Best Helpdesk Software

Customer inquiries come from every direction at all hours of the day. Without the right software, it gets chaotic and it can be challenging to stay organized. When we researched the best helpdesk software on the market, we identified Freshdesk as the best choice for most businesses. It supports most major support channels, is beginner-friendly without sacrificing advanced functionality, and comes with a free-forever plan that allows you to try it out as long you’d like.

The Best Helpdesk Software for Most

If you’re looking for an easy way to consolidate all of your support inquiries in one place, Freshdesk is the way to go. It supports live chat, email, phone, and social media inquiries, making it easy to centralize customer support for your entire business. Plus, it’s effortless to use and won’t break the bank with plans starting at just $15 per agent per month.

It also comes with powerful collaboration and automation tools designed to empower your team to get more done in less time without expanding your team.

The 6 Best Helpdesk Software Options to Consider:

1. Freshdesk – Best helpdesk software for most
2. HubSpot – Best free customer service CRM software
3. Freshservice – Best helpdesk software for IT support
4. Agiloft – Best all-in-one customer service suite
5. ManageEngine – Best for managed service providers
6. Zendesk Support – Best helpdesk tool for small businesses

When It Makes Sense to Invest Into Helpdesk Software

If you offer customer support in any capacity, helpdesk software is a great way to centralize your support processes. But it’s not for everyone. It only makes sense to buy helpdesk software once you’ve outgrown your existing customer support system. 

If you only get five or ten customer service inquiries a week, it should be easy enough for one person to manage via email or live chat. So, it doesn’t make sense to change things—if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

But what happens when that number jumps up to 50, 100, or 1,000 requests a week? At scale, managing this many inquires relying on email or chat is impossible while still adhering to the quality standards you expect.

Which is exactly why helpdesk software is essential as your business grows. It’s better to invest when things start ramping up, rather than waiting until it’s too late.

The last thing you want is a backlog of unresolved customer service tickets piling up over time.

Many businesses can also benefit from helpdesk software for internal use, too. It can help speed up IT response times to ensure your team’s never held back because of technical problems.

The bottom line: If your current support system is manageable, you don’t need to change anything. However, it’s critical to invest in the right helpdesk software before your internal and external systems are completely exhausted.

#1 – Freshdesk — The Best Helpdesk Software for Most

Freshdesk is our top pick for anyone interested in an omnichannel helpdesk solution that’s affordable, easy to use, and powerful enough for even the most complex customer support systems.

Whether you’ve never used helpdesk software, are managing a brand new support team, starting a new business, or experiencing growing pains from email-only customer support, it’s a smart move if you want to give your customers nothing but the best.

It supports incoming inquiries via chat, email, phone, and social media. No matter how you support your customers, you get all the tools you need to centralize communications in one place.

As such, you can say goodbye to bouncing from tool to tool to manage customer inquiries across channels.

On top of facilitating conversations, Freshdesk excels at delivering more context for every interaction, empowering agents and reps to know more about their customers without having to ask.

What used to take several minutes to learn via back-and-forth interactions can now be gleaned at a glance and saved for the next rep. Freshdesk makes it easier than ever to take notes, share information from one person to the next, and centralize customer info in one place.

It also comes with knowledge base creation tools to empower customers to help themselves.

That paired with powerful automations to eliminate repetitive tasks, your reps and agents can get more done while delivering high-quality support to the most important piece of your business—your customers.

From call centers and 100% online support teams to field service teams, Freshdesk is refreshingly simple yet powerful enough to act as the command center for your entire customer support system.

It also comes with various other features, including:

• Team collaboration tools
• Shared ticket ownership
• Automated support rules
• Website solution articles
• Custom team dashboards
• Data-driven analytics
• Canned responses
• SLA management
• Field service ticketing

Freshdesk is simple, yet diverse enough to meet the needs of businesses across a wide range of industries, regardless of size or use cases. 

Furthermore, they offer a wide range of pricing plans to suit the needs and budgets of those varying businesses.

Paid plans for ticketing, self-service, and reporting solutions include:

• Free with unlimited agents
• Growth — $15 per agent per month
• Pro — $49 per agent per month
• Enterprise — $79 per agent per month

Keep in mind that advanced features, like AI-powered automation and field service management, are added expenses.

For true omnichannel support, Freshdesk pricing starts at $29 per month per agent. These plans include everything in the Growth plan above plus 2,000 bot sessions per month, 2,000 incoming minutes, a chatbot builder, analytics, automations, and more.

Sign up for a 21-day free trial to take Freshdesk for a test drive today!

