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Best Help Desk Software
When you have just started business operations, customer issues or requests can hardly get the best of you. However, as your business grows, handling both internal as well as external issues becomes a formidable challenge. Such a grave situation amplifies the need for the best help desk software.
So if you are looking for the perfect help desk software to kickstart your support operations, your search ends right here. In this discussion, we have compared the 20 best help desk software along with their features and pricing. But before we begin, let's understand the definition of help desk software for those new to it. You may skip over if you are a pro.
What Is Help Desk Software?
Help desk software is a popular business application that organizes all incoming customer communications in a single platform. Help desk managers can keep a check on customer queries and monitor support agents’ performance. With features like canned responses, parent-child ticketing, shared inboxes, reports, and much more, the top help desk software solutions make customer support easy and fun.
Top 20 Help Desk Software & Their Key Features
Top 20 Best Help Desk Softwares of 2023
Key features
ProProfs Help Desk
- Best IT help desk software to delight customers
- A cloud-based framework makes it more efficient
- Email like interface with easy ticketing management and fast resolution
- Sorting, categorizing and handling tickets made far easy
- Dedicated Knowledge Base to answer around 80% of your generic issues/queries.
Web Help Desk
- Traditional help desk software
- Allows for automated ticketing
- Integrates with LDAP, AD and Microsoft SCCM
Hubspot Service Hub
- Help customers help themselves.
- Inbuilt customer feedback, surveys, and insights
- Ideal for small service teams
Zendesk
- Intuitive and a simple help desk solution
- Streamlined with time saving tools and triggers
- Personalized views for ticket status and other conditions.
Freshdesk
- Provide great experiences to your customers.
- Easy to send prompt and personalized responses
- Automatically convert customer emails to tickets
Freshservice
- An ITIL-aligned service desk software
- Let users track the resolution processes
- Inbuilt with automated escalation rules
Zoho Desk
- A simplified help desk ticketing system
- Built with multichannel capabilities
- Provides great visibility due to smart automation
AzureDesk
- No Tier Pricing
- Does not require any kind of expertise
- Easier for agents to work on multiple tickets
Vision Helpdesk
- A multi-channel help desk software
- Alert rules based on events and ticket
- Helps agents to communicate and share files
TeamSupport
- Totes an ability to cut costs
- Built specially to improve B2B customer loyalty
- Increases future scalability
Deskpro
- Ideal for every kind of organization
- Agile, flexible and robust
- Server Infrastructure of your choice
Bitrix24
- Helpdesk solution with CRM
- Open source code access
- Covers all communication channels
LiveAgent
- Live Agent Support Portal
- Unified Storage
- Real-time typing view on chats
Jitbit HelpDesk
- Aims at both startups and small self-funded companies
- Available both "SaaS" and "on-premise"
- Clean UI and simple set up process
ThinkOwl
- AI based helpdesk software
- Combination of human and machine learning
- Free omnichannel contact center
JIRA Service Desk
- Streamlined modern interface
- Apps to connect other platforms
- Includes service management, DevOps and more
Hesk
- Supports unlimited custom fields and forms
- A stand-alone help desk application
- Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud
HelpCrunch
- In-app messenger solution
- Multilingual service
- Process requests 5X faster
Teamwork Desk
- Centralize all communications
- Focus on transparency to customers
- Manage all communication from one central system
Help Sumo
- Integrate with VOIP Services
- Responsive HTML5 design
- Deals with requests from any channel
Let’s have a comparison to their individual features, pricing and why to use these top help desk solutions in detail.
1.ProProfs Help Desk Software
ProProfs Help Desk is listed among the top help desk software products today. This feature-rich help desk platform not only enables an online business to track all customer issues, requests, and bugs but also allows your customer support teams to resolve them in no time effectively.
ProProfs Help Desk Software includes several other salient features, such as child tickets, canned responses, integrations, and shared inboxes, that helps in expediting ticket resolution and delightful customer experience.
