The Best Help Desk Software of 2024

Customer service can make or break your business. It doesn’t matter how great your product or services might be; if customers feel they can’t rely on your support, the relationship can quickly turn sour. In fact, over 65% of people have higher customer service expectations than they did only three to five years ago.

The bottom line: As companies compete in a saturated market on customer service alone, you can’t afford to slip up even a little.

It stands to reason that the more your business expands, the more queries you’ll have to answer. At some point, manually handling support requests becomes nearly impossible.

This is where help desk software comes in.

A high-quality help desk platform should enable you to consolidate customer queries into one inbox, no matter which channel they originated from. It should also permit you to allocate tickets to specific agents and keep all conversation data at your fingertips to provide faster, more reliable support.

With all that said, this article explores the best help desk software of 2023 for taking your customer support to the next level. More specifically, we’ll look at each tool’s key features, pricing, pros, cons, and identify who they’re best suited for.

Let’s dive in…

1. Zendesk

Best Overall

When it comes to customer support software, Zendesk is one of the oldest contenders on the market. They’ve been around since 2007 and have since amassed over 160,000 customers. Zendesk also won #1 in Gartner’s Digital Customer Service use case.

Zendeks offers a complete customer service solution that’s easy to scale. More specifically, it comes with a chatbot that can use language mimicking your brand’s voice. It also facilitates omnichannel customer service, allowing you to meet customers where they’re at. I.e., live chat, social, email, voice, SMS messaging, etc. You can also build an integrated self-help center and community forum.

Automation and AI-powered bots make personalized support at scale possible- even if your agents are busy or out of the office. With its wide range of features and flexible pricing plans, Zendesk suits startups, small businesses, large firms, and enterprises. So, rest assured, you won’t have to jump ship if your business expands.

Key Features

• Omnichannel: Manage and respond to queries from several channels from one unified place, including social, text, voice, email, live chat, etc.
• Analytics and reporting: Generate custom reports for all channels that include qualitative metrics (should you wish)
• Answer bot: Provide 24/7 support with AI-driven chatbots. This bot works alongside your team and offers customers self-help articles from your knowledge base.
• Knowledge base and forum: Create an online knowledge base with helpful articles and even establish a community forum where customers can chat amongst themselves.
• Integrations: There are over 1,000+ pre-built integrations available.

Zendesk Pricing

There are three premium plans billed annually:

• Suite Team: $49 per agent per month. This comes with Zendesk’s full ticketing system, omnichannel support, automations, and a unified agent workspace.
• Suite Growth: $79 per agent per month. This unlocks the self-service customer portal and customizable ticket layouts.
• Suite professional: $99 per agent per month. This unlocks community forums, private conversation threads, and conversation routing based on your agent’s skill set. It also comes with custom reporting and analytics.

2. Salesforce Helpdesk

Best for Established and Fast-growing Businesses

Salesforce provides various business software solutions, including sales, marketing, commerce, and customer service platforms. Founded in 1999, Salesforce first entered the market with its (CRM) system. It was one of the first cloud subscription services available. Since then, the company has continued innovating and building trust with its loyal customer base.

The Service Cloud promises to boost customer loyalty with AI-powered workflows and automation. You can also provide personalized service at every touchpoint and improve your call center management with Salesforce’s smart productivity tools. As such, it’s one of the best platforms for businesses with their own call centers.

However, it’s not the easiest platform to use. Thanks to its wide range of sophisticated features, Salesforce has a steep learning curve. That said, it offers more affordable pricing than Zendesk and provides everything growing businesses need to step up their customer service game.

Key Features

• Self-service: You can build an online knowledge base to help customers find the answers they’re looking for. On top of that, you can see which articles customers have already looked at to provide more effective customer support.
• Social channels and phone support: Answer queries from any social channel from one centralized place. You can also add telephony integrations to integrate your call center with Salesforce’s Service Cloud.
• Field service: Reduce in-person visits by providing support through phone and video appointments. You can prioritize essential projects, assign and manage jobs, and monitor safety protocols from any mobile device.
• AI: Speed up customer self-service with Salesforce’s chatbots. You can guide customers through multistep actions and maintain natural language via a conversational chatbot in real-time.
• Agent workplace: Agents can handle cases from the convenience of one screen, regardless of how customers got in touch. They can access their own knowledge base, and Salesforce can automatically route customers to the most skilled and available agents.
• Reporting and analytics: Access all your KPIs from one place, and resolve cases faster by viewing and acting upon analytic trends. Analytics are embedded in the agent’s workspace for better visibility into case volumes, agent and mobile worker activity, chatbot performance, etc.

