Help Scout Docs: Set Up a Knowledge Base Site, Plan by Plan

Help Scout Docs is the knowledge base built into every Help Scout plan, Free included. You get 1 Docs site on Free, 2 on Standard, 3 on Plus and 5 on Pro, and each extra site costs $20 per site per month billed annually or $24 per site per month billed monthly.^[1] Free caps its site at 10 articles, while paid plans set no article limit. The verdict is short. Docs is a capable public help center with real SEO controls and, from Standard, custom branding, but a sign-in-only site needs Plus or Pro and some developer time. Extra Docs sites are billed on top of the per-user plan price, which grows with headcount; our Help Scout pricing guide has the full math.

How many Docs sites each plan includes

Extra sites are sold on paid plans, and by our arithmetic one extra site comes to $240 a year billed annually or $288 a year billed monthly. Deleting an extra site stops its billing at once, which suits a short-lived site such as an event FAQ. Each site gets its own subdomain, so separate products, brands or languages can run on their own address, logo and colors. The site count is the real constraint.

Hitting the cap on Standard is an arithmetic question. Moving the whole team from Standard to Plus adds $20 per user per month billed annually, while a third site adds a flat $20 per site per month billed annually. For a one-person team the two cost the same. From two users up, buying the site is cheaper. The exception is private content: no add-on unlocks Restricted Docs below Plus, so there the upgrade is the only route.

Building the structure: collections, categories, articles

Docs uses a three-tier hierarchy. Collections sit at the top and can be public or private; categories group articles inside a collection; articles hold the content. One rule shapes the plan: an article belongs to exactly one collection but can sit in several categories. Put audiences in collections (customers, partners, staff) and topics in categories (billing, setup, troubleshooting), then cross-list an article wherever readers might look. The home page can lead with Most Popular Articles or with Categories.

Plan deletion rights before anyone starts editing. By default every user can edit, publish and delete articles. Deleting a collection removes its articles and categories, deleting a category leaves its articles Uncategorized, and the customer cannot recover any deleted article, category or collection.^[2] Unpublishing is the safe move. It keeps the article and its revision history inside Help Scout, so retire content that way. Custom per-user permissions start on Plus.

Writing in the Docs editor

The editor is a rich-text editor with auto-save and revision history, and it accepts basic Markdown only, not extended syntax. You can start an article by uploading an HTML, Markdown or plain-text file, and drop HTML blocks into the body. Images can be PNG, GIF or JPG up to 10 MB, and Docs resizes them to at most 1,000 pixels wide and 800 high, so crop screenshots first. Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Loom or Wistia embed from a URL. On Plus and Pro, AI Assist inside the editor fixes grammar, changes length or tone, and translates.

Putting Docs on your own domain and brand

A new site lives on a subdomain of helpscoutdocs.com. Moving it to your own address costs nothing extra, with one firm limit: Docs supports a custom subdomain such as help.yourdomain.com, not a root domain or a directory path.^[3] You point one CNAME record at the site, and only one, since extra records can open security holes. Help Scout then issues a free 90-day Domain Validated certificate, normally within minutes, and renews it automatically. Cloudflare-served certificates get only limited support.

Branding runs from point-and-click to full code. Custom site branding (presets or custom CSS) needs Standard, Plus or Pro. Without code you set the logo, favicon, touch icon and colors. Beyond that, upload or link a custom stylesheet, or paste CSS into the head code field, which also accepts custom JavaScript with jQuery already loaded. Keep the site description to 50 characters and the meta description to 160. One trap is easy to miss: the Beacon widget on your app does not pick up the custom CSS or code you wrote for Docs.

Search, SEO and the Docs report

Public sites are indexed by search engines unless you add a noindex meta tag in the custom head code. Docs builds a sitemap.xml automatically, and only the slug part of an article URL is editable. Redirects send visitors and crawlers from old URLs to new ones; the Account Owner, Administrators and users with the custom Docs permission manage them. Keeping links from a previous help desk has one condition. The CNAME must use the same domain the old help center used.