Features:
ProProfs Help Desk makes it so easy that you will never lose a ticket and will always know who is working on what. Critical tickets can be resolved first as you can easily prioritize them as per business requirements.
This feature allows you to get in touch with real chat support reps. Human communication always lends a personal touch and increases the value of customer satisfaction.
Provides various online training courses to train agents and customers that keeps them updated and aware of all contemporaries.
This help desk solution is for all skill levels and NO software or HTML expertise is needed. Moreover, you can view and access these support tools from any device or location around the globe.
Pricing: $20/agent/month
Why Use ProProfs Help Desk Software?
This section includes all reasons as to why ProProfs Help Desk is considered among the top help desk platforms in the market. Let’s have a look:
Easy to Use Shared Inbox
This help desk software is simple to use and is designed for all skill levels. Just connect all your customer-facing emails and get all your emails in a shared inbox.
Delightful Reports
Measure customer delight with insightful reports that ProProfs Help Desk generates. The best part is - These presentation-ready metrics give you insights into agent training opportunities.
Awesome Human Support
ProProfs provides human support. They have phone help, chat and a huge knowledge base. If you need help, you can call, chat, email 24*7 or use the knowledge base.
2.Web Help Desk
It is more of a traditional helpdesk software solution that allows for automated ticketing, which eventually ensures that the SLAs are met positively and support agents are managed as per the workflow KPIs. It is a product from Solar Winds.
Features:
SolarWinds Web Help Desk software has applied in the IT department, facilities management, field services, HR, and few others.
Changes are not easy, especially when it impacts your organization or your employees. Effective change management comes into the picture if there is clear communication to the people affected, handled without frustration, and a focus on improving the service quality.
You can improve security and compatibility via FIPS 140-2 compatible cryptography support, which is commonly known as FIPS-mode SSL Protocol.
Pricing:Available on Request.
Why Use Web Help Desk Software?
The UI is really interactive and makes it easy for agents to manage all customer tickets efficiently on one platform.
Web help desk software is an on-premise tool that offers advanced features to cater to customer questions instantly.
All agents or “assets” can be tracked right from the start of a generated ticket to when they resolve the ticket.
3. Hubspot Service Hub
Hubspot offers a complete help desk with built-in reporting and automation. You can convert customer chats into tickets that can easily be tracked, prioritized, and organized.
Features:
Enable self-help and ensure customers discover helpful information on their own.
This help desk software helps you get a pulse on customer delight and deploy multiple surveys to gather feedback, which eventually improves your customer experience.
The software uses bots to scale 1-1 communication and improve live chat experience by routing customers to appropriate chat agents and providing relevant help documentation.
Pricing:$35/user/month.
4.Zendesk
Zendesk focusses its products around building an omnichannel ticketing system that is like a shared inbox for all your customer inquiries and their trajectory. A detail-oriented ticketing system makes Zendesk counted as one of the most popular helpdesk software.
Features:
Zendesk has an app marketplace with an assortment of first-party and third-party apps, some paid, and some free.
Inbuilt with some scripted responses while handling tickets makes the job easier by saving time and typework.
Zendesk has an efficient workflow for ticket management, which can search customer’s history and a personalized view to track ongoing performance.
Pricing:$5/user/month.
Why Use Zendesk?
Intuitive And Smart
Zendesk provides organization to put a variety of customer support interactions in one accessible database.
Works With Other Zendesk Software
This software also works with other modules of the Zendesk software family-like Zendesk Talk, which is also their call center package.
Elite Plans Come With Custom Business Rules
Higher plans in the package are equipped with multi-functionality such as business rules, integrations, multilingual content, performance dashboard, and CSAT surveys.
5.Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a help desk software product by Freshworks. It is also a cloud-based omnichannel help desk solution that has multiple features based around the tickets created.
Features:
This help desk solution is compatible to integrate information from multiple channels like phone, email, chat, and social media.
Freshdesk has another special feature of team huddle, which helps to bring in expertise on complicated or escalated cases.
