The 13 Best ITSM Tools for Delightful IT Support

Right from daily-use office printers to complicated IT servers – modern organizations are heavily dependent on IT services. 

No wonder a majority of businesses are adopting the best ITSM tools to build and maintain a strong IT ecosystem, enhance employee productivity, reduce IT risks, and improve the end-user experience. 

But here comes a challenge. 

A single Google search of the “best ITSM software” can give you thousands of results. In such a scenario, how do you find the tool that can perfectly match your needs?

Well, don’t worry as we have done the heavy lifting for you. After rigorous research, we have handpicked the top 13 ITSM tools that will make your life much easier. In this blog, we will discuss 13 such tools and explore their top features as well as prices. 

What Is IT Service Management?

Information technology service management or ITSM refers to all the activities that are performed by an organization to design, update, control, and deliver IT services that are offered to end-users. 

Although many people think that ITSM is just about resolving IT support issues or requests. However, in reality, ITSM goes way beyond that and helps your team manage the complete lifecycle of IT services – right from supervising the IT assets owned by an organization to initiating changes needed for faster technological adoption. 

Now, to enjoy the fruits of ITSM, you need ITSM software. But how do you choose the right ITSM tool for your team? Well, the section below lists some important features that your business must consider. 

Key ITSM Features: What Should You Look For?

Like any other business application, an ITSM solution must be easy-to-use and affordable. But somehow that is not enough. Let’s look at the 5 core ITSM features that you need to look out for: 

1. Cloud Hosting 

IT support professionals are always on the frontline dealing with numerous issues and requests. In such a scenario, a cloud-hosted ITSM solution allows them to be more flexible whether they work from the office or at home. 

Besides any time, anywhere access, cloud-hosting offers multiple benefits. Your business can maximize data security, scale your business operations effortlessly, and deal with urgent problems more dynamically. 

On the other hand, open-source or self-hosted ITSM solutions might require you to deploy a separate team for hardware maintenance and software upgrades. Even if something goes wrong, getting reliable support from the software vendor or community can be a big challenge. 

2. Knowledge Management

knowledge management refers to the ITSM capability to create, publish, document, and share information with users when they need them. Giving your users access to a vast pool of knowledge is considered one of the key ITSM best practices. 

The best ITSM tools allow you to create an internal knowledge base for employees. Members from different departments such as HR, Accounts, Legal, etc. can easily find answers to their IT-related queries. Proper knowledge management allows your business to encourage self-service, deflect support tickets, and focus on incidents or requests that are more critical in nature. 

3. Incident Management 

IT incidents such as server downtime can have a disastrous impact on business operations. It can not only hamper team productivity but also lead to monetary losses. 

According to a Gartner report, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600/minute, which can extrapolate to well over $300K/hour. 

ITSM software enables an IT support team to swiftly manage both incidents as well as service requests. You can search for past incidents, track ongoing incidents, and predict future ones based on analytics. This prepares your team to handle incidents with ease and reduce their possible impact on the business. 

4. Automation Capabilities

When we talk about ITSM technologies, workflow automation is in great demand. Automation capabilities can help you speed up your incident management, asset management, and other workflows. This helps your team rise above repetitive and time-consuming tasks and gives them more time to focus on serious issues. 

For example, modern service management tools offer AI-powered chatbots that can interact with IT end-users and resolve their basic concerns. Chatbots can also be used to direct users to relevant teams or agents. Similarly, some tools allow you to share automated surveys with employees or customers and collect their valuable feedback. 

5. Reports & Metrics 

Reports and analytics help you gain much-needed visibility into your IT performance and see what can be improved during the course of time. The best ITSM software empowers managers with intuitive and actionable data. 

You can track Service Desk metrics such as the total number of incidents, average response times, ticket volume by support channels, ticket backlogs, and more. You can even gauge user satisfaction from time to time and see how changes can further improve their experience.

Above all, ITSM tools must allow your team to create useful reports using easy-to-understand graphics and advanced customization options. 

13 Best ITSM Solutions for Enhanced IT Support

Finding the perfect ITSM solution for your team means scanning through hundreds of software comparison platforms, product websites, user reviews, etc. To make your job easier, we have curated a list of 13 tools that can enhance your IT service delivery: 

1. ProProfs Help Desk 

ProProfs Help desk is one of the best ITSM tools that can capture IT issues and requests from multiple channels such as email, help center, live chat, web forms, and others. The best part is that ProProfs enables ITSM principles and processes without the typical ITSM tool complexity so that your business can get started in minutes. 

