Best Free Help Desk Software - 2023 - Expert Rated
The best free help desk software compared
Your customer service systems have a substantial effect on your business’s success. When implemented correctly, they enhance your efforts to build long-lasting customer relationships, enabling your company to thrive. Without them, you simply cannot provide customers with prompt and efficient support and ultimately lose them to your competitors.
A help desk software collects customer interactions, be it requests, questions, or issue reports, and converts them into tickets that your customer support agents can track, prioritize, and respond to in a timely manner.
Regardless of your company size and industry niche, help desk solutions help your customer support team provide effective service and manage their workload. The best part is, you don’t actually have to pay anything to acquire one, considering there are tons of excellent free help desk software options on the market.
That said, not every free help desk software is worth your money. Case in point: most vendors have free plans with serious limitations, and others offer a free trial for a specific time period only. Not to worry though; we worked hard to weed out the bad options and identify providers who actually deliver on their promises.
Read on to find out our top picks for the best free help desk software.
Best Free Help Desk Software
To select the best free help desk software, we’ve had several demos with vendors, interviewed industry experts, tested the products first-hand, and gathered user feedback. We’ve also analyzed the features of these tools, and we think the ones that matter most in free help desks are ease of use, multichannel support, knowledge base, and reporting.
- Ease of use: An intuitive and user-friendly help desk system is essential for optimizing the customer support experience. We sought platforms that empower support agents to navigate effortlessly through the system, access customer information, and respond to queries promptly.
- Multichannel support: Customers expect support across various channels, including email, live chat, social media, and phone. We’ve made sure to select help desks that are capable of integrating with these communication channels to enable seamless interactions with customers.
- Knowledge base: When customers are able to self-serve, you deflect a considerable number of tickets and enable your support agents to focus on the highest-priority problems and queries. The help desks on this list offer a way for you to curate and publish helpful support content your customers can browse through before logging a ticket.
- Reporting and analytics: The ability to track and analyze support performance is critical for continuous improvement, which is why we looked for help desks that allow you to measure various support metrics, including response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction.
For more information on our software research and vetting process, check out our editorial guidelines.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk allows you to categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets. The tool is also super easy to use and is scalable to grow as your small business grows. It has a generous free plan that includes several desirable features, including team huddle that lets agents bring in experts to resolve complex tickets and dynamic placeholder to auto-fill details like customer name, ticket status, or even ticket URL.
PROS
- Freshdesk enables your customer service team to offer proactive support across multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, email, and website, to engage your customers.
- Freshdesk is incredibly user-friendly. Your agents don’t need any specialized coding or technical knowledge to use it. Plus, it offers diverse templates with formatting components to simplify ticketing.
- Freshdesk's free plan is comprehensive, offering you all the features you would need as a small business and then some.
- With Freshdesk, your team can collaborate with each other and resolve issues faster.
- The platform comes with a mobile app that enables agents to provide support on the go. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices.
- In addition to a generous free plan, Freshdesk's paid plans provide great value for money. It gives you several advanced features like gamification at affordable rates.
CONS
- Freshdesk’s marketing is slightly confusing. Most of its advanced features require an upgrade to the highest pricing tears, which users don’t realize until after signing up. Here’s a free vs. paid plan breakdown, so you don’t find yourself making wrong decisions.
- You cannot provide temporary access to seasonal hires, part-time workers, or other team members in the Free plan. While this feature is available, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium plans.
- Freshdesk doesn’t offer dedicated technical support. As a result, complicated issues take longer to resolve.
Freshdesk makes managing customer conversations significantly easier, thanks to its omnichannel view. The multi-channel support with smart automation allows you to help customers through their preferred communication method at a much faster pace.
Additionally, you don’t have to look at every single ticket, preventing support ticket pile-ups. The tool lets you create custom rules using the ticket creation feature to prioritize tickets based on the keywords used by customers and forward them to the right team member automatically.
Your agents can also add to-do items directly to the tickets to avoid missing out on anything, which helps boost their overall productivity.
HP, Henkel, Decathlon, Panasonic, American Express, Fiverr, Thai Union
Freshdesk offers the following plans:
- Free – This includes integrated ticketing across email and social, knowledge bases, ticket trend report, analytics, and 24x7 email support.
- Growth – This costs $15 per agent, per month. Expect everything in the Free plan, automation, SLA management and business hours, in-depth helpdesk reporting, collision detection, and custom email servers and ticket views,
- Pro – This costs $49 per agent, per month. Expect the ability to include up to 5000 collaborators, round-robin routing, custom reports and dashboards, and CSAT surveys & reports — and everything in the Growth plan.
- Enterprise – This costs $79 per agent, per month. Expect everything in the Pro plan, along with a sandbox functionality, assist and email bots, and canned response suggester.
Best For
While companies of all sizes can find value in Freshdesk's paid plan, its Free plan is best suited for small businesses with up to ten agents.
Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management is essentially a collaborative IT service management (ITSM) solution that helps teams receive, manage, track, and resolve requests — all from a central location. You can build multiple projects and track and manage customer support requests and incidents with the software. Compared to other free help desks, Jira Service Management offers you several useful in-built features to resolve your customers' technical issues faster, reducing the need to rely on third-party tools.
PROS
- Jira excels at issue tracking and collaboration to enable efficient customer service.
- Its interface is intuitive and customizable to match your company’s branding.
- Purpose-built features like scrum/kanban boards and agile planning support agile teams.
- The platform can integrate seamlessly with hundreds of third-party tools.
- Free plans and free trials are available.
- Easy issue tracking and great collaboration are the core features of Jira Service Management to provide customers faster, more efficient customer service.
- Jira Service Management allows customers to rate the quality of a knowledge base article, helping you identify improvement areas and update accordingly.
- Jira Service Management has a customizable user interface. You can also change the feel and look of the help desk center and portal to reflect your company’s branding.
- Incident and problem management is prompt and easy, thanks to Jira Service Management‘s alerts and email notifications.
- Jira Service Management’s mobile app support ensures you’re notified instantly about breached SLAs and all assigned, reported, watched, and mentioned requests.
- In addition to Jira Service Management's internal features, you can use its diverse range of integrations to further maximize functionality.
CONS
- While the UI is user-friendly, users do need some time to fully grasp its large feature set.
- Email notifications can't be customized, flooding the inboxes of users.
- Can get pricey for larger teams.
- Reporting customization is limited.
- Jira Service Management’s Free plan doesn’t offer customizable charts and dashboards.
- Jira Service Management has a rigid email notification system, so you cannot customize it, and your notification system may get easily cluttered. Modifying notifications per user or sending by batch isn’t an option either.
Regardless of whether you want to announce changes in your interface, manage incidents, or identify a bug, Jira Service Management has service desk features to simplify the process.
You get access to a wide range of help desk services. Prioritize tickets to ensure urgent ones are tackled first; create a single repository of planned changes and releases; set up custom automation rules to automate manual and time-consuming tasks.
It also offers you a single platform to handle all internal requests and issues, allowing you to empower your team, as well as track company-wide IT assets.
Jira is used by companies of all sizes, including Twitter, The Telegraph, Puppet, Sotheby's, and Engie.
Jira Service Management has four main subscription plans:
- Free: Up to 3 agents and unlimited customers, always free.
- Standard: $21 per agent per month. Scales to 5,000 agents with 250GB storage and unlimited email notifications.
- Premium: $47 per agent per month. Adds advanced incident management, unlimited storage, and more.
- Enterprise: Custom quote required. Includes enhanced data and analytics, security, 24/7 senior support, and more.
Best For
Jira Service Management works well for teams needing to track and resolve a large number of customer requests. However, even smaller teams can benefit from its free plan to help streamline work planning and tracking.
I use Jira daily. I have 2 boards. One for standard HR Requests that are not sensitive in nature. Leaders from several client companies use this board to request forms, advice, etc. The 2nd board is for confidential matters such as employee harassment reports. I use this board to track the status of investigations and disciplinary issues.
- I like that I can order and answer questions according to priority (instead of constant emails/calls).
- I like that I can see where I am with each item (to-do, in-progress, etc.).
- I like that I can give access to people outside my organization such as ICs, Freelancers, and Clients.
The company bought Jira for a software development team. Shortly after, other teams started using it as well. I have used it for 1 year for HR projects. It has provided me with ways to capture questions and requests from employees, contractors, and customers.
- It was created mostly for software development, so a lot of functionality is not useful for HR.
- It can be difficult to set up if you are not familiar with the tool.
- I like the "board" view in Jira Work Management or Trello (also owned by Atlassian) better.
It is very robust and has a lot of automation. It can be customized to do whatever you need as well. For my purposes, it works great, but so would Trello. I certainly like it better than some of its competitors.
What are you going to use if for? If you have no IT or development needs within your organization, you might try something simpler. Does it fit in your budget? They charge per user, so it can get pricey.
They have branched out to be useful to more than just IT over the years. I have only been using it for HR for one year, so there haven't been that many changes yet. I know that more power ups are created regularly. Those can be useful.
Software Development & Maintenance
Large firms with no major IT needs.
Zoho Desk
Zoho is a provider of all sorts of business solutions that are affordable yet on par with the market’s leading offerings. Zoho Desk exemplifies this, being a feature-rich customer service software that’s robust, intuitive, and budget-friendly.
PROS
- With Zoho Desk, you get one of the most extensive feature lists of any help desk and ticketing system in the market.
- Zoho Desk is very flexible when it comes to pricing, as you can switch plans as you go if your team member count or necessities grow.
- It’s available in 22 languages.
- Lets you provide support across multiple channels.
- With Zoho Desk, you get one of the most extensive feature lists of any help desk and ticketing system in the market.
- Zoho Desk is very flexible when it comes to pricing, as you can switch plans as you go if your team member count or necessities grow.
- It’s available in 22 languages.
- Lets you provide support across multiple channels.
