The 17 Best Customer Service Software: 2025 Buyer's Guide

Customer service software is difficult to shop for. There are hundreds of options on the market, all with similar-sounding features and comparable pricing.

Your choice of support software is something you want to get right the first time. Customer support is a critical function that needs to work efficiently at all times, and downtime due to a poorly functioning support system isn't an excuse customers will be willing to accept.

To help you quickly compile a short list of options to consider and ultimately find the right platform for your organization, we reviewed dozens of support tools, digging deep into their features, customer reviews, and pricing.

The result: We found 17 tools on the market that are at the top of their game with features that cater really well to different types of businesses and support models.

What is customer service software?

Customer service software is a system that's used as a central hub for tracking, managing, and resolving customer issues. It's the behind-the-scenes ally of every support team, organizing incoming requests, ensuring no message is left unanswered, and helping teams stay efficient.

Terms like "help desk software," "ticketing system," and "service desk software," are also commonly used to refer to tools in the customer service software category. However, "help desk" more often refers to tools that help teams support external customers, while "service desk" generally refers to tools that help teams support internal customers. More on that below.

What are the different types of customer service software?

Customer service software can refer to tools that help companies support external customers (i.e., your company's customers) or internal customers (i.e., other individuals employed by your company). And it can be used to deliver support across all of the different ways you receive support requests, or it might be specialized to deliver support on a single channel only.

To help you find the right tool for your needs, it's helpful to understand the different sub-categories of customer service software. Here's a handy table that provides an overview of all of the different types of customer service software and who they're best for.

Knowing exactly which type of support tool you need before you start evaluating options will help you put together a short list and make a decision much more quickly.

The 17 best customer service software

Now that you know exactly which type of support software you need, you can start evaluating the features and options of the different platforms on the market.

By considering the uniqueness of their features, the competitiveness of their pricing, and their ability to cater to businesses with very specific operating models, we narrowed down the market to the 17 best customer service software options, listed below.

We also included some runner-up tools to consider if the specific tools we recommended aren't quite right for your team.

1. Help Scout – Best overall customer service software

Help Scout stands out due to its ease of use, powerful features, and focus on helping teams deliver exceptional support.

Working in Help Scout starts in its inbox. The inbox houses all of your customer communications across all channels — email, live chat, and social — in one place. It's a one-stop shop for your entire support team with features that make it easy to collaborate and answer requests quickly:

• Use collision detection to see when someone else is already working on a request. Your team won't have to worry about tripping over each other ever again.

• Create multiple inboxes if you have different teams working on different types of requests. Build an inbox for support, finance, HR, marketing — everyone.

• Build workflows to automatically route conversations to the right places. Want to send all billing-related emails to the finance team? Create a workflow!

• Create saved replies to reply to frequently asked questions in seconds with previously written, pre-vetted answers.

• Snooze conversations for a later date/time. This is helpful for getting non-urgent requests out of the way or as a reminder to follow up with a customer when you need to get more information before replying.

• Add internal notes that only your team can see to give teammates a heads-up on a conversation or provide helpful resources for new employees you're training.

• Get help answering a request with @mentions in internal notes that alert specific teams or coworkers that a conversation needs their input.

• Create tags and custom fields and add them to conversations — either manually or via workflows — to alert reps to important conversations (like emails from VIP customers) or easily find conversations on specific topics (like product requests).

• Build different views to filter conversations by specific conditions that are important to you. See only conversations with a VIP customer tag, customers that have been waiting for a reply for more than 24 hours, and more.

• Schedule replies to be sent at a time and date of your choosing — maybe at a more reasonable hour if you're working late at night or after a few hours when you expect an engineering bug will be resolved.

Every conversation you open in Help Scout also has a customer profile in the sidebar that shows information like the customer's company, email address, and location as well as any previous support conversations your team has had with that customer.

Beyond its inbox, Help Scout offers many additional tools and features that make it quick and easy to deliver great customer support.

Help customers help themselves with Docs

Docs is Help Scout's knowledge base tool. You can use it to create a searchable customer help center by publishing articles and organizing them into collections and categories, making it easy for customers to find the answers they need quickly and on their own.

But customers don't have to visit your help center to get self-service support. Help Scout also offers a feature called Beacon — a widget you can embed on your website or in your app that lets customers browse your help articles without ever leaving the page they're currently viewing.

