The 11 Best Help Desk Software: Tested & Compared

Whether you’re an online business or a brick and mortar store, keeping up with customer requests is an important part of delivering a great customer experience (CX). As CX continues to be a key differentiator for brands — just as Gartner predicted years ago — they need a dedicated tool to help them keep in touch with customers.

The tool of choice for many businesses is a help desk.

What is help desk software?

Help desk software helps companies organize, manage, and respond to service requests. It’s useful for both external requests from customers and internal requests from team members.

Using a help desk platform is a great way to improve your customer experience — 75% of customers desire a consistent experience, regardless of how they engage a company (through social media, in person, by phone, etc.) — because it consolidates all of your customer support interactions into one omnichannel tool.

Help desks may include a variety of features like a shared inbox, knowledge base software, and a live chat solution. However, not all help desks include all of the tools mentioned.

What help desk software features are important to look for?

Depending on your specific use case, some features will be more important than others. That said, whether you’re using a help desk for internal or external conversations, there are a few key features to look for.

Easy-to-use interface

Any new software takes time to learn. However, some tools have much shorter learning curves than others. The quicker you’re able to train agents, the quicker they’re able to get back to doing what they do best: supporting others.

You should also see what the experience is like from the customer side of the equation. For example, is it easy to send in a request? Does the platform make the back and forth between you and the software’s support team feel easy and pain free? What is the chat interface like? What about the help center?

Collaboration and productivity tools to help automate your workflow

Two of the biggest benefits of using a help desk tool are the ability to streamline work and to collaborate with others.

Look for a help desk with a shared inbox and helpful collaboration features like private notes, saved replies, and collision detection. You should also keep an eye out for features that can help boost efficiency, such as workflows that help you automate manual tasks and AI help desk tools that can help you address customer or employee needs more quickly.

Self-service features for better service experiences

Look for software that can help customers and end-users find answers on their own. This can be done through a knowledge base solution where answers to FAQs and other important information can be published. 

Alternatively, some organizations may want to include chatbots as part of their support strategy. When done well, support chatbots can help with answering simple questions like providing order updates and giving status updates on outstanding support tickets.

Reporting and metrics

Though not every part of what makes a great customer experience can be quantified, there are plenty of things that can be. With access to reporting and metrics tools, you’re better able to understand which areas you excel in and where you still have room for improvement.

Scalability to help you grow

Whether you're looking to purchase a help desk software solution for your school or your company, one thing is certain: As your team continues to grow and change, so will your needs. Since switching help desks is a big undertaking, finding a solution that can grow with you is important. 

It’s best to look for a tool that will work well for at least the next 18-24 months. Anything less than that and you might be setting yourself up for a future headache. Anything beyond that timeframe gets pretty hard to reliably predict.

Quality customer support

No matter how user-friendly a tool is, chances are you’ll have questions about it at some point. Though you may assume people making help desk ticketing software would be great at providing support, that’s not always the case.

Once you have a list of serious contenders, take a look at each of their knowledge bases to see how comprehensive their content is and how easy it is to navigate. You should also take note of the different ways that the company provides support (which channels, etc.), then send a few requests to their support team to see how quickly they respond and how helpful they are in your interactions overall.

The 11 best help desk software for 2024

1. Help Scout

2. Hiver

3. Zendesk

4. Front

5. Gorgias

6. Kustomer

7. Google Collaborative Inbox

8. Freshdesk

9. Zoho Desk

10. SysAid

11. Jira Service Management

1. Help Scout - Best for teams who prioritize customer satisfaction

Help Scout is a complete customer service platform with everything you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Beyond support, Help Scout is also a great communication tool for other departments, such as human resources, IT services, and accounting. It’s also suitable for use across many industries like education and real estate and can be configured to be HIPAA compliant, making it a solid choice for those in the healthcare industry.

This section will take a deep dive into Help Scout’s core tools as well as a couple of other things that make Help Scout special:

• Inbox

• Beacon

• Docs

• AI

• Reporting

• Integrations

• Best-in-class customer support

Inbox

One of the trickiest things about managing customer and client communications as a team is keeping those communications organized. Help Scout’s Inbox is designed to bring all of your customer conversations into one place, making it easier for you to collaborate, stay organized, and increase your team or organization’s efficiency. 