To take your organization’s knowledge management to a whole different level, you can create an intuitive employee self-service portal. The portal can contain important employee handbooks, documentation, FAQs, guides, etc. to help them resolve issues at their own pace. Support managers can measure performance with the help of important metrics such as average response time, ticket volume, user satisfaction, rated tickets, and more. 

Top Features of ProProfs Help Desk: 

• Automatically route IT tickets and issues to relevant agents and teams
• Create an internal knowledge base for your employees and reduce ticket volume
• Share CSAT, NPS, and other feedback surveys with end-users
• Leverage AI-powered chatbots to assist users even when your team is unavailable
• Break complex IT support tickets into multiple child-tickets

Pros:

• Leverage AI-powered chatbots to assist end-users 24×7
• The tool comes with a simple email-like interface 

Cons:

• You cannot view customer requests or complaints shared via social media
• There is no feature to track your IT assets

Choose it for: AI-powered chatbots, ticket prioritization, shared inbox, CSAT surveys

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Small startups, small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Lazy Cloud Lodge is a famous inn, bread & breakfast located in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The company is best known for its romantic suites for couples, including whirlpools with a view of the fireplace. 

Since LCL offers unique rooms, many of its guests wish to talk to them before they book a room. Although the company provided information about packages and facilities on the website, via phone, and through email – it was not enough. With ProProfs Help Desk onboard, LCL can use live chat to interact with prospects and grow their business. 

ProProfs Help Desk Pricing: 

Starts at $20/agent/month (billed annually).

2. Zendesk

When it comes to ITSM ticketing systems, Zendesk has become a popular name among both small and large companies. Its powerful automation features help IT teams manage incidents, events, problems, and service requests from a single, intuitive dashboard. 

With Zendesk, you can create a self-service employee knowledge base and free your team from password reset requests and other common IT problems. Moreover, you can align your reporting to ITIL best practices by capturing metrics such as first response time, ticket backlogs, and more. 

Some Top Features of Zendesk: 

• Manage all IT incidents, events, problems, and service requests 
• Solve common user problems faster with canned responses called macros
• Keep track of phones, computers, monitors, and other IT assets
• Integrate with powerful IT tools like Oomnitza, Okta, OneLogin, Myndbend, and more
• Generate reports on incidents, problems, and change requests

Pros:

• The tool comes with thousands of integration options
• You can create AI-powered bots to automate support

Cons: 

• Compared to other IT tools, Zendesk is quite expensive 
• Many users have complained about the vendor’s poor customer service

Choose it for:  Self-service help center, Community forum, powerful automation

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Large enterprises

Case Study: 

BoxyCharm runs a subscription box service where it shares makeup, skincare, and beauty products with subscribers on a monthly basis. Customers can join BoxyCharm with a base or premium membership and enjoy products from the best brands delivered to their doorsteps monthly. 

After switching to Zendesk, the company was able to take its customer service to the next level. By leveraging social media messaging and powerful automation, BoxyCharm was able to deflect 60% of email tickets and witnessed a 17% rise in customer satisfaction (CSAT). 

Zendesk Pricing: 

Starts at $49/agent/month

3. TOPdesk

TOPdesk is one of the popular ITSM ticketing tools that should be on your list. The tool makes your IT support effortless by acting as a single platform to manage all your user requests, IT assets, and workflows. 

With its robust incident management features, you can keep track of all incoming requests, automatically assign tickets to specific agents, and share notifications through automated emails. Managers can easily view which assets their organization has, who are using them, and when they need replacement– all in one dashboard.

Top Features of TOPdesk:

• Track your IT team’s availability and workload
• Create a self-service portal to allow end-users to submit and track tickets 
• Schedule and manage all your IT projects effortlessly
• Apply barcodes on IT systems and scan them to automatically import data 
• Support your customers in real-time with live chat

Pros: 

• Get over 90+ integration options
• Use the mobile app to track tasks on the move

Cons: 

• The tool does not offer transparent pricing details on its website
• Limited design options for the self-service portal

Choose it for: Omnichannel support, facility management, Kanban board

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

London District Catholic School Board (LDCSB) is an educational institution located in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Their team comprises over 2500 employees and 80 agents in the IT department who manage service delivery for staff and students. 

By adding their assets to TOPdesk, LDCSB’s IT team was able to maintain an inventory of everything in the back end. The ITSM tool even helped them manage the distribution of Chromebooks and laptops to students during the pandemic. 

TOPdesk pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

4. SysAid 

SysAid is one of the top IT service management tools with built-in remote control and advanced automation capabilities. The tool can help you support your remote IT support team even during these unprecedented times. 