Answer questions immediately with live chat

The Beacon widget can also be used to offer live chat support to your customers. Beacon is flexible and can be set up to show only the specific support options you want to make available.

Customers can use Beacon to browse your help center articles before they reach out. If they can't find the answer they're looking for, they can send an email to your team or initiate a live chat directly in the Beacon.

One of the best things about live chat in Beacon is that you can also set it up so that the chat option is only shown when someone on your team is available to answer questions.

Speed up replies with AI

Where other customer support platforms are moving to an AI-first model, Help Scout designed its AI features to support the humans that deliver support — not replace them. You can use it to:

• Summarize lengthy emails and threads to simplify them when routing/escalating them to other teams with AI summarize.

• Fix grammar and spelling issues, adjust length and tone, and/or translate replies and help center articles before sending or publishing them with AI assist.

• Create a draft reply to a customer question (that you can review before sending) with AI drafts.

• Provide AI answers when customers search Beacon for self-service support (coming soon).

Help Scout's AI drafts and AI answers are trained on content from your help center and past customer conversations, making responses much more accurate and helpful.

Pricing

Help Scout's free plan includes one shared inbox, one knowledge base, unlimited users, 50 included contacts*, full access to all AI features, and most of the features above. For those that need more functionality, three paid plans are available that offer everything in the free plan as well as additional features and included contacts. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

Help Scout also offers a startup plan where companies that are fewer than two years old and have less than $1M in annual recurring revenue can get all of its features free for six months.

*A contact is someone who received a reply from your team or had their question resolved by AI answers in a given month. Multiple conversations with the same person count as one contact.

2. Zendesk – Best enterprise customer service software

Zendesk does everything a help desk can do — email, phone, live chat, self-service, and social support — and has every feature within those tools you could ever want or need. This makes it a perfect option for teams with complex support operations. If deep customization is a necessity, Zendesk is your best option.

Zendesk's Sunshine™ gives you the ability to create custom applications that work inside of Zendesk. You can do things like embed shopping carts in your live chat conversations, integrate support natively into your mobile app, and build workflows that use not only the data available in Zendesk but also any other platform you use.

For more technical teams, these applications can be built on AWS using popular programming languages and Zendesk's API. For non-technical teams, Zendesk offers low- and no-code tools so you can build applications without needing developer help.

While these things might sound appealing regardless of the size of your business, they also make Zendesk much more complex to onboard and use. According to customer reviews:

• "It can feel a bit overwhelming at first because of all its features."

• "Zendesk has advanced and complex features that require IT resources for configuration and customization. This could be a barrier to startup companies."

• "The extensive features are not intuitive enough, so some training is required for agents and administrators."

Pricing

Zendesk's plans start at $19/agent per month for basic features only. However, if deep customization with Sunshine™ is what you're looking for, you'll need to be on the Suite Professional or Enterprise plans, which start at $115/agent per month.

Alternatives to consider: Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk, and Khoros.

Recommended Reading

Customer Service

What Are the Best Zendesk Alternatives? 9 Top Options

3. Gorgias – Best ecommerce customer service software

Gorgias is one of only a handful of tools on the market that are fully focused on ecommerce customer support. It offers extensive integrations with the major ecommerce platforms — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. Shopify is even one of the company's investors.

As far as its help desk, Gorgias supports all of the standard channels — email, chat, social, phone, and self-service. When customers reach out for help, a sidebar displays all of the information you need to reply, including previous conversations, orders, tracking numbers, reviews, and subscription details.

For larger ecommerce businesses, Gorgias also has automation features that help you automate your work. You can use rules to route tickets automatically, send instant AI replies to customer questions, and create reply templates and custom variables.

If you decide to use Gorgias' AI agent to auto-reply to customer questions, you'll need to spend some time upfront training it. You start by training it on your brand, policies, and data. After that, you review all of its answers and provide feedback to help it improve. When you're finished, it will reply to tickets and close them for you.

Pricing

Gorgias' pricing is based on ticket volume rather than user count. The base plan starts at $10 per month for 10 support tickets, but that plan doesn't include any automation features. For automation, you'll need to be on the $40 per month plan, which gets you nine traditional responses and one AI response.

Essentially, the plans are tiered by the amount of automation you need. The first plan above gets no AI replies, the second gets you 10% AI replies, the third gets you 20%, and the fourth gets 30%. The price you pay will depend on both how many tickets you reply to and how many tickets you want to reply to with AI answers.

