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Who helps you when something breaks
The conclusion first. Checking only the vendors’ own pages, 2 of the 5 — monday.com and Asana — commit to a response time in numbers, and only on their top plans. For the remaining 3 we could not confirm a figure on the vendors’ own pages. And on free plans, some vendors provide no route to a person at all (HubSpot free tools, Asana free plan).
Squarespace is not covered here, because we could not find plan-by-plan support differences stated on its own pages.
Who can reach a person, and through which channel
| Product / plan | Access to a person | Channels | Response-time guarantee | How to read this row |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot free tools | No | Knowledge base and community only | None | During an outage you have no option but to research it yourself |
| HubSpot Starter | Yes | Email, in-app chat | No guarantee (email replies are stated as within 1 business day) | Phone is not included at this tier |
| HubSpot Professional / Enterprise | Yes | Email, chat, phone | No guarantee (as above) | Phone starts here |
| monday.com, all plans | Yes | Chat and other online channels, 24 hours | Not published | The support landing page says "24/7 support for all", but we could not confirm this as a stated plan specification |
| monday.com Enterprise | Yes | The above plus a dedicated customer success manager | Yes (30 minutes / 1 hour / 24 hours) | The most specific of the 5 |
| Asana Free (Personal) | We could not find this stated | Forum, Academy, Help | None | "Asana Support" appears from Starter onwards |
| Asana Starter / Advanced | Yes | Through the Help Center | None | There is no mention of 24-hour coverage |
| Asana Enterprise / Enterprise+ | Yes | 24 hours, English | Yes (2 business hours) | A figure written into the contract documents |
| Semrush Free | Yes (limited scope) | Contact form | None | Billing and account matters only |
| Semrush paid (SEO / Starter / Pro+ / Advanced) | Yes | Contact form | Not published | Product questions are accepted as well |
| Semrush Enterprise | Yes | 24-hour support | Only the wording "Enterprise SLA"; we could not confirm a figure | The numbers are not published |
| Shopify Basic / Grow | Yes | Chat only, 24 hours | Email typically 48 hours (though email is not available here) | Neither phone nor email is available |
| Shopify Advanced | Yes | Enhanced chat | Not published | We could not confirm what it covers |
| Shopify Plus | Yes | Phone, email, chat | Email typically 48 hours | This is the only plan that comes with phone |
Source: each vendor’s own help and pricing pages (checked August 2026). URLs at the end. A knowledge base is a database of instructions the vendor publishes; you search it yourself rather than asking a person.
On free and lower plans, can you reach a person?
HubSpot free-tools users are pointed to the knowledge base and the community, and nothing else. Even on paid plans there is a seat condition (a seat is the right for 1 person to use the service; per-seat pricing is the standard SaaS billing model).
Even under a Starter contract, an employee without a seat cannot contact support. Letting a staff member use the tool without buying them a seat is not a workable arrangement.
Shopify offers 24-hour chat on every plan, but its own help pages state that reaching a support agent requires logging in to the store. It does not help with the kind of trouble that stops you logging in. Semrush free accounts can also submit inquiries, but only on billing, account, legal and security matters — nothing that concerns the product itself.
Only 2 vendors state a response time in numbers
The vendors that write a response time into their contract documents are monday.com (Enterprise; Critical within 30 minutes, among others) and Asana (Enterprise and above; within 2 business hours, in English) — 2 vendors, and in both cases the top plan only. What HubSpot provides is a target rather than a guarantee: email within 1 business day. The "typically within 5 minutes" wording for the Call me callback is tied to a mobile app feature discontinued on September 3, 2024, and we could not confirm a response target for the current phone support on the vendor’s own pages. For Semrush and Shopify we have not been able to confirm response-time figures either (Shopify states typically 48 hours for email only).
The 24-hour coverage described here assumes support in English. Whether a person answers in Japanese in the middle of the night, Japan time, is a separate question: for all 5 vendors we could not find published hours for Japanese-language support.
What an SLA actually contains, and the cost of moving up a plan (Shopify Basic to Plus is $27,252 a year, for example), are covered in a separate piece, "How much does a response-time guarantee cost?".
What can a lower plan do when something breaks?
| What happened | What a user on a lower plan can do | If it is still not resolved |
|---|---|---|
| It went down at the weekend or overnight | Shopify Basic: 24-hour chat (login required) / monday.com: chat on every plan / HubSpot free tools: no route / Asana: no mention of 24 hours outside Enterprise | A shop taking 100,000 yen a day loses 50,000 yen if recovery slips by half a day. That compares directly with the annual gap to the higher plan |
| You can no longer log in | Shopify: chat is out of reach because a login is the precondition / HubSpot users without a seat: no route | Nothing is left to try. That alone can be reason enough to choose a higher plan |
All 5 vendors publish free learning material (HubSpot Academy is described as "100% free & online"). That is not a point of comparison, though, because all 5 have it. The question that does matter is whether you could resolve the problem on your own from course material, with no support route open.
Who should not choose these products for their support
Anyone considering Shopify Basic, Grow or Advanced who will not be comfortable without a phone line. Reaching a phone means jumping all the way to Plus, which turns the $27,252 annual gap into the price of that phone line. In many cases, retaining 1 outside e-commerce partner is the more realistic option.
Anyone planning to start with HubSpot free tools and ask for help when they get stuck. The free tools have no human route. Even on paid plans an employee without a seat cannot contact support, so who inside the company is allowed to ask has to be settled before signing.
Anyone who wants to start with Asana for free and roll it out internally. On the pricing table, "Asana Support" first appears at Starter.
Anyone who needs a person answering in Japanese late at night. For all 5 vendors we could not find published hours for Japanese-language support.
If you are unsure
Source: each vendor’s own help and pricing pages (checked August 2026)
Do not look at the response-time figures first. The first thing to calculate is how much disappears in 1 day if your own operation stops. If that amount is below the annual gap to the higher plan, support is not a reason for the choice. As long as 3 of the 5 vendors publish no response time, "higher plan equals faster" remains an untested hypothesis.
Sources (all checked August 2026)
- HubSpot: how to get support, seat conditions, email within 1 business day, and the end of the Call me feature (September 3, 2024)
- HubSpot: channels by plan and onboarding fees ($3,000 / $7,000)
- HubSpot Academy (100% free & online)
- monday.com SLA for the Enterprise plan (30 minutes / 1 hour / 24 hours, 99.9% uptime, 5–30% credits, claims within 90 days)
- monday.com Enterprise: dedicated CSM and the note on additional cost
- monday.com support landing page (24/7 support for all)
- monday.com pricing page (24-hour support stated for Enterprise only)
- Asana Service Level Addendum (Enterprise and Enterprise+ only / 2 business hours / holidays excluded)
- Asana: support wording by plan, Customer Success options, 99.9% uptime SLA
- Semrush pricing page (plan line-up; Enterprise = Dedicated account manager, Enterprise SLA & 24/7 support)
- Semrush: scope of inquiries from a free account
- Semrush customer support terms (via web form; no response-time clause)
- Shopify: support routes, phone and email conditions, login required, email typically 48 hours
- Shopify pricing page (Basic $29 / Grow $79 / Advanced $299 / Plus from $2,300, support row)
Amounts are in US dollars, excluding tax. We could not confirm the following on the vendors’ own pages: response times for Semrush and Shopify (other than Shopify email), the definition of Shopify Advanced’s "enhanced chat", the basis for monday.com’s 24-hour support on all plans as a plan specification, any remedy where Asana misses its response time, Enterprise pricing for monday.com and Asana, and published hours for Japanese-language support at all 5 vendors. Terms change, so please check each vendor’s own pages before signing.
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