Channels

It’s important to meet customers, clients, and patients where they are, which is why Help Scout supports popular channels like email, live chat, and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Have other channels you’d like to manage? Check out our integrations page to bring other contact types like text messages and voice into your Help Scout inbox.

Saved replies

While some messages may be one of a kind, most help desk queues see a lot of repeats. Saved replies allow you to create templated responses for all of your FAQs, getting both agents and customers back on track more quickly.

Internal notes and @mentions

Multiple emails and long forwarded threads can get unwieldy fast, so Help Scout allows you to tag teammates in internal notes right in the conversation window. This keeps all communications about the case organized, documented, and easy to reference.

Collision detection

Multiple agent replies can make for a confused customer, which is why Help Scout’s collision detection is so important. The feature makes it easy to tell whether someone is viewing or responding to a message with just a glance, keeping everyone on track and off each other’s toes.

Snooze and send later

If you aren’t ready to respond to a customer or need to remind yourself to follow up, you can snooze a conversation to temporarily remove it from the queue. In cases where you want to reply to a customer now but have it delivered at another time, you can also choose to have the message send later. 

Keyboard shortcuts

When you’re in the queue, every second counts. While the time spent moving from keyboard to mouse may not seem like a lot, it adds up! Help Scout’s keyboard shortcuts allow agents to handle many tasks like assigning conversations, inserting images into replies, adding internal notes, and more, all without taking your hands off the keyboard.  

Tags and custom fields

Finding conversations on a specific topic can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, which is why tags and custom fields can be a game changer for many teams. Tags are labels that you can add to conversations to help you track specific groups of messages. Use tags for things like tracking VIP cases, customer feedback, and more. Custom fields are similar but are for more general things that you might want to track across all of your conversations, like type of request (bug report, billing issue, etc.).

Views

Need to group conversations by a specific topic? Inbox views let you focus on a specific segment of messages. Views can be created using several different criteria like tags, assignments, wait time, and more.

Workflows

Another Help Scout feature that can save you time is workflows. Workflows are a way for you to automate repetitive tasks to help decrease busy work and increase productivity. Workflows rely on if/then statements and can automate tasks like conversation assignments, tagging, or setting up autoresponders.

Customer management

Customer profiles display helpful information like a customer’s company, email address, location, and previous support interactions right from the conversation sidebar. Use customer profiles to give you all of the details you need to provide contextual, personalized support experiences that improve customer satisfaction.

Mobile apps

In addition to its desktop app, Help Scout offers both iOS and Android apps, allowing busy teams to stay connected whether in the office or on the go.

Customer satisfaction ratings

If you’re wondering if your support made the grade or missed the mark, Help Scout’s customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys can help you find out. Email and chat customers are asked to rate the service they received as Great, Okay, or Not Good, and they are also offered a chance to leave a comment to provide more context for their response.  

Docs

Help Scout’s knowledge base tool is called Docs. It's a self-service solution that allows your team to build and publish internal or external help documentation for employees or customers in minutes.

A new (and improved) editor

Easily create media-rich documentation using Help Scout’s updated Docs editor. Use the shortcut menu to quickly add formatting to your text, such as headings or bulleted lists. You can also add callouts, quotes, tables, videos, images, code blocks, and more. For those who prefer to create documentation using markdown or HTML, you can do that, too.

Article drafts are automatically saved while you compose, ensuring that you never lose your work. Want to revert back to an earlier version of your article? No problem! A full history of each article is always available for review.

Finally, add keywords to each article to improve search quality and smooth your customers’ path to information. 

Collections and categories

Sort articles into collections and categories to keep your help center organized and easy to navigate. Each collection covers a separate topic, like a specific product or department, while categories break down those collections into sections that house individual articles. Having this type of structure helps your audience find what they’re looking for more quickly.  

Customization

Docs sites are customizable. Add your logo, change the colors to match your brand, and use a custom domain to better match your company’s web experience. Want to get a little fancier? Use CSS to further customize the look and feel of your help center.