If you go over your allocated ticket count in a month, you can still send replies, but you'll be charged an overage fee for the replies that exceed your total ticket count.

Alternatives to consider: Kustomer, Dixa, and Gladly.

Recommended Reading

Customer Service

8 Gorgias Alternatives for Better Customer Support

4. Jira Service Management – Best internal customer service software

Jira is an ITSM platform that helps you consolidate all of your service operations into a single tool, making it easier to align the efforts of IT, development, and customer support teams. While it can be used like a help desk for customer support, it's very much an IT-first platform built for IT operations teams.

Jira Service Management comes with all of the key features you'd expect to find in a service desk, including a request portal, knowledge base, SLAs, asset tracking, and change requests. It also has a robust API that lets you integrate with virtually any other platform to and from which you need to pass data.

Where Jira Service Management really stands out is with its automation features that help teams speed up their work. You can automatically reply to support questions using AI-generated answers that are trained on your knowledge base; triage, assign, and prioritize tickets; and detect priority alerts.

As one customer wrote on G2: “Once built, it offers so many ways to automate, makes everything flow so much better, and alerts all interested parties.”

Pricing

Jira Service Management has a free plan for up to three agents and includes multi-channel support, a knowledge base, and incident, problem, and change management. However, for access to AI-powered automation, you'll need to be on the Premium plan, which starts at $44.27/agent per month.

Alternatives to consider: ServiceNow, SolarWinds, and SysAid.

5. Front – Best customer service email management software

While most of the other shared inbox and help desk tools on this list help you manage team email addresses like support@ or help@, Front lets you manage both team and personal email.

You can assign emails you receive in your personal inbox to other team members, mention team members in private comments on an email to get their help, or even share your entire inbox with a teammate — either temporarily or permanently.

This works really well for agencies and consultancies with clients that have one primary point of contact at your business. 

When someone on your team goes out of town, you can simply grant access to their inbox to whoever's filling in so they can make sure client questions and requests continue to get addressed while you're out.

Beyond letting you collaborate on personal emails, Front has plenty of the helpful features you'll find in any email support system: automated workflows, customer conversation histories, reporting, auto-assignment, and message templates. Additionally, you can use its built-in AI to summarize threads and draft responses.

Pricing

Front's pricing starts at $19/seat per month and includes personal and shared inboxes, up to 10 workflows, and conversation histories. For access to analytics and Front's AI features, you'll need to be on the Growth plan or higher, with prices starting at $59 per seat per month.

Alternatives to consider: Gmelius, Mailbutler, and Drag.

Recommended Reading

Customer Service

The 12 Best Front Alternatives for Shared Email

6. Aircall – Best customer service call center software

Most help desk tools don't offer phone support out of the box, so if your team only provides customer support by phone, you'll need to look for call center software instead. For the call center use case, Aircall is our top choice.

Aircall works on the cloud, so you don't need any hardware to use it. You can create local and international toll-free numbers, create direct extensions, and set up call routing via IVR so calls go to the right teams. If you need to collaborate on calls, Aircall has a call conferencing feature for up to five people.

If you only offer phone support on certain days of the week or hours of the day, you can create schedules to dictate when calls are accepted. Outside of that schedule, calls are sent to voicemail so customers can leave you messages even when you're unavailable.

Other features include blocking numbers (prevent spam and bot calls), warm transfers (update another rep before transferring a call), call assignments and notes (for when you need someone who's not around to answer a customer's question), and queue callbacks (let customers request a return call instead of waiting on hold).

Finally, if your team offers phone alongside other types of support, Aircall has integrations with all of the popular help desks.

Pricing

Aircall starts at $30/license per month with a three-license minimum. That plan includes one phone number (additional numbers are $6 each per month), unlimited calls within the U.S. and Canada, IVR routing, and help desk integrations. For access to queue callbacks, you'll need to be on the $50/license Professional plan.

Alternatives to consider: Nextiva, Dialpad, and Talkdesk.

7. HelpDocs – Best customer service knowledge base software

Almost every help desk on the market offers a knowledge base feature. However, if all you need is a knowledge base, those tools are going to be overly complex and pricey. That's where HelpDocs comes in. It gives you exactly what you need to let your customers find answers to their questions on their own.