Salesforce Helpdesk Pricing

Salesforce’s Service Cloud comes with four pricing plans- each billed annually per user, per month.

• Essentials: $25 per user per month. This offers all the basics, such as case management, service console apps, telephony integrations, and the knowledge base.
• Professional: $75 per user per month. This also comes with a complete service CRM suitable for teams of any size.
• Enterprise: $150 per user per month. You can customize your CRM and reports with advanced analytics.
• Unlimited: $300 per user month. You get everything above, plus 24/7 support.

3. Zoho Desk

Best Free Plan

 

Zoho Desk might be for you if you’re a small business looking for a free help desk solution. The platform dates back to the mid-nineties and is well renowned for its simplicity. Over 50 million users rely on this service provider.

Zoho Desk has useful automation features to make your agents’ lives a little easier. For instance, an AI assistant can speak to customers and identify repeated keywords and opinions in your customers’ text to analyze their feelings. You can also auto-tag tickets to help agents identify the query’s subject matter, build a knowledge base, and offer customers other self-service functions.

Analytics also cover time-tracking for individual tickets. Plus, you can generate real-time reports for big-picture metrics across your entire customer support system.

Key Features

• Ticket management: Manage support tickets from social media, telephony, email, etc., from one place.
• AI: A chatbot provides customers with solutions, auto-tags tickets, and analyzes customer sentiment from their messages.
• Self-service: You can create a branded self-service portal for customers.
• Agent productivity: Tickets are automatically organized to help boost productivity. Agents can also craft better responses by reviewing the customer’s history, using templates, and accessing the knowledge base. Your team can also collaborate on tickets and manage tickets on the go from the mobile app.
• Automation: Send automated notifications concerning ticket progress, assign tickets to specific agents, and update records.

Zoho Desk Pricing

There’s a free plan for up to three agents, with a private knowledge base accessible only to your team, email ticketing, and customer management tools. Beyond this, three premium plans are priced per agent per month. You can choose to pay monthly or annually (with the latter, you’ll enjoy a slight saving) as listed below:

• Standard: $14 per agent per month. This unlocks automated workflows, product-based ticket management, integrations, and reports.
• Professional: $23 per agent per month. This also comes with the activity module, which covers tasks, calls, and events. Each activity is assigned a start time, duration, priority level, and other parameters to help agents manage their time and responsibilities better.
• Enterprise: $40 per agent per month. This plan includes a live-chat functionality, the AI chat tool, contract management, advanced process management, and much more.

4. Freshdesk

Best for Small Businesses

Freshdesk is the best help desk system for small businesses. However, customer service is only a part of Freshworks’ overall toolkit. For example, Freshdesk provides a ticket management system with AI automation that routes tickets to the most relevant, available agents. Their AI is called Freddy. Freddy also works as a chatbot, similar to the bots offered by other tools in this list.

In addition, agents have a shared inbox, so they can collaborate on more complex queries. Omnichannel support is available across email, phone, chat, and more.

The platform also comes with helpful website widgets, such as web forms, personalized content, and page-click detection. All of which come in handy for finetuning your user experience, a neat element that other software hasn’t placed as much focus on.

Key Features

• Omnichannel support: You can consolidate customer tickets across email, phone, chat, WhatsApp Business, and other social media
• Resolve tickets faster: Eliminate manual tasks with advanced automation rules, and solve customer queries faster by routing tickets to available agents with the relevant skills.
• Stay on top of CSAT Goals: Use customizable analytics to track team performance, identify bottlenecks, and monitor your team’s performance.
• Self-service: Create an online knowledge base and automatically harness AI-fuelled chatbots that link customers to relevant articles.
• Collaboration tools: Collaborate more effectively with in-app collaboration features, agent collision detection, shared ownership of tickets and tasks, and more.