Restricted docs

Have certain docs that you only want to display to specific customers or clients? Restricted Docs is a feature that allows you to use Help Scout’s APIs to control access to your knowledge base with your own visitor authentication.

Beacon

Beacon is Help Scout’s multi-purpose web widget. Beacons can be embedded on any webpage or within your app, providing your customers with easy access to live chat and self-service features. In addition, your team can also use Beacons to proactively reach out to customers, increasing engagement. 

Live chat

While email is great for issues that aren’t time sensitive, some situations require real-time assistance. Customers can access live chat from any Beacon, and those conversations are managed from within your Inbox. 

The live chat option is only shown when your team is signed in and available to receive a chat. When your team is offline, customers are able to send an email request, ensuring that they will still have access to the help they need.

Self-service

Since one of the best ways to empower your audience is to offer self-serve options, Help Scout allows your customers to access all of your help documentation from any Beacon. No more switching tabs or leaving your site to find answers; now, customers can get help when and where they need it.

Proactive messaging

It’s not only important for customers to be able to contact you for help; it’s also useful for you to be able to reach out to them. Beacons allow you to send targeted messages to your audience based on the customer properties that you set and triggered by criteria like time spent on page, scroll behavior, or page views.

There are five types of messages including modals, banners, and NPS surveys. You can also create more personalized feedback opportunities with microsurveys. 

AI features

Help Scout believes that AI customer service technology should help customer service teams, not replace them. The platform’s AI features are designed to help your team work smarter, not harder, so you have more time to focus on tasks of greater complexity and value.

AI summarize

AI summarize breaks down long conversation threads into a few bullet points, helping surface the key aspects of the interaction. Use summarize when escalating conversations, transferring them to other teams, or as part of your quality assurance (QA) process.

AI assist

Available in Inbox, Docs, and Messages, AI assist helps support reps polish their copy before hitting send or publish. Use it to make replies longer or shorter, friendlier or more professional, or to check for spelling and grammar issues. Assist can also translate text to languages like Spanish, French, Japanese, and more, helping you provide support to your customers in their preferred language. 

AI drafts

Get over the fear of the blank page with AI drafts, a tool that automatically writes draft replies to customer conversations with a click of a button. Drafts uses generative AI, content from your help center, and past customer conversations to create accurate responses that can be quickly reviewed, edited, and sent, increasing your teams’ productivity and efficiency.

AI answers

Coming soon: AI answers is a smart search assistant that can provide a specific answer to your customer’s questions in a matter of seconds — it’s like magic! Much like drafts, answers relies on generative AI and your help documentation to provide responses faster and more accurately than keyword-based searches.

Reporting insights

One of the main benefits of using a help desk is the ability to track your support efforts. Help Scout comes with prebuilt reporting dashboards to help you monitor things like conversation volume, response time, channel usage, agent performance, and customer happiness. You can also build your own report filters using tags, customer fields, or views to help keep track of the metrics most important to your organization.

Integrations

Keep everyone in the loop by integrating Help Scout with other tools in your tech stack including ecommerce platforms like Shopify, CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, communication tools like Slack, and project tracking software like Jira. 

Don’t see the integration you need? Use the Help Scout API to create your own!

Best-in-class support

In addition to Help Scout’s intuitive and powerful platform, one of the things that sets the company apart is its dedication to providing best-in-class customer service. The support team provides 24/6 support, weekly live classes, and helpful documentation and content to ensure you have everything you need to provide your customers with a quality customer service experience.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $22/user per month.

2. Hiver - Best for small businesses

The best way to think about Hiver is as an extension to your Gmail account. With it, you can handle a lot of the same items that you can with a stand-alone customer service software. These are things like internal notes on conversations, assigning messages to other agents, and providing support via live chat.

Other Hiver features to look out for include a reporting dashboard, a knowledge base builder, integrations, customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, automation tools, and some basic AI functionality. However, some of these features are only included in their higher-cost plans.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Hiver.