The solution includes a consolidated inbox to manage incoming tickets from several sources to one location and an option to create custom ticket statuses as well.
Pricing:$19/user/month.
Why Use Freshdesk?
Focuses On Collaboration And Productivity
Freshdesk comes with a powerful suite of multiple features which is mostly production-oriented and makes it easy for teams of all sizes to collaborate and deliver a great support experience for customers.
Good Customer Base
This helpdesk solution is used by over 150,000 customers across multiple organizations such as HP, Harvard University, Bridgestone, etc.
Ability To Set SLAs
Setting service level agreements (SLAs) and having a check on other advanced reporting features in the evaluation criteria section makes Freshdesk stand out as a worthy help desk solution.
6.Freshservice
Freshservice is also a Freshworks product that serves as an online IT help desk. It has some remarkable features on top of powerful ticketing capabilities. Let’s discuss some of the salient features that come in a package with this help desk solution.
Features:
This tool delivers a great user experience when it comes to asset management. It includes auto-discovery of new resources, enhanced impact analysis, and strong configuration management.
Freshservice’s intuitive UI (User Interface) requires minimal training and is customizable to both IT and Non-IT Requirements.
The software helps you track assets, manage self-service portals, navigate and manage issues, organize contracts and licenses.
Pricing:$29/user/month
Why Use Freshservice?
Service Catalog Module Made User-Friendly
Install a user-friendly catalog module to offer multiple services for multiple departments so that users can easily access the desired module as per the service request.
Efficient in cutting down the manual effort
This service desk software helps you configure and automate repetitive tasks, prioritizes tickets for approval, and notifies users automatically.
Self Service Management
Change, Release and Knowledge Management are some of the distinct reasons to go for this help desk solution. This tool enables users to look up solutions from the knowledge base on their own and raise requests directly from your portal if required.
7.Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk software solution that focuses on being context-aware. Including its multichannel capabilities, Zoho Desk comes with an advanced AI assistant, which brings all the tools and context embedded, which helps your team deliver a great customer experience.
Features:
Zoho Desk is well known for its user-friendliness and the ease of navigating the software. It gives you an experience full of flexibility and is quick to get up and running.
This cloud-based help desk ticketing tool has a long list of integrated apps and telephony services. The list includes software like AWS, Jive, G Suite, Salesforce, and many more, including over numerous options by linking with Zapier.
Unlike other online ticketing management software, a strong feature of Zoho Desk is its tier count, which is only three that too, with a free 15-day trial with a reasonable limit of three users.
Pricing:$12/user/month.
Why Use Zoho Desk?
Compatible With iOS & Android
Users can operate zoho Desk with mobile apps for iOS and Android. Support is provided via several avenues, including active user forums, user guides, blogs, and a live chat, which comes with paid packages.
Prioritizes Tickets As Per Severity
Out of the best help desk system companies, Zoho Desk includes features which categorize tickets of higher importance or overdue flag, track quality metrics, and support for self-served users.
Customer Happiness Rating and Cloud Telephony Makes it Different
One of the help desk system lists consists of features like “Customer Success Rating” and Cloud Telephony, which comes with affordable packages that are billed annually. Other plans also include features to add custom ticket templates, cross-department reports, and role-based access control.
8.Azure Desk
Out of the best help desk system companies, Azure desk comes with all the “must-have” features of an enterprise-class system for all sorts of businesses at minimal cost to users. Similarly, there are few more features offered by Azure desk.
Features:
Azure Desk doesn’t have any tier pricing for its users. One single plan and a straightforward cost make it totally affordable.
This help desk solution is straightforward and easy to use. You don’t need much technical expertise to operate this self-explanatory software.
Browser like tabs and a creative UI makes it easier for agents/users to work on multiple tickets together without switching the windows and having too many clicks.
Pricing:$30/user/month.
Why Use Azure Desk?
Comparatively affordable
This help desk solution is comparatively affordable than other software in the list. It doesn’t have any tier pricing or variable charges as such.