#2 – HubSpot — The Best Free Customer Service CRM Software

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM solution for sales, marketing, operations, blogging, and customer service. The customer service hub comes with an intuitive (and free) help desk solution you can use if you’re just getting started or on a tight budget.

It delivers everything you need to provide ticket support, all while reaping the benefits of HubSpot’s robust CRM software. As you grow, you can upgrade to paid tiers for truly limitless scalability.

The service hub also lets you create a self-service knowledge base so customers can help themselves. Although it takes a while to set up, you’ll have fewer tickets so you can take the time to resolve customer issues rather than wasting time answering common questions over and over again.

The free tier even includes basic live chat automation. You can use canned snippets and basic chat flows to answer common questions and offer hands-free help 24/7.

You also get access to powerful customer service tools, including:

• A team email so anyone can hop in and start answering inquiries
• Email templates and snippets (up to five each)
• Integrated calling capabilities
• Email to ticket and chat to ticket
• Bots for ticket creation
• Basic reporting

HubSpot’s free CRM works great for small businesses just starting out. The Starter plan is $50 per month and is a feature-rich, cost-effective stepping stone between free functionality and advanced customer support tools for enterprise-grade businesses.

With that said, HubSpot’s Professional Plan (starting at $400 per month) is where the helpdesk and customer support functionality starts to shine above the rest.

With it, you get a wealth of advanced features, including powerful automations, extensive knowledgebase creation tools, 1:1 video capabilities, custom reporting, and multiple ticket pipelines.

You also get advanced versions of all the free tools, so the same functionality is there with advanced functionality layered on top when you’re ready for it. So, don’t let the $400 price tag scare you—by the time you need to upgrade to that plan, you’ll have more than enough revenue to justify the investment.

Overall, HubSpot is an excellent choice for businesses of all shapes and sizes. While the free tools are helpful, you should upgrade to a paid plan to make the most of your new helpdesk software.

Sign up for a free plan to see if HubSpot’s Service CRM is right for you!

#3 – Freshservice – The Best Helpdesk Software for IT Support

Freshservice is the sister software to Freshdesk, however, the two aren’t interchangeable. Freshdesk is for customer support and Freshservice is for IT teams offering support internally.

With a strong focus on automation, it helps your IT team get more work done in less time, resulting in fewer work-stopping technical issues, better support experiences, and more streamlined processes to ensure no ticket falls through the cracks.

With Freshservice’s automation features, your team can implement automated workflows to augment your internal support efforts using virtual agents and AI-powered responses.

AI-powered responses rely on context and machine learning to deliver targeted replies automatically and route tickets to the correct IT reps in real-time. As a result, your employees get help faster and your support team to focus on more involved issues.

But the best part is that it’s built to deploy and scale quickly.

You and your team get 24/7/365 customer support, free migration services, and expert onboarding to get up and running as fast as possible.

Freshservice also includes TONS of features, even on the introductory plan, including:

• Incident management
• Knowledge base creation
• Employee self-service portals
• SLA management
• Routine task automation

Pricing is flexible with three plans to choose from and a wide variety of add-ons to boost your helpdesk functionality when you’re ready.

Paid plans include:

• Starter – $19 per agent per month
• Growth – $49 per agent per month
• Pro – $89 per agent per month
• Enterprise – $109 per agent per month

Each tier adds more advanced capabilities as your IT support needs change over time. And you can easily add more agents or remove agents within your administrator account dashboard.

Sign up for a free 21-day trial to take Freshservice for a test drive today!

#4 – Agiloft — The Best Custom Service Desk Suite

Agiloft is a bit unique compared to other helpdesk software on the market today. The company is branded as an enterprise solution for contract lifecycle management. 

They have a wide range of products, including CLM for sales, legal teams, ITSM, workflow, and more. But each solution comes with a robust service desk suite. The product suite contains different features for things like:

• Customer support software
• Internal help desk software
• IT ticketing
• ITIL and ITSM
• RMA management
• Asset management
• Change management

As you can see, the Agiloft product suite is ideal for both internal uses, as well as external support throughout each stage of the contract lifecycle. 

The software is trusted by 2.5 million users worldwide. But with that said, it’s really only made for sophisticated products and services. Basic users and smaller teams will find Agilsoft too overwhelming. 

Let’s take a closer look at the service desk pricing from Agiloft:

• Professional — $45 per month per license
• Professional Extended — $65 per license per month
• Enterprise — $75 per license per month

All of the rates are based on an annual contract. It’s also worth noting that the plans require a minimum of five users, which adds to the cost. 

Whether you want a cloud-based solution or in-house deployment, Agiloft pricing remains the same. Start a free trial or request a custom quote and personal demo to get started. 