3. Zendesk - Best for enterprise teams

Almost anyone working in customer support has heard of Zendesk. They make a multichannel support solution that includes features like a shared inbox and knowledge base tools. For those who provide their customers and clients with phone support, you can buy a number right in the tool without having to independently seek out a voice provider. In addition, they offer some more advanced AI-based solutions like virtual agents.

You also get access to a range of productivity and automation features, reporting to track resolution metrics, and 1,000+ integrations to connect with other applications in your technology stack. To be honest, there’s not a lot Zendesk doesn’t do or many communication channels it doesn't cover, which can make it seem like a good value. 

However, the flip side is that it’s a very complex product that requires a lot of time, energy, and resources to get up and running. That can add additional costs on top of the monthly subscription rate, which is something to think about before making a decision.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.

Recommended Reading

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4. Front - Best for group email collaboration

When communicating with customers, most teams opt to use a group email address (e.g., support@yourdomain.com) to accept reports of customer issues. However, some staff prefer to communicate from personal email addresses but still want the functionality of help desk software. Front lets you do just that. 

With Front, you can connect email (personal and group addresses), SMS, and social media accounts to a shared inbox. The platform includes collaboration features like internal notes and reply drafts as well as automation and AI features to reduce manual work. It also offers a knowledge base builder, reporting features, and the ability to create chatbots.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/seat per month. Learn about other tools similar to Front.

5. Gorgias - Best for teams that require TikTok shop support

Gorgias is a help desk solution mainly focused on ecommerce. Gorgias offers access to standard features like a shared inbox tool, knowledge base tool, and live chat tool.

The main differentiator from other options on the list are its Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce integrations that let you partner your support and ecommerce platforms to improve support efficiency. Through those integrations, you’re able to see order details, edit orders, and even do refunds directly from your help desk, which can save a lot of time and hassle for your team.

Another interesting feature of Gorgias is its ability to integrate with TikTok, allowing your support team to manage TikTok shop inquiries right from your help desk. Very few customer service tools offer the integration, so it can be a great feature for folks that do a lot of business on the video platform.

When it comes to pricing, Gorgias uses a type of payment structure known as contact based pricing vs. the more standard approach of charging by user. There can be benefits and drawbacks to each system, so it’s more an item to be aware of rather than a pro or con.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $10 per month for 50 tickets. Learn about other tools similar to Gorgias.

6. Kustomer - Best for sentiment tracking

Kustomer offers multi-channel support for email, chat, phone, and social accounts, which can all be viewed in a single conversation. This formatting allows your team to not miss a beat when customers move between channels during a support interaction. The platform also has all of the support software features you’d expect to find like collaboration tools, knowledge base software, and reporting functionality.

One interesting feature is the platform’s sentiment analysis function, allowing you to monitor incoming customer interactions and determine how customers are feeling. The software also has an AI feature dubbed KIQ, which allows you to deflect contacts using chatbots. This feature, however, is only offered as an add-on.

Price: Plans start at $89/user per month (eight seat minimum). Learn about other tools similar to Kustomer.

7. Google Collaborative Inbox - Best for teams already using Google Workspace

If you’re already using Gmail and want to add some structure to your support efforts, Google Collaborative Inbox could be a good option. 

Setting up Collaborative Inbox is relatively simple. You create a Google Group, add people to that group, turn on the collaborative inbox option, and configure the appropriate settings. Now everyone in the group can respond to emails in the group mailbox without sharing login information (which is huge in terms of security).

Beyond that, you’re able to assign conversations to different group members and set conversation statuses (closed, on-hold, etc). You can also set permission levels for collaborators, though it is somewhat limited in capability.

While there is a big difference between Collaborative Inbox and the other tools on this list, it can be a good place to start.

Price: Free with Google Workspace. Learn about other tools similar to Google Collaborative Inbox.

8. Freshdesk - Best for businesses looking to scale

When you sign up for a free Freshdesk account, you get access to a shared inbox tool where you can manage incoming email and Facebook requests. In addition, the free plan also includes access to a knowledge base builder and some basic reporting dashboards.