Efficient Incident Management
Azure Desk enables you to manage all IT incidents for various franchise operations effectively. One can track, monitor, and escalate outstanding tasks on priority basis wherever necessary.
Best Features/Price Ratio
The software comes with the best feature/price ratio with an outstanding support team, which makes it one of the best help desk ticketing tools and an end-to-end support engine for rapidly growing companies.
9.Vision Help Desk
Vision Help Desk is also a known customer service tool for many businesses across industries. Support ticket tracking, incoming call management, and call tracking are some of the features that establish sound communication between customers and vendors.
Features:
The software provides a multichannel communication platform with automated routing and email integration features.
You will be able to customize and create alert rules as per your priority and business requirements for all events and tickets.
The platform helps the agents to communicate effectively and provides access to share any file, document, or media between teams.
Pricing:$15/user/month.
10.TeamSupport
A software solution built to improve B2B customer loyalty enriched with an innovative SaaS application that goes well beyond the traditional customer support technology. With a sole focus on providing the best customer support experience, TeamSupport is mainly dedicated to support large B2B chains of small commercial facilities.
Features:
TeamSupport introduces a low monthly fee only for the users needed as per business. Its affordable help desk software pricing includes almost all features and customization needed for a better support experience.
With NO duplication of effort, TeamSupport has a comprehensive and seamless workflow that improves collaboration and efficiency across teams.
There are few visual tools included in this software which improves clarity and communication with customers. In-line images for easy cut and paste, integrated screen recording helps customers send a video of their exact issues.
Pricing:$75/user/month.
11.Deskpro
Deskpro is a help desk software platform that offers a modern and real-time web interface. Ideal for every kind of organization, Deskpro is full of features and customizable components, which makes it robust and flexible to use.
Features:
Helps you monitor and audit the entire log of all administrative interactions within the help desk.
Deskpro helpdesk is built in a way that it always keeps you up to date, and all customers are upgraded to a newer version of the software automatically.
Embeds the chat widget on your website to connect with users without visiting the service portal.
Pricing:$30/user/month.
Why use DeskPro Help Desk Software?
No matter what channel you use, this tool helps you stay on top of every reply. Email, social media, live chat, or phone calls, all communication channels are monitored with DeskPro.
Enable customers to answer their question themselves with a robust knowledge base integration.
Never lose any customer data with the easy importer tools offered by this help desk software.
12. Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a free help desk software specially built for the contact center modules and usually comes with CRM. This module allows users for a wide range of communication channels, including live chat, SMS, email, social media messages, and even phone calls.
Features:
Bitrix24 is a powerful platform that includes features of a contact center module for staff communication, project management, and CRM.
This software is used by almost 4 million companies, including cloud and on-premise, with open-source code access.
Bitrix24 is particularly built for companies and small businesses. It is well suited for remote teams too, who want to keep in touch and operate efficiently.
Pricing:$19/user/month.
13. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is the perfect help desk software to meet the needs of small and medium businesses. This unique help desk solution helps users to stay closer to their customers and help them with a faster resolution.
Features:
It is like a smarter version of your email inbox. Be it emails, calls, chats, Facebook & Twitter messages, forum posts, or suggestions; it can be accessed and managed from one place.
Access and communicate with your customers through multiple channels but always stay in the same hybrid ticket because they all look the same irrespective of the communication channel.
Adding a human factor to your chat desk through real time responses can be a game changer for your customers. This feature has the ability to provide convenient and exact answers that customers want.
Pricing:$15/user/month.
14. Jitbit HelpDesk
Jitbit is an affordable, lightweight, and fast helpdesk ticketing solution for your business, which comes with an interactive user interface. The dashboard of the software features a powerful grid showing all information on your tickets.
Features:
You can easily sort and filter the ticket requests, review them, and even perform bulk operations without leaving the webpage.
It lets you switch between queue modes such as “all”, “in progress” and “open” tickets. You can also switch to the “assigned to me” mode for ticket requests coming from a specific company or customer.
