Top 10 Jira Service Desk Alternatives for 2023

There’s no denying that the Jira Service Desk is one of the leading IT help desk tools in the market. You can track all IT incidents in one place, encourage self-service with a knowledge base, and a lot more. 

While it might have been the “right” option for you in the initial days, every growing IT support team hits a moment where they need to start looking for the best Jira Service Desk alternative.

But what could be the possible reasons? 

Jira might come across as the perfect ticketing tool at first, however, it has its own set of flaws. Right from a complicated and outdated interface to expensive plans, there are multiple problem areas that push users to make the switch. 

If you are sailing in the same boat, this blog will offer all the help you need. In this blog, we will share ten alternatives to Jira Service Desk that will give your team the flexibility and power to delight end-users. 

Let’s go! 

Jira Service Desk Alternatives Feature & Price Table

What Is Jira Service Desk? 

Jira Service Desk, also known as Jira Service Management, is an ITSM tool that helps your business deliver great customer and employee service experiences. You can empower multiple departments such as IT, HR, or Legal to set up a service desk quickly and adapt at scale. The tool is well-equipped with features related to incident management, change management, asset management, and more. 

So how much does Jira Service Desk cost? The tool offers a free version and two paid plans – Standard ($20/agent/month) and Premium ($45/agent/month). 

Why Look for Jira Service Desk Alternatives? 

Jira Service Desk is used by thousands of teams worldwide. However, there is a good fraction of those who are looking for Jira alternatives due to different reasons. 

In this section, we will discuss some of the biggest drawbacks of this tool that you must be made aware of. 

• Outdated User Interface (UI): When you log in to Jira Service Management, you are greeted with a dull and outdated interface. Compared to some modern IT help desk tools in the market, Jira’s interface needs massive improvements.  

• The Enterprise Plan is Billed Annually: Unlike other subscription plans offered by Jira, its Enterprise plan is billed annually. This means that you will have to pay a huge annual fee in advance instead of an affordable monthly subscription. The high pricing might make this tool an unfeasible option for most businesses. 

• Reporting Section Needs More Customization Options: With Jira Service Management, you can easily analyze reported incidents and response activities. However, the vendor does not provide many customization options to generate reports according to your needs. 

The Features Jira Service Desk Alternatives Must Have

When you are searching for the best alternative to Jira Service Desk, it is important to be aware of the features you want. Even if your feature list is not ready yet, don’t worry as we have done the heavy lifting for you. 

Here are some important IT help desk features that every alternative should have: 

• An easy-to-use and intuitive interface so your agents can start responding to end-user requests or issues in a matter of minutes. 

• Powerful ticketing features to ensure not a single help desk ticket can slip through the cracks. For instance, ticket prioritization, escalation, ticket assignment, ticket filters, etc.

• Automation features that help your team achieve more in a short time. For instance, automated email notifications to update agents and end-users about ticket progress. 

• Reporting functionality to help managers track agent performance and monitor customer experience with the help of metrics such as resolution time, CSAT, NPS, etc. 

Our Selection Criteria for Jira Service Desk Alternatives

When you compare Jira Service Desk with other similar tools, you will observe that almost every IT help desk software offers similar features. So what can be those factors that help you make the right decision? 

After visiting hundreds of online reviews, software comparison websites, and product websites, we have listed the top alternatives to Jira Service Desk. Only the tools that meet our criteria are included in the list. 

Core Help Desk Features: All tools should offer core help desk features such as ticket creation, multichannel support, self-service options, help desk reports, etc. 

Listed on Top Software Comparison Platforms: The Jira Service Desk competitors should be listed on the leading software review websites such as Getapp, SoftwareWorld, and Capterra. 

Minimum 10 User Reviews: There should be a minimum of 10 genuine user reviews on the above-mentioned platforms for the respective tools. Reviews submitted by genuine users allow you to weigh the pros and cons effectively. 

10 Best Jira Service Desk Alternatives

Now it’s time to explore the main section of this blog. Here is a list of the 10 best alternatives to Jira Service Desk along with their features, pros, cons, pricing, and other details. 