Freshworks Pricing

Freshdesk comes with a free plan for up to ten agents. This comes with:

• An email and social ticketing system
• Ticket dispatch features
• You can create a knowledge base
• You can generate ticket trend reports

On top of this, there are three premium plans, which you can further upgrade to include omnichannel support. In addition, you can opt to pay either monthly or annually for extra savings.

• Growth: $15 per agent per month unlocks automation, collision detection, time tracking, helpdesk reports, and more.
• Pro: $49 per agent per month – this also comes with custom roles, custom reports, apps, customer segmentation, and you can create a multilingual knowledge base.
• Enterprise: $79 per agent per month – this unlocks an audit log and all Freddy features, including the assist bot, the email bot, auto-triage, article suggester, and canned response suggester.

The omnichannel plans:

• Growth Omnichannel: $29 per agent per month. This unlocks the Chatbot Freddy, including chatbot analytics and the chatbot builder. You can also create conversation flows for regular message topics to help customers find answers quicker.
• Pro Omnichannel: $59 per agent per month. This unlocks omni-routing and enables co-browsing. This is where customers share their screens with agents. You also benefit from custom reports, roles, and permissions, and you can create an omnichannel knowledge base.
• Enterprise Omnichannel: $99 per agent per month. This comes with Freddy’s other features, including abandoned call metrics, user authentication, service-level monitoring, and more.

5. HubSpot Service Hub

Best CRM-Driven Help Desk

 

Hubspot is another giant in the digital marketing realm. It provides a wide range of software solutions alongside some handy free tools. As such, expanding your toolkit across sales, operations, marketing, etc., is a breeze.

Its CRM system is at the core of HubSpot’s offering, making it an excellent option for managing customers and progressing them through your funnel. As a result, Hubspot’s service hub is tightly interwoven with Hubspot’s CRM.

HubSpot provides an immense range of features, making it an incredibly scalable solution. But, as a result, it also comes with a steep learning curve. The Service Hub boasts a full suite of help desk automation tools for handling your online knowledge base, chatbots, customer surveys, and more. In addition, Hubspot offers a wide range of team management tools on higher plans.

Plus, all data feeds into powerful real-time reporting, whereby you can customize several report dashboards.

Key Features

• Customer portal: Customers benefit from a secure portal where they can track their tickets and conversations.
• Knowledgebase: Convert frequently asked questions into a searchable library of videos and self-help articles. You can also create ‘playbooks’ for agents that provide helpful resources and guides on giving the best possible customer service.
• Omni-channel messaging: Access multiple channels from one inbox and seamlessly switch between them
• Live chat: Help customers on your website in real-time via live chat. Visitors are also automatically routed to the right people on your team.
• VoIP calls: Call customers directly from HubSpot’s platform and benefit from features like call logging and analytics
• Fully integrated CRM: Get more context about your customers by automatically tracking customer details and interactions
• AI-powered insights: Capture details from every call and chat to analyze customer sentiment.

HubSpot Service Hub Pricing

You can access a range of free tools, including Service tools like ticketing, email scheduling, live chat, a shared inbox, and basic bots. After that, there are three Service Hub plans. All of which are paid per user per month and billed annually.

• Starter: $45 per month for two paid users. It’s then $23 per month for each additional user.
• Professional: $450 per month for a minimum of five users. Additional users cost $90 per user per month.
• Enterprise: $1,200 for ten users per month and additional users at $120 per month.

You can also opt to bundle the Service Hub with HubSpot’s other tools. However, HubSpot’s pricing is pretty complex, so we recommend visiting their website for more information.

6. HappyFox

Best All-In-One Helpdesk Solution

 

HappyFox offers a range of services. Aside from customer service tools, they also provide IT and operations support. Based in California, their focus is on making their customers happy.

The HelpDesk is the platform’s main toolkit and includes email ticketing with ticket templates. In addition, you can send SMS notifications to customers when their tickets are being processed and build an online knowledge base, including a community forum. You can also create customer satisfaction surveys and customize your helpdesk to suit your brand (including a custom domain).

Like many other tools, HappyFox offers an AI assistant for conversational ticketing. In addition, there’s a live chat tool, a chatbot, and you can launch automated workflows.