You can classify tickets into different categories manually, whereas customers can choose a category during ticket filing or do this via existing automation rules and email engine settings.
Pricing:$24/user/month.
15. ThinkOwl
ThinkOwl is an AI-based helpdesk software that combines the technology of the human brain and machine learning. It is one of the best multi-channel customer service software fully powered by artificial intelligence.
Features:
Artificial Intelligence + Help Desk Software = Better Relationships
Measures and understands your customer relations based on precise data gathered through a machine learning platform.
Manifesting the art of AI, ThinkOwl is a software that helps you optimize your knowledge base and gather insights from each automated customer interaction.
Pricing:$19/user/month.
16. JIRA Service Desk
A thoroughly modern approach to the helpdesk solution with the feasibility of apps to connect with other platforms makes Jira Service Desk one of the best help desks for small businesses as well as more significant enterprises.
The service desk can be used via mobile platform apps and notable customers such as Twitter, Spotify, and Sotheby’s.
Features:
You can easily connect to your favorite asset management app to track, refer, and tie requests with assets directly from Jira service desk.
You can link IT tickets to the development team’s backlog if your software teams already use Jira software. It helps you get to the root cause of issues before they escalate.
Jira Service Desk is PinkVERIFY certified, which offers you almost everything your IT teams need for a service request, problem, incident, and change management.
Pricing:$10/user/month.
17.Hesk
Hesk is like asset management built-in your help desk to monitor, manage, secure, and patch assets. It is completely customizable and supports unlimited custom fields and forms with remote control access and a self-service portal.
Features:
This help desk solution skips the value for cost evaluation as it is an open-source platform, which makes it a great option for small businesses and start-ups.
Get benefits from a wide range of tools such as email & LDAP integrations, remote desktop live chat, etc. that will save your time, energy, and money.
Hesk doesn’t integrate directly with other software and is developed as a stand-alone help desk application. There may be some third party tutorials on integrating Hesk with other 3P scripts, but none of them are endorsed or supported by Hesk.
Pricing:$39.95/user/month.
18. HelpCrunch
It is an in-app messenger service that helps you track customer data, set auto-responses, educate your customers, and quickly deliver a resolution. HelpCrunch also offers multi-channel support with a shared inbox, making it extremely easy to collaborate with agents in real-time.
Features:
Monitoring team’s productivity and performing to customer satisfaction is made easy with this help desk solution. You can analyze each agent’s performance over a period of time and find opportunities for improvement.
This messenger service helps in importing existing customer database to HelpCrunch and exporting the same from the system whenever required.
You can localize or translate your widget and messages if you expect visitors to land on your page from different geographical locations.
Pricing:$15/user/month.
19. Teamwork Desk
Teamwork Desk is a customer-centric help desk software that gives you all the features you need like shared inboxes, collision detection, help docs, and productivity indicators. This enables your team to keep customers at heart and drive an excellent customer support business.
Features:
Helps you collate every customer interaction in one place so that you can resolve their queries with context and deliver the best support experience.
Improving collaboration, reducing silos, and ensuring nothing goes unanswered are few of the key features of this help desk software.
Enables visibility for your team to see exactly who is responsible for what. This ensures faster resolution with no crossed wires.
Pricing:$9/user/month.
20. Help Sumo
Help Sumo offers you a complete help desk solution to manage and handle support tickets and other support related functionalities. It is a hosted online software specially designed for delivering support related resolutions via ticket system, social media, emails, and live chat.
Features:
You can manage live chats with your favorite IM apps and multitask like a pro with predefined live chat responses.
Analysis and tracking of key metrics are the first rules to run a functional and efficient helpdesk system. Such parameters are critical for delivering outstanding customer service.
It is always critical to guarantee service and resolution within the turnaround time when it comes to help desk system. This solution is built with an enhanced SLA management module so that you may never miss your promised delivery time.
Pricing:$19/user/month.
Why Use a Help Desk Ticketing System? What Are the Benefits?