#5 – ManageEngine — Best Helpdesk Software For Managed Service Providers

More than 100,000 businesses use ManageEngine as a helpdesk solution. It’s trusted by global brands like Dell, Disney, ABC, Honda, Xerox, and more. 

ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus MSP solution is an all-in-one ITSM system designed specifically for managed service providers.

It includes everything you need to manage client accounts, keep data separated from one client to the next, manage assets, and control devices remotely.

However, the best part is that you can download and install it on Windows devices in less than two minutes.

So despite its advanced capabilities and functionalities, it’s still easy to deploy, learn, and use on a daily basis.

Even the introductory plan includes everything you need to take control of your helpdesk solution, with features like:

• Account management
• Incident management
• Knowledgebase creation
• Self-service portals for employees
• Automated billing
• QuickBooks integrations

One of the newest features is field service management functionality that lets you easily schedule and monitor field service agents as they move from one job to the next.

Agents can also accurately track time using the built-in time tracker.

From there, you can easily bill that time to the right clients and automatically sync it with your accounting software.

Pricing for ManageEngine is not available online. Contact their team to request a free demo and quote. 

#6 – Zendesk Support — The Best For Small Business

For any business that needs a simple helpdesk solution, Zendesk Support will be perfect for you. It’s an ideal option for small businesses that want to upgrade their existing customer support system.

Starting at just $19 per month per agent, Zendesk Support allows you to track and manage customer support tickets from multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and web requests. 

While Zendesk Support works great out of the box, you can still customize it to meet the needs of your organization. Create custom workflows or use third-party apps and integrations to add flexibility. You can also add additional support features for an extra fee when you’re ready for them.

Set up predefined ticket responses, view customer histories, and give your customers support on their preferred communication channels. 

Some businesses might find Zendesk support to be a bit limiting, but it’s an affordable choice for smaller organizations.

With that said, Zendesk has tools to accommodate the needs of growing customer service teams. The Zendesk Support Suite comes with other Zendesk products, like Chat (live chat and messaging) Talk (call center software), and Guide (knowledge base and self-service tool).

Starting at $49 per agent per month, this product suite has everything your small business needs to manage service requests at scale, from any channel. 

Methodology For Choosing The Best Helpdesk Software

The market is flooded with different helpdesk solutions. Finding the best software for your business can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for.

This is the methodology that we used to pick the best options on our list. I’ll explain which factors you need to evaluate the most when you’re shopping around for helpdesk software. 

Ticketing

Ticket support is the first thing you should look for. By adding ticketing to your support process, it will allow your customer service representatives to resolve issues at scale. 

Look for a solution that supports ticketing on as many channels as possible, including your website, live chat, email, phone, and social media. The best helpdesk software has features for things like automated ticket creation and automatic ticket routing. 

By routing tickets to the right team member or department, it ensures that the matter gets resolved as quickly as possible. 

Internal vs. External Support

Why are you looking for helpdesk software? Are you trying to provide better service to your customers? Or are you trying to streamline support for your employees in-house?

Not every solution does both.

In most cases, internal help desk software for IT teams and ITSM is designed for larger organizations. In addition to providing help for internal software or hardware, these solutions offer ticket support for things like facilities requests and even HR self-service tools. 

A small business that just wants to help customers resolve issues quickly won’t need any of those features. 

Features

In addition to basic ticketing, there are a wide range of features to keep an eye on when you’re browsing for a helpdesk solution. Some common features include:

• Knowledge base support
• Ticket routing and ticket escalation
• Custom team dashboards
• Automated support rules
• API integration
• Omnichannel support
• Custom workflows
• Client management
• Field service ticketing

Some software will have advanced features or very use-case specific tools, such as ITIL and ITSM for enterprise contract lifecycle management. 

Price

Helpdesk software is typically billed per agent per month. In some cases, you’ll need to pay upfront for an annual contract.

The starting rates for helpdesk software start as low as $5 per agent per month with a solution like Zendesk Support. Other rates go as high as $100+ per agent. We’ve seen other solutions starting at $400 per month as well.

For most enterprise software and complex help desk solutions, you’ll need to request a custom quote.

Always take advantage of a free trial and demo before you commit to a long term contract. This will be the best way to determine which helpdesk software is right for you. 

Summary

For customer service or internal support, the best helpdesk software helps improve your entire process from start to finish.

Freshdesk and Hubspot are our top recommendations for most teams. They cover a lot of bases and won’t set you back too much in terms of pricing.

However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Don’t forget to use the criteria we talked you through in our methodology as you go through the process of choosing the right helpdesk software for your business.