1. ProProfs Help Desk 

ProProfs Help Desk is undeniably the best alternative to Jira Service Desk as it helps you take the IT end-user experience to the next level. You can encourage customers or employees to share their issues via multiple channels such as email, live chat, web forms, help center, etc. 

ProProfs Help Desk can even help your team improve knowledge management. You can create an online self-service portal with the help of ready-to-use themes and agents can collaborate to edit and publish help articles. You can even control access by keeping your knowledge base public or private. 

Top Features of ProProfs Help Desk:

• Automatically assign incoming incidents or requests to agents 
• Monitor the end-user experience with CSAT and NPS surveys
• Leverage the shared inbox feature to access multiple team inboxes in one place
• Allow agents to receive alerts when someone else is responding to a ticket
• Monitor ticket response and resolution times

Pros:

• You can develop powerful chatbots to automate your support process
• 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 $10/agent/month

Get free 15-days access to help desk software

2. Solarwinds Service Desk

Solarwinds Service Desk is another software like Jira Service Desk that comes with powerful IT service management (ITSM) features. With robust incident management capabilities, you can easily manage and prioritize all incoming incidents in one place. 

Solarwinds allows you to speed up service requests with an easy-to-use employee service portal. Staff members can easily track the progress of their ongoing tickets and view the SLAs attached to them. 

Top Features of Solarwinds Service Desk: 

• Get a complete, up-to-date picture of your company’s IT assets
• Plan, review and implement changes quickly across the organization
• Allow end-users to get instant assistance via live chat
• Create an IT service catalog that includes all IT services
• Customize your reports to view KPIs that matter to your business

Pros: 

• Resolve problems from anywhere using the service desk mobile app
• Address routine tech questions using a knowledge base

Cons: 

• The asset management dashboard needs improvement 
• Forms need more customization options

Choose it for: Service catalog, employee service portal, asset discovery 

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: Not available 

Solarwinds Service Desk Pricing: 

Starts at $19/agent/month

3. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ServiceDesk Plus can help your IT support teams resolve downtimes with ease and enhance the end-user experience. Incident management features allow you to track incidents, meet SLAs, and manage the complete lifecycle of IT support tickets. 

Unlike other Jira Service Desk alternatives, this tool allows you to track all your IT projects in one place. For example, you can centrally store all your ongoing IT projects, assign tasks, view 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

Pros:

• The tool allows you to build a separate inventory to monitor all your non-IT assets
• Allow real-time interactions between agents and end-users with live chat

Cons: 

• Important features such as service catalog and project management are offered as add-ons
• The Standard plan lacks IT asset discovery capabilities

Choose it for: Asset management, project management, CMDB, IT release management

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

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

Case Study: 

Venn Life Sciences is a drug development company that offers a unique combination of services such as drug development consultancy, clinical trial design, as well as execution. The company employs nearly 300 employees spread out across Paris, London, and Dublin. 

Venn Life Sciences was looking for an IT solution to manage their corporate assets such as laptops, servers, and mobile devices. After choosing ServiceDesk Plus, the company could perform various activities such as asset management, tracking, AD auditing, and more. 

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Pricing: 

Starts at $10/technician/month

4. Freshservice 

As software cheaper than Jira Service Desk, Freshservice offers an intelligent ITSM solution. You can use this tool to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks and replace them with automated workflows without any coding skills. 

With Freshservice, you can receive alerts on critical issues and minimize the impact of downtime on your business processes. Moreover, you can interact with employees on their favorite channels such as Slack or MS Teams and resolve their concerns. 

Top Features of Freshservice: 

• Automatically route incidents to relevant members of your team
• Set different SLA policies for different ticket categories or business hours
• Deflect common incidents and requests using a knowledge base
• Link problems to past incidents and conduct root-cause analysis
• Automatically track and discover asset information

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: Asset normalization, SLA management, 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

5. Zendesk 

Zendesk is one of the leading IT ticketing solutions in the market used by thousands of businesses globally. You can automate a majority of support processes to manage incidents, service requests, events, and more easily. 

