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Overview
Overdesk works with Help Scout, Zendesk, Intercom and FreeScout. On all four it drafts replies from your docs and your past conversations, triages incoming conversations, and reports on your queue. The differences come from what each help desk lets another product do, and this page lays them out side by side.
What each help desk supports
| Help Scout | Zendesk | Intercom | FreeScout | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drafts arrive as | Internal note, or an unsent draft reply | Internal note | Internal note | Internal note, or an unsent draft reply |
| Editing or discarding a draft in Overdesk | Updates an unsent draft reply in place, otherwise adds a note saying what changed | Adds a note saying what changed | Adds a note saying what changed | Adds a note saying what changed |
| Help-center articles in the knowledge base | Help Scout Docs, with a Docs API key | Zendesk Help Center | Intercom Help Center | Not available |
| Saved replies in the knowledge base | Saved replies | Macros | Macros | Not available |
| Escalation can assign to | People and teams | Agents and groups | Named on the note, not assigned | People |
| Tags | Yes | Yes | Yes | With FreeScout's Tags module |
| Conversation link on the Agent drafts page | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Allowed inboxes entries | all or mailbox numbers | all, or a group number for scheduled runs only | all | all or mailbox numbers |
| Webhook signing secret | Overdesk generates it | Zendesk shows it to you | Intercom shows it to you | FreeScout shows it to you |
Every help desk gives the knowledge base your resolved conversations, and every one can have its stale conversations closed when you turn that on.
What is the same everywhere
- Overdesk never messages a customer. Every draft is placed unsent, where only your team can see it, and a person sends the reply from the help desk. The one exception is a FreeScout draft reply on an API and Webhooks module older than 1.0.103, which may be sent: see Where drafts go.
- Drafts appear on the conversation and on the Agent drafts page in Overdesk.
- Auto-draft replies checks for new work every 15 minutes, and webhooks let a new conversation be drafted in near real time.
- Credentials are checked against the help desk before they are saved, and stored encrypted.
A note on draft replies
A draft reply sits in the composer, ready to edit and send, which saves your team copying text out of a note. Help Scout and FreeScout can hold one; on FreeScout it needs the API and Webhooks module 1.0.103 or newer, as the FreeScout page explains. Zendesk and Intercom have no API for filling in the composer, so on those two every draft arrives as an internal note. Where drafts go explains the setting.
More than one help desk
A workspace can connect more than one help desk, depending on the plan, and drafts on all of them in the same run. See Connect your help desk for the limits and Allowed inboxes for naming inboxes across two help desks.