Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems Compared

If there’s one thing customers dislike, it’s waiting on hold or explaining their problems to multiple support reps. The best help desk ticketing systems help you avoid this by swiftly and efficiently handling customer queries and requests. But how do you know which one’s the best for your business? To help you out, we reviewed over 30 options in the market to narrow down our picks and found Zendesk at the very top. The tool’s generous offerings like multi-channel ticket management, analytics dashboard, and unparalleled customization lets you offer excellent customer service consistently.

The Best Help Desk Ticketing System for Most

Zendesk is a dream tool for managers and support agents alike. The former uses the centralized hub to gain greater visibility into team performance, while the latter has a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey at the click of a button.

You also get several amazing features like integrated surveys to measure customer satisfaction and automated triggers to send responses and follow-ups, assign and escalate tickets to specific groups, and notify customers and agents. 

The price point is admittedly steeper than other options on the market, but considering the efficiency and lightning-fast speed, Zendesk is worth every penny.

The Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems Options to Consider

1. Zendesk — The Best for Most
2. Freshdesk — The Best for Scaling Businesses
3. Zoho Desk — The Best for Seamless Multi-Channel Support
4. Help Scout — The Best for Customer Support Teams With 500+ Users
5. ProProfs Help Desk — The Best for Email Ticketing

When It Makes Sense to Invest in Help Desk Ticketing Systems

Not all businesses are equal, even when operating in the same industry. 

That’s why you need to first determine whether investing in help desk systems makes sense for your business. Don’t put in the money just because your rivals have purchased one.

Ideally, you should get help desk software for your customer support team in either of the following scenarios:

1. Repetitive Questions

One of the quickest ways to lower employee satisfaction and productivity is to give them unexciting and monotonous jobs. The fact that they also waste time doing unimportant tasks—time that could’ve been spent more productively—is another bummer.

You can use a helpdesk software tool to create knowledge bases. With resources like video tutorials, FAQ sections, and detailed blog posts, you can cover all the repetitive questions your customer executives get in your knowledge base, giving customers anytime-anywhere support. 

Let’s also not forget customers prefer knowledge bases over other self-service channels.

2. Inadequate Ticket Management

Managing tickets adequately is important to serve your customers promptly and efficiently. If you aren’t on top of every support request coming into your system, you’re quickly earning brickbats that may lead to revenue loss.

If your team is unable to manage and resolve raised tickets, getting help desk software is a no-brainer. Besides assigning and distributing support tickets to agents who can then leave comments and share information with other agents, the tool also lets you manage all tickets via email, phone, and social media in one place.

Tracking statistics of every support request (think: total resolution time, call duration, average reply time) is another solid benefit to facilitate your efforts to organize and enhance customer support.

3. Low Customer Satisfaction

If you went through reviews left by customers, what would you find? 

Do you see too many complaints pointing out about your customer support reps’ slow service, lack of knowledge, or mismanagement? If yes, you need to get help desk software right away.

Support staff to work more productively using features like community forums, ticket management, live chat, and analytics. The end result is speedier and more efficient customer service that boosts productivity and customer satisfaction.

#1 — Zendesk — The Best for Most

Zendesk is arguably one of the most well-known help desk ticketing systems you can get your hands on today.

It seamlessly connects customer support executives with customers across all channels like email, voice, social, and bots. Expect greater visibility into your team’s performance with a centralized hub featuring pre-built dashboards and analytics. 

Zendesk’s omnichannel ticket support system allows you to provide customers with a truly personalized experience. For starters, your agents have full details—order history, web activity, loyalty status—about each customer they interact with, enabling them to resolve individual support requests and provide quality service. 

The built-in issue tracking system facilitates problem-solving at lightning speed as well. 

Your executives can see issues the moment they are raised by customers, and then use the information to notify software development teams of bugs or create new self-help resources addressing these problems. Pre-built integrations for 1,300+ apps keep your ideal workflows going.

Pricing

Zendesk’s pricing plans are as follows:

• Suite Team — $49 per agent, per month
• Suite Growth — $79 per agent, per month
• Suite Professional — $99 per agent, per month

You can opt for enterprise plans, starting from $150 monthly per agent. A 14-day free trial is also available.

#2 — Freshdesk — The Best for Scaling Businesses

Freshdesk channelizes the power of collaborative ticketing and AI to deliver the best possible customer experience. 

Its AI assistant Freddy facilitates faster support by recommending the most fitting solution articles to agents, plus prevents reopening tickets when customers give generic responses like “Thank you.” You can also set up service level agreements (SLAs) stating when tickets need to be replied to and resolved and send automated reminders to agents whenever SLAs are violated.

Besides this, Freshdesk is packed with various features to reinforce customer support efforts for small and large businesses. 

The highly scalable solution comes with customizable workflows and a shared inbox to collate all customer support tickets across all channels. A comprehensive dashboard allows you to monitor customer support metrics, whereas automated pop-ups help deflect common customer queries.

There’s also a “team huddle” feature that lets you bring in experts to resolve more complicated tickets and a gamification feature to motivate agents to improve their output.

Pricing

Freshdesk’s pricing plans are as follows:

• Free (up to 10 agents)
• Growth — $15 per agent, per month
• Pro — $49 per agent, per month
• Enterprise — $79 per agent, per month

A 21-day free trial is also available.

