from the page's comparison table, which prints monthly and annual rates side by side. We did not screenshot the rendered page, so we could not confirm which billing toggle it opens on. An Enterprise card and a Twitter channel row appear only in commented-out page code, so neither is published here. Several comparison-table cells, including audit logs, custom integrations and training, show an image whose label and file disagree. We have not stated those features and are waiting on a screenshot. The AI page, Shopify integration page, security page and status page were checked the same day. Where Helpwise's own pages contradicted each other, on SSO, chatbot, calling and summarization, we recorded the conflict rather than the more flattering reading. No review-site text was used.
What’s new in Helpwise
The latest from Helpwise’s own changelog, linked to each post.
- Introducing Custom Fields in Monday.com
helpwise.io