When customers run into your business with their expectations, that too using different channels, such as email, phone, social media, and so on, it becomes almost impossible to keep a track of every issue manually.
Help desk solutions bring all support interactions on a single platform and help your agents organize, assign, filter, prioritize, escalate, and resolve issues faster. Let’s look at more benefits of help desk software:
Provide 360-Degree Support Experience
With the best help desk software, even a small business can unify multiple customer service channels into a single interface. So, no matter if customers contact your team via live chat, email, social media, phone, or help center, a seamless customer experience can be delivered across the board.
Offer Support 24x7 With a Knowledge Base
Contemporary customers don't entertain the idea of waiting for too long to get their issue resolved by a human agent. Instead, they want to leverage a self-service portal or knowledge base (that includes guides, help articles, FAQs, etc.) to resolve their common issues on their own.
Automate Repetitive & Manual Tasks
By using the best help desk ticketing system, you can automate mundane and manual tasks to enhance your team’s productivity, save time, and efforts. For instance, you can choose to automate actions such as ticket assignment, notifications and alerts, customer surveys, and a lot more.
Track the Right Performance Metrics
Every customer service manager must know how well his team members are performing and the quality of service they are delivering to end-users. The ideal ticketing system offers insightful and customizable reports that can be used to gauge performance and measure customer satisfaction.
Types of Help Desk Solutions
Your proper understanding of a help desk is incomplete without knowing the different types of them available in the market.
On-Premise Help Desk
An on-premise help desk, also known as a self-hosted help desk, is a licensed software solution that organizations own and host themselves. Once you purchase the license, you can install it on your server, and maintain it.
Benefits:
- Complete control of data and security
- On-premise help desks can be customized upto some degree
Drawbacks:
- Requires a massive upfront investment for purchasing the software license and the servers
- You need an in-house IT team to constantly maintain your servers
Web-Based Help Desk
A web-based service desk software, also known as a cloud-based help desk, is hosted on the vendor’s server. There is no need to buy expensive licenses or install heavy software. Your agents can access complete features by simply logging into the vendor’s website.
Benefits:
- Easy to set up and maintain
- Offers anytime, anywhere accessibility, you just need an internet connection
Drawbacks:
- Internet connection is always required
- No access to source code (hardly matters to most)
Features of Best Help Desk Software
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The best service desk systems require minimum adjustments and offer an intuitive interface for effortless service.
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As your team grows, you can add more agents, handle more issues, and deliver delightful experiences to every customer.
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Use a shared inbox to merge multiple customer-facing email inboxes (support@, info@, etc.) into a single platform.
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Help desk systems can easily integrate with multiple third-party business applications for better performance.
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Create and use canned responses to answer common customer questions and save everyone’s time.
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The top free help desk software makes it easier for multiple agents and teams to collaborate with internal notes.
Help Desk Software Market Trends
There is no doubt that the demand for help desk software is growing by leaps and bounds.
The global market for help desk software is expected to reach USD 11 billion by 2023 with an annual growth rate of 33%.
Organizations are leveraging the help desk automation capabilities to minimize risks that can impact the business, avoid manual tasks, and achieve more with limited support staff. For instance, bigger brands are working to replace level 1 human agents with AI-powered chatbots. Unlike previous ones, these chatbots can understand human sentiments, can scan through long documents in seconds, and divert the chat to a human expert when the need persists.
Another popular trend that is picking pace is the use of self-service options to reduce both support ticket volume as well as costs. Businesses are investing in quality help content in the form of how-to-videos, guides, etc. to enable end-users to help themselves.
Best Help Desk Software of 2023: Choose the One Made For Your Team
Well, that was a comprehensive list of the 20 best help desk software. You may find that there are many common features shared by these software applications. Irrespective of these common functionalities, you must consider the aspects discussed in this article that make them unique.
We have put ProProfs Help Desk at the top position owing to its wide range of features and affordability. You can opt for a free premium trial and then go for the plan that best matches your needs.