HelpDocs has all of the features you'd expect from a knowledge base. Write and publish articles, sort them into collections, publish your help center on your own domain, and optimize your articles to make them easy to find — whether customers are searching your own help center or using a search engine. 

No design or coding skills are needed to make your help center look great — HelpDocs offers eight different templates you can apply to style your knowledge base. While you're working on it, you can publish changes to a development environment to get it fully ready to go before pushing it live to your customers.

You'll create articles using HelpDocs' WYSIWYG editor. It lets you apply simple formatting like bolding, italicizing, and adding hyperlinks as well as more complex components like block quotes, code blocks, videos, buttons, accordions, and tables.

If your team is more technical and you want to do more customization, that's possible, too. You can write your own CSS to make your help center look exactly like you want and code entire articles using HTML or Markdown.

Pricing

Publish unlimited articles on HelpDocs' Start plan. It's $55 per month when paid annually and includes all of the features detailed above for up to five users.

Alternatives to consider: HelpJuice, Document360, and KnowledgeBase.

8. Olark – Best live chat software for customer service

Olark is a great option if all you're looking for is live chat. That's all it does, and it does it well. 

To set up live chat through Olark, you embed a widget on your website and/or in your app. You can customize it to match your branding, add forms to get more information from customers before the conversation starts, and see customer details like previous conversations and pages viewed on the back end.

Olark also offers chatbots that let you answer frequently asked questions automatically, and the great thing about them is that Olark will build and train them for you. You won't have to spend weeks training the AI on your data; you just hand that work off to the Olark team.

For teams with more complex operations, Olark offers several advanced features called PowerUps. Use co-browsing to let a customer share their screen with you so you can see what they're seeing, translate languages to provide international support, and view transcripts of every conversation your agents have had.

Olark is also very focused on making its product accessible. It's ADA compliant and has received certification from a third-party evaluator that it exceeds WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

Pricing

Olark's pricing starts at $29/seat per month and includes its basic live chat and reporting features. On that plan, PowerUps are available as add-ons; you can get co-browsing for $99 per month and translations for $29 per month.

The Pro plan includes all PowerUps in the monthly per-seat cost, as well as its built-for-you chatbot feature. However, pricing for that package is not available to the public.

Alternatives to consider: LiveChat, tawk.to, and LiveAgent.

9. Sprout Social – Best social customer service software

Logging in and out of several different social networks to check for and reply to customer questions is incredibly time-consuming. A social media support tool like Sprout Social simplifies the process by aggregating all of your customer interactions across all social platforms into one place where you can manage them all.

Sprout Social works with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X (Twitter), YouTube, and Facebook Messenger. It also supports social listening on Reddit, Tumblr, and the general web so you can see what customers are saying even when they don't directly tag you.

You'll see all mentions, tags, and conversations in Sprout Social's inbox and can reply to them directly from there. You also get detailed metrics on how you're doing with your social support. Track average handle time, see individual reps' case completion rates, and track your CSAT and NPS scores across all interactions.

This makes it great if social is your primary or only support channel. However, it doesn't offer any other help desk features, so if you need to provide support in other ways, you'll need another tool. Sprout has integrations available for HubSpot Service Hub, Zendesk, Dynamics 365, and Salesforce Service Cloud.

Pricing

Sprout Social's pricing starts at $199/seat per month and includes its social inbox, up to five social profiles, and reporting. To get access to its help desk integrations, you'll need to be on the $399/seat per month Advanced plan.

Alternatives to consider: Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Verint.

10. ChatBot – Best customer service chatbot software

While creating a help center is a great way to help customers help themselves, some customers will still struggle to find what they need in your documentation. If that's the case for your business and you can't provide human-led support, you may want to consider adding a chatbot to your support offerings.

ChatBot crawls all of the pages of your website and help center and organizes those pages into specific categories like products, billing, and returns. You can reorganize the categories as needed and remove outdated or irrelevant pages from the database to ensure the bot doesn't use those pages as resources.

Once it's ready to go, you can launch your bot on your website, in your app, and on Facebook Messenger or Slack.

However, if you just want the chatbot to be the first line of support but also have agents available to handle more complex queries, you can do that with ChatBot using its live chat feature. It will transfer messages to an agent as needed, and if no one is available, it creates a ticket for your team to follow up on.

Pricing

ChatBot's plans start at $52 per month for one chatbot and up to 12,000 chats per year. All of its plans include AI features, live chat, and integrations.