SysAid’s robust asset management feature can help your business view, secure, and manage your IT assets directly from within the service desk. Having reliable asset data at hand leads to better ticket management and faster issue resolution. In addition to this, you can run standard or custom reports to monitor incidents, service requests, problems, changes, IT assets, and more. 

Top Features of SysAid:

• Remotely access your work desktops and data with the SysAid Remote Desktop feature
• Track your IT asset hardware and software inventory
• Boost team productivity with automated routing, escalation, and end-user notifications 
• Create a dedicated knowledge base with how-to solutions for end-users
• Easily integrate with third-party software applications such as Salesforce, Google Apps, etc. 

Pros:

• Compare your firm’s IT performance against other companies
• Generate in-depth reports on service quality and IT assets

Cons: 

• SysAid does not offer transparent pricing information on its website
• It is difficult to upload files on your knowledge base 

Choose it for: Ticket management, digital workflows, network discovery

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Relay Resources is a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon. The organization helps disabled people learn in-demand skills and find relevant jobs. RR even employs disabled people for jobs in document services, landscaping, janitorial, and supply chain solutions.

Earlier, the organization was using manual methods to track service requests and there was no central system in place. However, with SysAid on board, Relay Resource’s team was able to implement hierarchy-based escalations of tickets and real-time tracking of all computing and hardware assets.

SysAid Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

5. Jira Service Management 

As one of the best IT management software, Jira Service Management empowers multiple business departments, from IT to HR help desk, to set up a service desk and manage user queries. Your business can finally look to avoid the complexity of traditional ITSM solutions and deliver meaningful support experiences. 

Jira Service Management empowers your employees to find answers to their basic questions using an internal self-service portal. Its knowledge base called Confluence can surface relevant articles to help employees get the solutions they need without any agent intervention. 

Top Features of Jira Service Management: 

• Track the complete lifecycle and ownership of assets
• Easily respond to, resolve, and continuously learn from incidents
• Resolve requests based on priorities and SLAs
• Use 300+ pre-built form templates to collect all the information you need about a request
• Access ITSM features on the movie with Jira’s mobile app for Android and iOS

Pros: 

• Great integration options with third-party tools
• Powerful features of inter-department collaboration 

Cons: 

• The reporting section needs to have more customizable fields
• The performance can be slow sometimes

Choose it for: Configuration management, incident escalation, knowledge management 

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Canva is an online graphic design platform that people can use to create social media graphics, posters, presentations, and other visual content. With over 1,000 employees and 40 million users, Canva’s team was finding it difficult to maintain visibility across workflows and keep up with demand. 

The online platform uses Atlassian’s Jira Service Management to increase collaboration and transparency, manage 5,000 tickets per year with ease, and empower users across the globe to bring their designs to life.

6. Solarwinds

Solarwinds offers a modern ITSM system to manage the delivery of IT services. With the help of this tool, you can create a service catalog that lists all IT-related services that can be performed for, by, or within your business.

To streamline work operations across various departments, you can create an employee service portal. All your employees can easily track the progress of their tickets and view the SLAs pertaining to their requests. Empower end-users to resolve issues by offering a knowledge base that contains important resources such as step-by-step help articles. FAQs, tutorials, and more. 

Top Features of Solarwinds Service Desk:

• Organize, manage, and prioritize incoming support tickets.
• Create a service catalog to standardize request and fulfillment processes
• Manage IT assets such as hardware, software, POs, and more
• Create a service portal for end-users to submit tickets and requests
• Address problems from anywhere and at any time with the Solarwinds mobile app

Pros: 

• Resolve incidents from anywhere using the service desk mobile app
• Allow users to address routine questions using a knowledge base

Cons: 

• The asset management dashboard can be improved 
• Forms need more customization options

Choose it for: Service portal, change management, service catalog

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: Not available 

Solarwinds Pricing: 

Starts at $19/agent/month

7. BMC Helix ITSM

BMC Helix ITSM is an industry-leading service management tool that uses intelligent automation to help your business adopt the various ITSM best practices and principles. Using this tool, you can increase efficiency and stability for all your IT infrastructure and services

BMC Helix ITSM takes user experience to a whole different level. Its popular persona-based UX can be optimized across devices and allows you to deliver personalized support experiences at scale. Moreover, with its proactive problem and incident management features, your team can find potential issues and resolve them to avoid impact on business operations. 