Site search weighs fields in a fixed order: article keywords first, then an exact title match, a partial title match, close keywords and finally body text. That makes the keywords field the cheapest fix in Docs. When customers search for a term your article never uses, a keyword closes the gap without a rewrite. The Docs report shows most-viewed articles, failed searches and article ratings, and failed searches are the to-do list: each one is a question your site did not answer.

Ratings are on by default for new sites, appear inside Beacon too, and each visitor rates an article once. An article shows a happy face at 80% positive or more and a sad face at 59% or less. Mind the blind spots. Searches from the reply editor and from the API stay out of the report unless the API calls the Update View endpoint, so the report undercounts what agents look up for customers.

Keeping content private: three options

Private collections are the simplest route. They are visible only to Help Scout users, never on the public site, and can still feed Beacon and Scout, which makes them a natural home for internal procedures. A Docs site cannot be password-protected for outside visitors, though. Customer-only content therefore needs Restricted Docs or a Beacon placed behind your own login.

Restricted Docs puts a whole site behind your sign-in, on Plus and Pro only, and the Docs API is currently the only way to switch it on.^[4] The flow:

1. Call the site-restrictions endpoint with the callback method and your sign-in URL; Help Scout returns a shared secret.
2. Help Scout redirects each visitor to your sign-in page.
3. Your server signs a JSON Web Token with HS512 and that secret, carrying the visitor's email, issue time and expiry.
4. You send the token to the site's auth callback, and the visitor lands on the requested page.

Test in a private window, because a signed-in Help Scout user skips the callback. Disabling the restriction makes the site public again, and you must disable it through the API before any downgrade to Standard.

Beacon behind a login is the third route: a private Docs site shown only through a Beacon on pages customers already sign into. A site beyond your plan's allowance adds the monthly site charge, and hiding a site does not remove pages search engines already indexed. Whatever the route, keep sensitive data out. Docs is not built for customer data and lacks the GDPR and HIPAA coverage of the rest of Help Scout.

Languages, migration and the AI that reads Docs

Each Docs site has its own translation settings, so the native route is one site per language. A Standard account running English and Spanish fills both included sites; a third language means an extra site. AI Assist in Docs, in beta on Plus and Pro, can translate article text. To avoid extra sites, Weglot translates a site dynamically and its translated pages get indexed, Crowdin syncs chosen collections manually or on a schedule, and Transifex collects content from public sites.

Help Scout's standard data import does not bring knowledge-base articles. Zendesk help-center articles move through a separate tool that support switches on, and anything else goes through the Docs API, which creates articles from uploaded HTML, text or Markdown files. The API needs Standard or higher and allows 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 requests per account per 10 minutes for one, two, or three or more sites, counting admin-screen edits. Our Help Scout API guide covers the details.

Docs also feeds Help Scout's AI. Scout (formerly AI Answers) answers customers from a connected Docs site, and edits reach it immediately; it is billed at $0.75 per resolution on Standard, Plus and Pro, with 3 months free for new accounts and a monthly cap you can set. Resolutions are billed monthly in arrears on top of the per-user plan price; see our Help Scout pricing guide. AI Drafts, on Plus and Pro, uses Docs articles for reply drafts. Every Docs site carries a built-in Beacon with a contact form, plus live chat from Standard and Scout where it is switched on; the contact form cannot be switched off alone. Our Beacon guide covers the widget.

The bottom line

Docs is worth setting up on day one because it does three jobs: a public help center with sitemap, redirects and keyword search, an internal library in private collections, and the source that Scout and AI Drafts read. Start on the included sites, add keywords to every article, and read failed searches every month. Upgrade for Restricted Docs only when customer-only content is a real requirement and a developer can wire the sign-in. Keep deletion rights tight. Nothing deleted comes back.