Alternatives to consider: Tidio, Chatbase, and Meya.

11. HubSpot – Best customer service CRM software

If you're running a company where most of your customer support is handled by the sales team via account managers or customer success, a CRM that has built-in support tools might be the best option. HubSpot excels in this use case because it offers both a CRM and support software through its Service Hub.

HubSpot's CRM is simple to use but can be as powerful as you need it to be. It tracks all of your interactions, automatically identifies companies, clusters individuals into their company profiles, and allows you to view every interaction you've ever had with a customer, including email exchanges and call recordings.

You can attach contracts to customer profiles to easily find the details you need to support them, create automated reminders or deals for upcoming renewals, and add live chat to your website and app for instant support. You can even integrate live chat with Slack to have conversations show up in a specific Slack channel.

HubSpot also has an incredibly thorough and up-to-date help center, a community where you can get help with things you can't find the answers to in its official documentation, and customer success reps for each customer when you need human support.

Pricing

HubSpot has a free plan that includes the basic features of all of its different hubs, including Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Marketing Hub. To access its routing and automation features, you'll need to be on the Starter plan, which starts at $20/seat per month.

HubSpot also offers discounts for startups where you can get access to many more of its premium features at as much as 75% off of the normal cost.

Alternatives to consider: Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.

Recommended Reading

Customer Service

9 Best HubSpot Service Hub Alternatives: Expert Reviews

12. Bettermode – Best customer self-service software

If you're looking to really supercharge your self-service options, Bettermode is definitely worth looking into. With it, you can create a knowledge base, support community, and as many private customer portals as you need.

To start, you can use Bettermode to create a public knowledge base for your customers. Your articles can be set to public or private, and all the options you need to optimize your articles for search engines are built-in. You can organize your articles into collections, add tags, and include a search function for users to find what they're looking for quickly and easily.

Next, you can use Bettermode to create a support community. Community members can post questions and advice, and other community members can reply and react to those posts. As anyone working in support knows, there are certain customers who are almost as well-versed in your product as you are. With a tool like Bettermode, customers get access to that resource, giving them another avenue to get assistance when they need it most.

If you only want customers to be able to join your community, you can use single sign-on (SSO) to tie your community accounts to your product's login credentials. SSO is also helpful in creating customer portals. Create private communities for specific customers, restricting access to those communities to only users from that customer's organization. Bettermode also supports private messaging for one-on-one conversations.

Pricing

Bettermode offers a free plan that lets you have up to 10 members in your community. To host your community on your own domain and add unlimited members, plans start at $19 per month.

Alternatives to consider: Forumbee, Circle, and Gainsight Customer Communities.

13. Hiver – Best customer service software for small businesses

Hiver is a great option for small businesses that have been using Gmail or Outlook for customer support and are looking to upgrade to a system that's not going to have a huge learning curve. Hiver sits on top of Gmail/Outlook and gives you tons of the types of collaboration features that support teams need as they scale.

With Hiver, you can create a shared inbox for an email address like support@, then select which of your users should have access to that inbox. Collision alerts let team members know which requests are already being worked on so you can avoid duplicate effort (and replies), and email notes and @mentions let teams communicate privately about requests when needed.

If you need more advanced features, Hiver has those too. You can assign specific requests to the team members best equipped to answer them, set up round-robin to avoid cherry-picking in the queue, and even set SLAs for target response times. Hiver even has some AI features that will write draft responses for you and automatically close tickets that don't need a reply.

Pricing

Hiver has a free plan that includes shared inboxes, @mentions, collision alerts, and email notes for unlimited users. To get access to round-robin and SLAs, you'll need to be on the Lite plan, which starts at $19/user per month. AI features are only available on the $49/user per month Pro plan.

Alternatives to consider: Awesome Support, Google Collaborative Inbox, Outlook Shared Mailbox

14. Intercom – Best AI customer service software

While almost every customer service platform on the market now offers AI features, Intercom is the only one that's gone all-in on AI. It calls itself an "AI-first customer service platform," and AI is baked into nearly all of the platform's features.

Fin 2, Intercom's AI agent, automatically replies to support requests received via email or live chat. You train it on how to reply by giving it sources to learn from, which can include your previous support replies, your help center articles, data from connected third-party integrations, and other one-off documents you submit.