#3 — Zoho Desk — The Best for Seamless Multi-Channel Support

Zoho Desk is one of the few help desk ticketing systems that take multi-channel support to the next level.

It lets you collect and organize support tickets from different channels like email, social media, telephone, live chat, and web forms in one place. This way, you can manage and respond to all customer inquiries directly without changing screens.

You also never have to worry about losing sight of priority tickets, thanks to Zoho Desk’s intuitive ticket view. 

It highlights all important details regarding support tickets, including ticket history and customer contact. Zoho Desk is also the first context-aware ticketing system solution in the industry that allows you to view all relevant customer data on the ticket screen.

Another attractive feature on offer is HQ, a live dashboard that provides an overview of incoming and outgoing bandwidth. Create reports and monitor your team’s performance to identify and eliminate performance gaps. 

Integrations with popular platforms like Zoom, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and other curated applications from Zoho seal the deal.

Pricing

Zoho Desk’s pricing plans are as follows:

• Standard — $40 per agent, per month
• Professional — $23 per agent, per month
• Enterprise — $40 per agent, per month

A 15-day free trial is also available—no credit card required.

#4 — Help Scout — The Best for Customer Support Teams With 500+ Users

With features like sharing inboxes, live chat, and customer management tools, Help Scout has earned its place on our list.

You get a robust API, complete with a broad selection of integrations, that removes any hassle when you’re working the tool with your existing customer channels and databases. Manage all your customer conversations in one seamless inbox, regardless of whether they reach out to you via email or in real-time. 

Executives can use canned responses to provide information faster, leave notes for other agents, and add tags to facilitate automated service processes. Building a knowledge base with quick how-tos and tutorials to familiarize customers with your product is also possible.

Reporting and analytics help you keep up with supporting performance, while customized workflows and automated responses ensure you help customers faster and more efficiently.

The uncluttered and easily navigable interface is another advantage. Your agents can hit the ground running to improve the customer support experience without worrying about any learning curve.

Pricing

Help Scout‘s pricing plans are as follows:

• Standard — $20 per user, per month
• Plus — $35 per user, per month
• Company — $60 per user, per month

You can do a 15-day free trial without having to submit credit card information, too.

#5 — ProProfs Help Desk — The Best for Email Ticketing

If your customer support teams manage most of their customer interactions through emails, give ProProfs Help Desk a shot.

Your team members can collaborate easily using shared inboxes that let you club all customer-facing email accounts (sales@, help@) together. They can also raise “child tickets“ if they need further assistance from other customer service agents to resolve complicated tickets. 

What’s more, a Round-Robin task assignment feature ensures all support tickets are evenly distributed among reps and departments.

Sort, categorize, prioritize, label, mark, and assign tickets at the touch of a button. Automating certain processes (example: response sending, ticket assignment) is also possible to enhance agent and manager productivity.

Internal integrations like a knowledge base, a survey maker, and live chat make ProProfs Help Desk a complete powerhouse, enabling you to deliver a 360° support experience and gauge customer delight using CSAT and NPS surveys.

Pricing

ProProfs Help Desk’s pricing plans are as follows:

• Essentials — $10 per user, per month
• Premium — $15 per user, per month

There’s also an Enterprise plan for businesses requiring advanced support. A 15-day free trial and a 15-day money-back guarantee make for attractive offers.

Methodology for Choosing the Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems

Let’s review the three most important criteria you should remember when narrowing down options for the best help desk ticketing systems.

Cloud-based or On-premises

Help desk software deployment is of two types: on-premise software that you locally install on the server you need to purchase and cloud-based SaaS solutions that are managed for you.

Businesses typically opt for cloud solutions because of the greater affordability and flexibility, but that may not always be the case. For instance, on-premises would be the better choice if you want to keep your data in-house.

For on-premises installations, you need to purchase separate hardware and hire an IT professional to manage it. On the other hand, cloud-based software requires a working internet connection. Weigh the pros and cons of both options, along with their suitability, before making a choice.

Reporting and Metrics

While it’s true you cannot quantify what makes a good customer experience, there are a few common aspects to guide your approach. Through reporting and metrics tools, you can better understand where your customer support team excels and where there’s room for improvement.

Ideally, you want software that allows you to at least determine what days and times of day are the busiest, why people typically reach out to your executives, CSAT ratings, and average response times. Even better if you find tools that offer pre-built customizable dashboards to facilitate quick and easy metrics reporting.

Access to Collaboration and Productivity Tools

With the right helpdesk software, you can easily collaborate with other team members and streamline workflows. Not only will this reduce the burden on agents, but it’ll also promote customer satisfaction as your reps will have more time to focus on the most critical task: supporting people.

Most of the tools we listed above offer various collaboration productivity tools. Think: having context-based conversations using private notes, canned replies to give lightning-fast support, and workflow automation to save time.

Keep an eye out for the features that would work best for you and your team. Select software tools that let you automate repetitive and manual tasks like assigning and sorting incoming requests and integrate with your existing tech stack for convenience. 

The Top Help Desk Ticketing Systems in Summary

The majority of help desk ticketing systems are cloud-based SaaS services, and you’ll likely choose one like Zendesk and Freshdesk too. Just remember to start configuring your instance right away after you sign up for faster deployment.

In case you opt for an on-premise help desk, consult the vendor regarding the solution’s compatibility with your current hardware and installation process. Even better if you can have them do the installation on your behalf.