Top Features of BMC Helix ITSM:

• Identify issues proactively and prioritize them based on business urgency
• Add robust multi-media content to your knowledge base for enhanced support
• Over 90 out-of-the-box reports to get insights quickly
• Identify asset purchasing opportunities
• Deliver users a consumer-like service catalog for easy access to IT services

Pros:

• Make the most of a drag-and-drop change calendar
• Create an intuitive service catalog for end-users

Cons: 

• Setting up BMC Helix ITSM can be quite complex
• The vendor does not provide transparent pricing details on its website

Choose it for: Proactive problem management, service level management, chatbots

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Grupo Moura is a conglomerate corporation that has made a mark in manufacturing, real estate, and social entrepreneurship. The company employs over 6,000 employees and owns 80 distribution centers in Brazil. 

Due to rapid expansion, the company wanted to digitize its service management functions. With BMC Helix ITSM onboard, Grupo Moura aligned its services with the company’s agile culture and improved the end-user experience. 

BMC Helix ITSM Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

8. Spiceworks 

Spiceworks is a free ITSM software that helps you keep tight control on IT incidents and tasks. With ticket collaboration features, agents can share tickets with their trusted peers and work on the ticket together. 

You can create a user portal and customize it to help users help themselves. Your employees or customers can submit tickets, track the status of a ticket, and get the information they need within seconds. Moreover, IT support agents can discover the devices on your network automatically with the help of Spiceworks IP Scanner. 

Top Features of Spiceworks:

• Allow users to share IT requests via email, phone, user portal, or mobile app
• Use ticket rules to auto-assign tickets to your experts
• Use custom fields to track additional information about tickets
• Provide multi-site support for your clients based in different locations
• Choose between cloud or self-hosted help desk based on your requirements

Pros: 

• Users can track all ticket activities in one place
• Use custom fields to add additional information about tickets

Cons: 

• Integrating with other tools can be a major challenge
• Users are made to view irrelevant advertisements because of its free pricing model

Choose it for: Multi-site support, incident management, user portal, performance reports

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: Not Available

Spiceworks Pricing: 

Spiceworks is free for all users. 

9. ServiceNow

ServiceNow is another robust IT service management software that can help your team identify, track, resolve high-impact incidents, and improve agent efficiency. With this tool, you can automatically categorize and route issues to the correct resolution team using machine learning. 

You can leverage Virtual Agent, an automated conversational chatbot, to resolve repetitive IT service tasks and requests. In addition to this, ServiceNow allows you to set business expectations right from the start and gain visibility into your IT team’s service commitments with Service Level Management. 

Top Features of ServiceNow: 

• Track and manage all vendors from a single dashboard
• Enable employee self-service for better experiences and lower costs 
• Collaborate to investigate issues and restore service quickly
• Use performance analytics and reports to enhance accountability and make smarter decisions
• Leverage the mobile app to make it easier for employees to work from anywhere

Pros: 

• Visual task boards offer you better visibility
• Define agent roles and responsibilities

Cons: 

• The Slack integration needs improvement 
• The ticket search feature is not very intuitive 

Choose it for: Virtual agents, incident management, predictive intelligence

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Wesleyan University is a private university based in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831, the educational institution offers majors in multiple areas of study such as Computer Science, Data Analysis, Psychology, Planetary Science, Philosophy, and many more. 

After establishing ServiceNow at the heart of its IT operations, Wesleyan University saw incredible results. To centralize knowledge management, it created a vast IT self-service portal that is accessible to all students, faculty, and staff members. 

ServiceNow Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

10. Freshservice

Freshservice is known for its robust ITSM service desk that offers features such as a service catalog, incident management, asset management, knowledge base, and more. You can quickly deploy your service desk and develop enterprise-grade customizations without the need for any coding. 

With Freshservice’s change management features, you can plan changes in a few clicks and allow leaders to approve and evaluate changes. The tool is also known for its simple yet impactful reporting features. For instance, managers can organize reports based on their potential impact, type, or department to easily track service desk performance, identify problems, and make informed decisions.

Top Features of Freshservice: 

• Create a user-friendly service catalog for users to place requests in no time 
• Start a conversation with your teammates from within a support ticket
• Keep track of all your IT and non-IT inventory in a single place
• Generate automated reports for incidents, changes, and assets 
• Integrate with third-party apps such as Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, etc. 

Pros:

• Resolve tickets on the move with dedicated mobile apps for Android and iOS
• New users can get a 21-day free trial 

Cons:

• The tool offers onboarding services to get your team up to speed in no time
• In the lower-priced plans, reporting needs to be more robust

Choose it for: SLA management, asset normalization, project analytics, customizable templates

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Centro Global Solutions is a multinational company known for business process management services. The firm offers call center and business process outsourcing (BPO) services in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific regions.