Key Features

• Omnichannel ticketing – Create custom ticket queues, manage customer conversations from multiple channels, and automatically categorize incoming requests by topic, including support, sales, marketing, or billing.
• Canned actions – Respond faster with templated responses to frequently asked questions.
• Automation – Automate support processes with smart rules.
• Surveys – Send surveys and get feedback from customers.
• Task management – Create and tick off tasks, set deadlines, organize pending tasks, and get notifications for due dates or when tasks are assigned to team members.
• Reports – Monitor and analyze your customer support. Track SLAs, review customer support performance and agent activity, view inflow reports, and more.

HappyFox Pricing

First, there’s a plan that can be billed monthly, annually, every two years, or even every three years, based on how many agents you have. Or, if you have a big support team, some plans permit unlimited agents.

HappyFox’s pricing is among the most flexible we’ve seen. Here are the prices for annual billing:

• Mighty: $29 per agent per month
• Fantastic: $49 per agent per month
• Enterprise: $69 per agent per month
• Enterprise Plus: $89 per agent per month

Unlimited agent plans are considerably more expensive. However, they start to warrant themselves if you have more than 52 agents.

• Starter: $1,499 per month
• Growth: $1,999 per month
• Scale: $2,999 per month
• Scale Plus: $4,999 per month

7. Live Agent

Best for Ease of Use

 

LiveAgent is a simpler, more intuitive platform best suited to beginners looking for ease of use. The product provides all the key features you need to deliver a great customer experience. For instance, it comes with an advanced ticketing system, live chat for your website, a customer self-service portal and knowledge base, and an omnichannel inbox. Not to mention, call-center software is also built-in! On top of this, LiveAgent has some of the most affordable pricing plans on this list.

Key Features

• Advanced ticketing: Provide seamless customer support across every channel, including phone, email, live chat, and social media. You can also create department and responsibility rules to route tickets to the right agent.
• Live chat: Take a sneak peek at incoming messages so that your agents can start preparing a response before the customer hits “send.” It also has automatic chat routing and a built-in CRM to help manage your contacts.
• Knowledge base: Create an online knowledge base brimming with helpful articles.
• Customer portal: Customers can review their tickets from your branded customer self-service portal
• Social media: Answer customers on social media within your Live Agent platform, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, and Viber.

LiveAgent Pricing

Live agent comes with a free plan. After that, there are three premium plans, paid monthly based on the number of agents you have.

The free plan comes with one email address for ticketing, one custom chat button and only features very limited reports.

It’s worth noting that on the Ticket and Ticket+Chat plan, you need to pay an additional $39 per month to access social media channels like Instagram, Viber, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Ticket: $15 per agent per month. Unlimited email addresses, ticket history, advanced reporting, customer portal, and forum
• Ticket+Chat: $29 per agent per month. This adds unlimited chat buttons, feedback management, real-time visitor monitoring, and chat satisfaction surveys.
• All-inclusive: $49 per agent per month. This adds call-center support, video calls, and call routing.

8. Jira Service Desk

Best IT Ticketing System

Jira is a project and ticket management tool Australian software company Atlassian created. Jira comes with many tool subsets, but its main software concerns itself with issue tracking, making it particularly effective for IT ticketing.

The Service platform is still relatively new and focuses on aligning IT teams with other departments like sales. In other words, it’s not as concerned with customer support as it is with operator support. Instead, the key goal is to provide speedy resolutions so that other departments can get back to work.

It comes with high-velocity service management, and tickets can be tracked in real-time. Jira also pays special attention to asset and knowledge management, which are vital for effective IT team collaborations.

Key Features

• Request management: Teams can manage queries from one platform to rapidly respond to incidents, run fast-track root cause analysis, and record workarounds for other departments.
• Change management: Inform your IT operations teams with rich contextual information surrounding software changes.
• Asset and knowledge management: Store assets such as product catalogs and IT documentation so that teams can effectively manage inventory and track ownership. You can also enable self-service to deflect more requests to the knowledge base by routing team members to the right articles.
• Mobile App: Manage IT service requests on the go with the mobile app.
• Smart forms: Add dynamic and customizable smart forms to your customer service portals

Jira Service Desk Pricing

Jira’s pricing works on a per agent, per month basis. However, the more agents you sign up, the greater the discount.