You can also direct Fin on what to do with questions it can't answer on its own. Intercom has a no-code workflow builder where you can set up routing trees that tell Fin where to send requests that need human attention based on the type of request it is.

As far as how Fin replies, you can select different options for the tone it uses and how long its replies should be. And you're able to access detailed reports on Fin's performance: how many requests it solved without human intervention, how customers rated their interactions with Fin, and what topics you receive the most requests about.

Pricing

Intercom's base plan starts at $29/seat per month. Ticket resolutions by Fin are an additional $0.99 per resolution on top of the base per-user monthly cost.

Alternatives to consider: Balto, Brainfish, and Cognigy. 

15. SupportBee – Best customer service portal software

If you want to be able to support your customers individually in their own custom portals, SupportBee might be the right option for your team. It lets you create portals for your customers that don't require a login to access; instead, customers access their portals through a private URL.

Inside of the portal, customers can see all of the support requests ever submitted from any member of their team. This can help reduce the number of support requests you receive; customers can see if someone else has already submitted a ticket on the same issue and also read your reply to find out how to resolve the issue on their own.

In addition to portals, SupportBee has shared inbox and knowledge base features that let your team collaborate on incoming requests and create articles for customer self-service.

Pricing

Customer portals are only available in SupportBee's Enterprise plan, which starts at $20/user per month.

Alternatives to consider: FuseBase, Planhat, and Moxo.

16. SimpleTexting – Best SMS customer service software

With SimpleTexting, you can receive and answer customer questions via text message. Any questions you receive go into your shared inbox in SimpleTexting, and you can reply to them from your computer — no actual texting required.

SimpleTexting is great for customer service because its shared inbox has a lot of the same features you'll find in email support platforms:

• Create answer templates that let you send pre-written replies to frequently asked questions in seconds.

• Schedule texts to be sent at a later date/time so you're not texting people in the middle of the night.

• Snooze incoming texts to have them disappear from your inbox temporarily and reappear later when it's time to follow up.

• Add private notes for other team members that customers can't see.

These are all features for one-to-one texting, but SimpleTexting also has mass texting features for sending out important notices to all of your customers.

Pricing

SimpleTexting's pricing starts at $39/month for up to 500 sent texts. Additional charges may also apply for phone numbers and carrier fees.

Alternatives to consider: Textline, Heymarket, Text Request.

17. Chatwoot – Best open-source customer service software

Chatwoot is perfect if you're looking for an open-source support tool that you can self host. It's regularly maintained — the last update as of writing this post was three weeks ago — and nearly 250 people have contributed to its code on GitHub.

Out of the box, Chatwoot comes with all of the features you'd expect to see in support software: a shared inbox, knowledge base, live chat, and social integrations with Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. You'll also find channel-specific features like canned responses, private notes, workflows, and teams.

Of course, the great thing about open-source software is that you can build in anything you need that the software doesn't already come with, but its existing long list of features means it's likely to have a lot of what you need already built.

Pricing

Chatwoot's free plan lets you download the code and self-host the platform. For support from the Chatwoot team or to customize the platform's branding, you'll need to be on the Premium Support plan, which starts at $19/agent per month.

Alternatives to consider: osTicket, Helpy, and Zammad.

Industry-specific customer support platforms

All of the platforms above are industry-agnostic — they're built to work for all different types of customer service teams in all different types of industries. However, some industries have very different business models or are required to adhere to more strict guidelines that might make the tools above a poor fit.

If you're looking for a tool built specifically for the needs of your industry, here are a few additional options to consider:

• Manufacturing Cloud for Service is Salesforce's support product built specifically for manufacturing teams. 

• Epic's MyChart software lets medical facilities send secure messages to and receive messages from their patients. 

• OperaDDS digitizes a lot of the administrative work for dentists' offices but also lets patients communicate securely with their dental providers.

• Shopmonkey lets mechanics send messages and estimates to their customers, as well as track inventory, generate invoices, and process payments.

• CivicPlus offers lots of features for government officials and offices to communicate and update their constituents, including a mass texting system, 311 request manager, and public records request management system.

• Jobber is an all-in-one platform built for field services companies that comes with support tools like customer portals, two-way text messaging, and automated reminders.

Customer service software comparison

Just looking for the tl;dr version of this long article? Here's a side-by-side comparison of our 17 favorite customer support tools, highlighting all of the most important details:

What's the best free customer service software?