The BPO company was using an in-house built IT support solution that presented their team with multiple problems. Centro GS used Freshservice to create a dedicated service catalog and added over 100+ knowledge base articles to encourage self-service among agents and customers. 

Freshservice Pricing: 

Starts at $19/agent/month

11. InvGate Service Desk

InvGate Service Desk stands apart with its visually appealing ticketing system and advanced reporting capabilities. 

With InvGate, you can empower agents to provide better service with clear incident prioritization based on SLA, urgency, and department. It also features gamification, as well as a knowledge base to bolster the knowledge of IT support staff and improve the speed of issue resolution.  A visual workflow designer allows you to define automated workflows to manage requests more efficiently.

Top Features of InvGate Service Desk:

• Centralize support for multiple departments such as IT, HR, Legal, and Facilities
• Create a customizable self-service portal for end-users
• Provide support directly from Microsoft Teams
• Integrate with InvGate’s IT Asset Management tool
• Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud

Pros:

• Track hardware and software related to each incident
• Easily customize tool alerts and notifications

Cons:

• Lack of transparent pricing structure
• The reporting function needs more add-ons

Choose it for: Cloud asset management, gamification, network discovery

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: Not available

InvGate Service Desk Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

12. HaloITSM

HaloITSM is another remarkable ITSM software that empowers your IT team to deliver ITIL-aligned services across the organization. The tool makes it easier for IT support agents to manage incidents, automate workflows, and meet SLAs. 

With HaloITSM, you can create a vast self-service portal for IT users. They can find solutions to common problems on their own without contacting your team for assistance. You can even allow users to request the services they need using this portal. 

Top Features of Halo ITSM: 

• Turn solutions into articles and build your knowledge base
• Improve self-service content with keyword indexing and rich formatting 
• Attach files to IT incidents or requests
• Allow end-users to track the progress of their requests
• Create multiple SLA groups based on response and resolution times

Pros: 

• You can easily track SLA violations
• Investigate the root cause of issues to improve business processes

Cons: 

• The pricing model is based on a minimum of 10 users
• The on-premise version is slow and needs improvements

Case Study: 

ACH Group works with the vision to improve the lives of elderly people. With a wide range of services, the company supports old people who live in their independent homes and even offers retirement living options to meet their different needs. 

The company was looking for an intuitive ITIL-aligned tool to manage service desk requests. It partnered with HaloITSM mainly for superior configuration management database (CMDB) and change management handling features. The HaloITSM team made sure the onboarding was as seamless as possible. 

HaloITSM Pricing: 

Starts at $89/agent/month

13. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is used by thousands of businesses to resolve downtimes and improve the end-user experience. With powerful incident management, service desk agents can track the progress of incidents, meet SLAs, and resolve issues proactively. 

Unlike most ITSM tools, ServiceDesk PLus allows you to track all your IT projects in one place. For instance, you can get 360-degree visibility into all your ongoing IT projects, assign tasks, monitor progress, and meet deadlines effortlessly. 

Top Features of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus:

• Build an accurate database of IT assets used in your organization
• Manage resources to keep your IT projects within the budget
• Showcase your services to end-users with a service catalog
• Streamline the planning and execution of changes
• Create a knowledge base to reduce incident ticket volume

Choose it for: Project management, asset management, CMDB, IT change management

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: 

Venn Life Sciences is a drug development business that provides a wide range of services such as drug development consultancy, clinical trial design, and execution. The pharma company employs over three hundred employees spread out across Paris, Dublin, and London. 

Venn Life Sciences was searching for an IT support system to manage their company assets such as laptops, servers, and mobile devices. After selecting ServiceDesk Plus, VLS could easily handle crucial activities such as AD auditing, asset management, tracking, and more. 

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Pricing: 

Starts at $10/technician/month

Rise Above IT Challenges With the Best ITSM Software

As modern businesses shift and evolve rapidly, the need for strong IT service management (ITSM) has become paramount. Right from managing your IT assets to making long-term technological decisions, ITSM tools are revolutionizing how businesses operate. 

While searching for the best ITSM tool, always look for standard features such as ease of usage, cloud hosting, incident management, asset management, and a self-service portal. As a matter of fact, strong automation capabilities can help your team achieve more in less time. 

If you are looking for an affordable yet feature-rich tool to manage your numerous IT issues and requests, look no further. ProProfs IT help desk can help you capture and track all IT-related problems and equip your team with all the features they need to deliver delightful support experiences.