A free plan for three agents allows small teams to plan and track work efficiently. After that, there are three premium plans. Prices based on 50 agents are as follows:

• Standard: $16.50 per agent per month, 250 GB of file storage
• Premium: $40.80 per agent per month, unlimited file storage
• Enterprise: Get in touch for a quote

The Best Free Help Desk Software

Help desk software can quickly get expensive. Luckily, for those looking to dip their toes in the water, a few free versions are available. Most notably:

• Zoho Desk
• Freshdesk
• Hubspot Service Hub (Free plan)

However, it’s important to consider the limitations of such freemium versions. For example, most restrict the number of agents that can access your help desk, so you’ll need to upgrade to facilitate larger customer support teams. Others miss important features, such as knowledge base creation, the ability to generate reports, and/or automation. Unfortunately, many of the key benefits of using help desk software greatly depreciate without such features.

As with anything, you get what you pay for, so it’s often worth considering a premium service. But always request a free trial demo or utilize a trial to see if the features align with your needs and warrant the cost.

Help Desk Software Buyers Guide

Before wrapping up the guide, here’s all you have to know before choosing the best ticketing software:

What is Help Desk Software?

In short, help desk software can help you provide more effective customer support by streamlining omnichannel communications into one centralized inbox. That’s as well as automating tedious tasks that take time away from your customers. For example, in response to easily answered questions, you can use help desk software to help customers find relevant self-help documentation. Some provide an intuitive chatbot for this feature. Ticketing software should also automatically allocate support requests to available agents or agents with the most relevant skill sets.

What are the Benefits of Using Help Desk Software?

Here are some of the best reasons to consider investing in help desk software:

Save Time

Automation ensures agents don’t waste time on tedious tasks. The same goes for self-service features that enable you to provide customers with the necessary information. The result? Customers are less likely to want to speak to a human agent, freeing up your customer support team to improve the customer experience of customers who get in touch.

Save Money

When you streamline your customer support strategy, you might not need as many agents on your team as you did before. Thus, saving on staffing costs.

Reduce Frustration

Help desk software helps you provide superior customer service, so your customers don’t have to struggle with easily avoidable frustration. For example:

• They won’t have to repeat an issue to different customer service reps.
• Customers might be able to help themselves via self-help tools.
• Shoppers can be routed to agents with relevant skills.

All of this goes a long way to providing higher-quality customer support.

What to Look For in the Best Help Desk Software?

Here are some key considerations to help you choose the best help desk software for your business:

Pricing

Price is an important consideration when choosing help desk software. It’s wise to look for software with free and affordable plans. But, more importantly, tools that provide good value for money that won’t force you to upgrade for features you’ll likely need in the future.

Analytics and Reports

The best help desk software should come with powerful analytics and reporting features to monitor why customers seek support and if the support they receive is sufficiently effective. In addition, help desk software should allow you to conduct surveys and analyze sentiments from calls and chats to get clearer insights into your customers’ pain points. Then with this information, you’re better positioned to improve your product, services, and overarching customer support strategy.

Automation

One of the greatest benefits of help desk software is that it can reduce the time spent on tedious, repeatable tasks. So, it’s important to check that your chosen software can significantly streamline your workflows.

Self-Help Services

Human customer support is great, but did you know that 40% of customers prefer self-service options over human contact? That’s why it’s vital that whatever help desk software you choose comes with the ability to create easy-to-navigate knowledge bases for your customers.

Help Desk Software FAQ

You can find some frequently asked questions below.

Choosing The Right Help Desk Software

So, there you have it. That’s our list of the best help desk software in 2023. Old giants remain strong, while more agile, younger companies are starting to offer more affordable solutions.

If you’re a small business looking for help desk tools, we recommend Live Agent for its affordable pricing or Freshdesk. In contrast, IT companies should check out Jira’s Service Desk for unique asset management features. Whereas more established companies are in good hands with Hubspot Service Hub, Salesforce Helpdesk, or Zendesk.

Remember, when choosing a Helpdesk, it’s essential to consider which features are the most important to you and which metrics you’d most like to track. While the software mentioned above shares key components, their focuses are subtly different. So, bear that in mind before making any final purchasing decisions.

Let us know in the comments below which tools you rely on to provide your customer support.