Zendesk even allows support managers to make the best decisions for their team and the business. They can easily view tickets by channel and track key performance metrics such as average first reply time, new tickets, satisfaction ratings, etc., from a single reporting dashboard. 

Top Features of Zendesk: 

• Encourage self-service with an internal knowledge base
• Connect with end-users via messaging, social media, email, or phone support
• Analyze support requests and incidents to identify trends 
• Give agents all the context they need to offer personalized service
• Customize your ticket forms to gather the right information

Pros:

• Integrate with multiple apps from the IT app directory
• Leverage AI-powered bots to automate support

Cons: 

• Zendesk is quite expensive compared to other IT help desk systems
• A lot of users have complained about Zendesk’s poor customer service

Choose it for:  Community forum, self-service help center, 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

6. SysAid

SysAid is a powerful help desk software like Jira Service Desk that can help you empower employees to resolve IT issues on their own. With a self-service portal, IT end-users can access FAQ pages, submit incidents or requests, monitor existing tickets, view IT announcements, and much more. 

SysAid allows you to customize web forms so your team can capture all the details they need about an issue. You can even communicate with end-users in real-time via live chat and resolve their queries in a matter of minutes. 

Top Features of SysAid:

• Create a dedicated knowledge base for both IT agents and end-users
• Modify and build workflows with a simple drag-and-drop feature
• Monitor your servers, IT networks, desktops, and other assets
• Allow IT users to reset their passwords and gain access to their accounts
• Deploy escalation rules to avoid SLA violations

Pros:

• You can evaluate your company’s IT performance against other companies
• Generate detailed reports on IT assets and service quality, 

Cons: 

• The vendor does not provide transparent pricing information on its website
• Uploading files on your knowledge base is quite time-consuming

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 in Portland, Oregon that helps people with disabilities learn new skills and find relevant jobs. The company employs disabled people for jobs in janitorial, document services, landscaping, and supply chain solutions.

Earlier, the company was tracking service requests manually and there was no central system in place. With SysAid, their team was able to set hierarchy-based escalations of tickets. The company even automated real-time tracking of all computing and hardware assets via a centralized dashboard.

SysAid Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

7. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is an omnichannel help desk software that can help you assist customers via live chat, email, phone, social media, and other channels. With great customization capabilities, you can re-design your help desk to match your unique brand. 

As a free alternative to Jira Service Desk, Zoho Desk helps you create a multi-brand help center. You can set different notifications, and SLAs for different help centers and even use appropriate themes for each. 

Top Features of Zoho Desk: 

• Create a community forum for your website visitors, prospects, and existing customers
• Automatically tag tickets and keep your help desk inbox well-organized
• Set SLAs and escalate issues automatically when SLAs are violated
• Save time by using templates for ticket forms and notifications
• Assign different roles and permissions to your help desk agents

Pros:

• You can easily connect with Zoho CRM and give agents complete customer information
• Track the time spent by agents on resolving each ticket

Cons: 

• The standard plan lacks essential features such as automated ticket assignment, agent collision, etc. 
• As your ticket volume increases, the tool can hang sometimes

Choose it for: Live chat, sentiment analysis, multi-brand help center, CRM integration

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

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

Case Study: 

Cartika began in the year 2000 and offers managed services for technology and app infrastructure. The brand offers an industry-leading LaaS platform that helps businesses manage their applications across multiple operating systems. 

Cartika chose Zoho Desk for its multichannel capabilities. The company offers multichannel customer service to clients through email, phone, chat, and a dedicated service management portal. To create the right service culture, the company encourages employees outside of customer service such as engineers to answer customer queries. 

Zoho Desk Pricing: 

Starts at $12/agent/month

8. Spiceworks 

Spiceworks offers cloud help desk software that you can set up in minutes. Cloud hosting means you no longer need to worry about software procurement, storage, or even maintenance.

Spiceworks allows you to capture end-user requests via user portal, email, and mobile device. Moreover, if you are a support manager looking to take a deep dive into reports and analytics, this tool has a lot to offer. For example, you can monitor metrics such as first response time, ticket close time, etc. 