If you need software to help you manage support requests but don't have any budget for a tool, we recommend looking into the free plans of the support tools below:

• Help Scout: On Help Scout's free plan, you get one inbox, a knowledge base, live chat, social media support, and AI features for unlimited users and up to 50 contacts per month. This makes it perfect for teams that have multiple people providing support but don't receive a massive number of incoming requests from different customers.

• Zoho Desk: Get one shared inbox and one help center for up to three users. This makes it perfect for teams that get a lot of support requests from different customers but only have a handful of team members reviewing and replying to those requests.

• HubSpot Service Hub: Get one inbox, live chat, and social support for up to two users. While this plan is more restrictive in terms of users than Zoho Desk, it does let you provide social support, which Zoho Desk does not include in its free plan.

• UVdesk: Get a shared inbox and knowledge base for unlimited users. You also get access to integrations with Shopify, Magento 2, Opencart, and Prestashop, making this a good option for ecommerce teams looking for a free support tool.

• tawk.to: Get free live chat for unlimited requests and unlimited users. If you only want to offer live chat, tawk.to is a great free option that's full of features. However, you will have to be okay with having tawk.to branding on your live chat widget.

• Tidio: Get a free help desk, live chat, and social support for up to 50 handled conversations per month. Tidio's free plan isn't as flexible as Help Scout's, but it does include a Whatsapp integration, which Help Scout doesn't offer.

• Jira Service Management: Get a shared inbox, knowledge base, live chat, and customer portals for up to three users. This is a great option for small, internal and IT support teams, as well as external-facing teams that need to build customer portals.

• Bitrix24: Get free live chat for unlimited users and requests, plus unlimited support on one social media channel. Bitrix's free plan lets you deliver social support on Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram, so it can be a good option if you want to offer support via Telegram.

Other support tools your team will love

Customer support has become a multifaceted discipline. You're tasked with interacting directly with customers, creating self-service content, sending out large-scale communications, and helping customers connect with one another.

Managing all those different responsibilities is much easier and more efficient with access to the right tools and resources. And while customer service software will get you most of the way there, you may also need additional tools in your tech stack to accomplish everything you need to do. Here are some other tools we love that are great for support teams:

• Statuspage helps you prevent the flood of incoming requests when something goes wrong with your system. Create a page that shows the status of your systems (overall and by individual feature), highlight your uptime statistics, and send notifications to customers who've subscribed to incident updates.

• Jira is our bug-tracking tool of choice. Though you could report bugs in any number of places, having a dedicated tool helps keep track of them to reduce duplicate work and keep everyone in the loop. You’re able to group incidents, update the status of a bug, and even ping people directly if you need a response quickly.

• Zight lets you take high-quality screenshots and screencasts and add them to your responses to customers in order to provide additional context that can't be explained as well with words alone.

• Loom lets you create one-off video responses to complex support requests. A link is created for each Loom video, which makes sharing quick and painless. You can also see when and how much of your video someone has viewed, both of which can be useful in a support interaction.

• Wistia is a great platform for hosting videos you want to add to your knowledge base. It provides analytics like total views and watch time lengths, which can help you understand how effective your help content is. You can also add chapters to let viewers easily navigate to the parts of your video that are the most relevant to them.

• Slab is an internal knowledge base tool that can be used to share org charts, employee handbooks, contact information, meeting notes, operating procedures, checklists — anything that's helpful for your team. Multiple team members can also collaborate on documents at the same time.

• Pitch can help you create beautiful slide deck presentations easily — even if you have no design skills whatsoever — when it's time to show off all of the great work your support team is doing to leadership or the rest of the company.

Choosing the right customer service software for your business

We have a full article on how to choose the right customer support tool that you can check out, but here’s the short version:

• Understand the job you are trying to do. Are you building a high-touch, hand-holding service experience for a select group or a mass-volume, fast-turnover retail service? Different solutions suit different environments.

• Assess your resources. If you’re a team of one or two, you can’t cover every support channel. And if you have a limited budget, there’s no point in looking at the more expensive systems.

• Refine the list of possible options. Knowing what you have to work with and what you want to get done, narrow in on the most likely categories of software you will use. Perhaps you want a shared inbox, a knowledge base, and live chat?

• Understand your “must have” features. Does this system absolutely have to integrate with an existing tool? Understanding what's non-negotiable and what's a nice-to-have will help you narrow down your options.