While the free plan is pretty bare bones, Freshdesk’s paid plans are much more powerful. The inbox and knowledge base have additional functionality like additional contact channels, custom ticket views, and article versioning. There are features for the management of service level agreements (SLAs), automation and AI tools to make your work easier, and more analytics options for tracking it all.

The platform gives your team a lot of room to grow, which makes it a great option for small businesses looking to save money now and scale in the future.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month.

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Top 14 Freshdesk Alternatives and Competitors for 2024

9. Zoho Desk - Best for small, sales-focused teams

You may be familiar with Zoho as a customer relationship management tool, but they also make a support solution for customer support interactions. Zoho Desk is another software option that can grow with you. Their free plan isn’t quite as robust as Freshdesk’s. It restricts you to three agents, a private (internal) knowledge base, and only offers one report (agent performance).

However, when you’re ready to expand your operations, Zoho Desk has all of the usual suspects when it comes to functionality, including AI-assisted responses and advanced automations for tasks like conversation sorting and tagging. If you’re currently using other Zoho products, like the CRM tool, Zoho Desk integrates seamlessly with them, making it a great choice for an initial help desk tool.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $7/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Zoho Desk.

10. SysAid - Best for IT support

SysAid is a help desk software designed for managing internal requests for IT services. They offer a number of SLA management features like ticket and workflow automation to help your team meet SLAs. You can also build a self-service portal for knowledge management so employees can handle basic requests like password resets on their own.

You’re able to get things going quickly with a host of templates and default forms, or you can create your own custom ones to best serve the needs of your organization and your team. Since most IT tools are used in conjunction with one another, you also get access to a number of third-party integrations.

Finally, SysAid has powerful asset management features that make it easy to manage all of the assets in your network and store information about the hardware used by your end users.

Price: Free trial available. Contact SysAid directly for pricing.

11. Jira Service Management - Best for technical teams

Jira Service Management is generally associated with engineering and technical teams due to its relation to the more widely known Atlassian productivity tool, Jira.

The cloud based platform is a great ITSM solution that lets your team manage request, change, incident, problem, asset, configuration, and knowledge management all in one place. It allows you to build out self-service portals for end-users and has collaboration features like a shared inbox for managing email and chat requests. Combined with custom workflows, AI tools, and reporting capabilities, the platform makes responding to user requests a simple and efficient process.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $17.65/agent per month.

Buyer’s Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool

Tailored to help you identify your customer support needs, this guide will help you find the right solution, simplify your purchase decision, and get leadership buy-in.

Get the guide

Evaluating options

After reading all the tool descriptions on this list, you might have noticed that a lot of the options in the market have fairly similar features. With a lot of similarities, it might seem difficult to choose the best solution for your business. That said, there are a few things we suggest to make the selection process simpler. 

Have a list of “must haves”

Come up with a list of non-negotiable features. Maybe you need automatic routing because both support and sales will be using the help desk. Maybe you need features specific to your industry or field. Perhaps you need an integration for a shipping tool you already have. Having non-negotiable requirements makes it easier to trim down the list of options.

Put an evaluation team together

If you’re just starting out or at a very small company, the evaluation team may be just you. If you have a larger team, we recommend the following mix:

• One junior level customer service person.

• A couple of help desk power users.

• A manager or senior leader.

Combining their different needs and backgrounds will give you a more effective way to research options for your organization since they’re each experts in their given areas. We also recommend you get the whole evaluation team looking at the same tool at the same time, rather than each person reviewing a different option.

Get hands on

When it comes down to it, a sales demo and online reviews can only show you so much. Actually trying out tools will help you discover the different nuances of the ticketing systems and see whether or not it will work for your use case. Those small details are often what end up making one tool the clear winner for a team.

Choosing the right help desk system

Moving to a new help desk is a huge investment in your customer service team, your customers, and — ultimately — your company. A long feature list is nice to have, but you should make your choice with a broader framework in mind.

Remember, the cost of picking a tool that works for your team (and your customers) is high, so use this guide and take the time to make an informed decision.

If you’re looking for a customer-first approach to help desk software, consider signing up for a 15-day free trial of Help Scout, no credit card required.