Top Features of Spiceworks: 

• Allow agents to view the complete ticket history and gain relevant context
• View and track all your IT projects in one place
• Monitor your new and unassigned tickets from a single dashboard
• Share tickets with each other and collaborate to resolve tickets together
• Create a customizable user portal and encourage self-service

Pros: 

• Spiceworks is easy-to-use and maintain
• You can use custom fields to add additional information about tickets

Cons: 

• Integrating with other tools can be a major challenge
• Due to its free pricing, users are made to view irrelevant advertisements

Choose it for: Incident management, user portal, multi-site support, 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. HelpSpot 

HelpSpot is another Jira Service Desk alternative that deserves to be on your list. With the shared inbox feature, you can access all your group inboxes in one place and share faster replies to delight customers. 

HelpSpot even allows you to create a fully functional knowledge base to encourage self-service among employees and customers. Moreover, you can even create response templates for common issues and share them across your team. 

Top Features of HelpSpot:

• Avoid duplicate responses with real-time collision detection
• Use filters to sort conversations by inboxes, departments, or other criteria
• Export help desk reports and share them with key stakeholders
• Group similar tickets together and save your agents’ valuable time
• Share NPS/CSAT surveys with customers 

Pros:

• Choose between on-premise or cloud versions based on your needs
• Schedule reports to receive them via email, directly into your inbox

Cons: 

• The tool must offer more thorough training sessions to users
• The User Interface (UI) needs improvement  

Choose it for: Shared inbox, ticket history, internal collaboration, email templates

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Startups, small to mid-sized businesses

Case Study: 

The Silent Partner, founded in 1998, is an Australian owned and operated business. The company offers a wide range of services such as virtual reception, helpdesk, diary management, web chat, etc., to its clients from all over the world. 

Before HelpSpot, The Silent Partner was solely relying on a shared inbox account to manage customer service. There was no visibility on what staff was working on. After automating workflows with HelpSpot, the company was able to save 100+ hours of staff time every month. 

HelpSpot Pricing: 

Starts at $699/year (for 3 agents)

10. BMC Helix ITSM

BMC Helix ITSM is another strong Jira Service Desk competitor that offers intelligent automation capabilities to deliver high-quality service to IT end-users. 

The tool offers intelligent recommendations to ensure your knowledge base offers the right information to end-users. Moreover, with powerful reports and visualizations, support managers can obtain data-driven insights and take long-term decisions. 

Top Features of BMC Helix ITSM: 

• View, update and manage the complete lifecycle of knowledge articles
• Upload multi-media self-help content for enhanced support
• Monitor support performance with the help of custom reports and dashboard 
• Track the depreciation of IT assets over the course of time
• Leverage artificial intelligence to identify recurring incidents

Pros:

• Leverage a drag-and-drop change calendar
• Provide a centralized service catalog to end-users

Cons: 

• Setting up BMC Helix ITSM can be quite complex
• The tool can be slow to load sometimes

Choose it for: Asset management, change management, service catalog

3rd party integrations allowed: Yes

Suited for: Medium businesses, large enterprises

Case Study: Not Available

BMC Helix ITSM Pricing: 

Get in touch with the company for a quote.

Comparison of Best Alternatives of Jira Service Desk

Final Verdict: Which Jira Service Desk Alternative Should You Go For?

Jira Service Desk is a powerful IT help desk software that allows you to:

• Track all incidents and requests in one place
• Discover and track your company’s IT assets
• Deflect more tickets with a dedicated knowledge base
• Get actionable insights into your team’s performance

Despite these great features, some serious drawbacks such as an outdated interface, expensive plans, etc. make people search for the right alternatives to Jira Service Desk. All the alternatives shared in this Jira Service Desk comparison blog are trustworthy and have been a popular choice among companies of all sizes. 

If you wish to go for an IT ticketing system that is more affordable and offers a wide range of features, you can go for ProProfs Help Desk. If budget is not a concern, you can consider Zendesk as your support partner. Similarly, if you wish to enhance the omnichannel support experience, Freshservice can be a good bet.