• Create a shortlist. Using those must-have features, reviews, recommendations, and other sources of insight, pick your top few options.

• Evaluate your favorites. Now you can deep dive into your top few choices, perhaps trying out their customer service and talking to existing customers.

• Trial time! Using a tool is the best way to know if it will work for you. All the feature checklists and marketing copy in the world won’t replace the experience of actually using the software to deliver support.

Help Scout’s free trial gives you and your team 15 days to try out everything that our platform has to offer, with our team supporting you at every step of the way.

Check out our extensive knowledge base, take a live class, or even get a one-on-one demo with one of our customer champions to learn how your team can get the most out of Help Scout.

Whatever you need, we’re here to help!

Frequently asked questions

Need more help understanding the support software market and finding the right product for your team? Here's some additional guidance.

What are the benefits of using customer support platforms?

Using a basic shared email address can be a great way to deliver support when your business is small. But as your business and team scale, you're going to need a platform that helps you manage requests more efficiently. Here are some of the benefits that customer service software brings to the table:

• Give more responsive and more consistent support. Features like automated workflows, tagging, knowledge base integration, saved replies, and AI help your team spend more time helping customers and less time fighting their tools.

• Gather customer insights. Easily identify, collect, and organize customer feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and use cases so they can be used to improve your product/service and increase customer satisfaction.

• Work better together. Customer service software helps you prevent duplicate work, keep track of customer queries, coordinate a response across multiple teams, and deliver up-to-date answers.

• Analyze and report. Use the built-in reporting features of customer support software to understand changes in support volume, team productivity, type and size of customer, and much more.

• Scale up your service. Maintain high-quality service as you grow by using tools that can coordinate multiple teams of agents to support an enormous customer base via organizational features, automation, and third-party integrations.

When you have more than a couple of people working together to support customers, upgrading to a dedicated customer service platform is the right choice.

What features should you look for when shopping for support tools?

The feature set of platforms built for customer service covers a wide range, but it can be generally categorized into a handful of focus areas.

Collecting

These features help you answer the question, “How do we get customer communications into this system so we can handle them?” They provide the first point of interaction between the customer and the software.

Common examples include a support@ email address, contact forms that funnel messages into a support inbox, and toll-free phone numbers.

Customer service tools may include built-in interfaces for some channels and may integrate with external providers for others.

Organizing

Organizing features take all of those incoming communications and create useful structures so teams can manage high volumes, understand what needs to be done, and respond in a timely manner.

Organizational features cover both tools for manually arranging things and for taking action automatically. Common examples include:

• Views to easily look at subsets of conversations.

• Tags to label conversations for handling and reporting on later.

• Workflows for taking actions automatically, such as adding tags, assigning to the right person, or setting priorities.

• Multiple mailboxes to organize different types of customers or communications.

• Custom fields to capture useful information about the request or the customer in a structured way.

Collaborating

Collaboration features allow multiple people to work together on incoming requests. Common collaboration features in customer service software include:

• Teams so that each group in your organization can see the conversations that are relevant to them.

• The ability to assign conversations to individual team members.

• Private notes that allow staff to collaborate on and discuss tickets without those conversations being visible to the customer.

• The ability to mention teammates on tickets to give them a heads up about relevant information in a conversation without assigning the ticket to them.

Responding

These features encompass all the ways a reply can be sent to a customer. Responding features can include:

• Text editors for composing and sending responses to emails and live chats.

• Social messaging tools to respond publicly to incoming requests.

• Knowledge base systems for creating and publishing help documents to share with your customers.

Integrating

Many customer service tools offer integrations with other systems and/or APIs for custom integrations. These allow companies to connect their customer service data with tools like:

• Slack or other communication systems for keeping your team up to date.

• CRM software for additional customer history and context.

• Shopify and other ecommerce platforms you use to serve customers.

• Social media platforms for delivering support on social networks.

• Other internal systems that inform customer service decisions.

Analyzing and reporting

Features for reporting and analysis allow companies to better understand things like who their customers are, what they are trying to get done, where their customers run into trouble, and what they need. Common reporting features cover things like:

• Time to first response.

• Customer satisfaction levels.

• Time to resolution.

• Incoming request volume over time.

• Common request categories.

Some of the features above are common across nearly every customer support platform; others are less common or are implemented quite differently.

Editor's note: Help Scout alum Jesse Short also contributed to this article.