CONS
- Some users found the initial setup and configuration of Zoho Desk difficult and time-consuming.
- Despite some customization options, some users felt Zoho Desk's ability to customize certain aspects like UI color coding was limited compared to other tools.
- A couple of users faced challenges with integrating Zoho Desk with specific other software/platforms.
- A few users experienced slowness and lagging at times while using Zoho Desk, especially when loading pages.
- Some of the product customizations can be hard to figure out, according to some users.
- The UX/UI can seem dated at times.
- Several users have reported that integrating the tool with several apps can be problematic.
One of the most significant advantages of Zoho Desk is its multi-channel support. It provides customer service through email, live chat, phone, and multiple social media at a very affordable price, which can be handy for tracking and collaboration as all types of customer queries are housed in one place.
Knowledge management is also another good feature of the platform. When customers submit tickets, Zoho Desk’s auto-suggest feature can pull up relevant articles promptly from the built-in knowledge base based on tickets’ keywords, reducing the wait time significantly.
Zoho Desk has a scalable pricing model with four plans, including a free one with some decent tools. We talked to some Zoho users and found they typically started with the free plan and ungraded it as their teams scale up. Additionally, the Enterprise plan is pretty much on par with most top-tier plans of other providers in terms of features and goes for a reasonable price. The platform also has a 15-day trial anyone can signup and try it for free.
However, we received some comments regarding the learning curve of the tool. As there are lots of features built-in, some users felt a bit overwhelmed to be able to use them to the fullest. Lastly, integrating Zoho Desk with some popular Sales and marketing tools doesn’t seem very intuitive. The system has relied heavily on Zapier and — some users stated — provides limited support for complex integration requirements.
McAfee, Daimler, LycaMobile, Rogers, Siemens Energy.
Zoho Desk has four pricing tiers:
- Free - For 3 agents with email ticketing, help center, knowledge base, SLAs, and 24x5 email support.
- Standard ($14/user/month) - Adds social channels, community forums, product-based tickets, public knowledge base, customer satisfaction ratings, and 24x5 phone support.
- Professional ($23/user/month) - Includes multi-department ticketing, team management, time tracking, ticket templates and sharing. Most popular plan.
- Enterprise ($40/user/month) - Adds live chat, AI assistant, advanced help center customization, process management, global reporting, and more.
Best For
Zoho Desk is a good fit for companies looking for a comprehensive yet affordable customer support solution. If your organization uses other Zoho products, this should be an easy addition.
Zoho Desk is used daily within our organization. It has helped create a tracking system for each individual. Zoho Desk tracks customer issues and ensures they do not fall between the cracks. The main workflow revolves around the creation of helpdesk tickets and monitoring them through closure.
- Zoho Desk can auto-assign tickets to individuals.
- It allows tracking of helpdesk tickets.
- It also tracks common issues and trends.
My company used Zoho Desk for all of last year. The main reason they bought Zoho Desk was to give customers a chance to create help desk tickets. We found that prior to this, we were losing track of customer requests and issue reports. Through zoho desk, the creation of tickets ensured we did not lose track.
- The price is a bit expensive.
- It would be nice not to have to pay for each individual that we want to have access to.
- If you accidentally close a ticket, it can be a pain to recreate it.
The big criteria that should be considered is how large your business is and how many users you will need. The other is which package would best fit your needs, we used the professional package.
I do see Zoho Desk frequently releasing updates to the system and, over the years we have had it, they have made it more user friendly and easier to track ticket trends.
I would suggest Zoho Desk for any organization that solves problems for customers. Either IT related product issues to product returns.
I would not see the need if you do not need tracking of customer issues or help tickets.
LiveAgent
LiveAgent offers some unique features, such as geotargeting and website visitor targeting, that help to improve and hyper-personalize customer support. Service level optimization is another handy feature that makes LiveAgent a great choice over its competitors. LiveAgent's phone app isn't at par with other help desks, though. The company needs to work on improving its interface so that support agents can help customers while on the go.
PROS
- LiveAgent’s modern user interface looks aesthetically pleasing while being easy to navigate.
- LiveAgent is super easy to implement and use. Even if your team isn’t tech-savvy, the time to productivity is quick.
- LiveAgent empowers small support teams to easily handle large volumes of queries. Critical features like a universal inbox, a live chat widget, and a knowledge base enable you to address all tickets with greater efficiency.
- For LiveAgent, every user is a valuable client. Expect 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, or email. The support agents are also in-house and not outsourced, which further ensures you’re given accurate answers to all your queries.
- LiveAgent takes feedback seriously and is constantly trying to improve the software, so you’re assured of a reliable tool.
CONS
- LiveAgent needs to work on its mobile app interface. While convenient to work with, it isn’t as at par with the competitors.
- LiveAgent offers limited integrations, which may be a hindrance for companies wanting to significantly boost support effectiveness and visibility.
- LiveAgent’s Free plan doesn’t allow for integrations with social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Viber — you’ll have to upgrade to the paid plans to get access. Therefore, you can’t offer customers omnichannel support and have to stay limited to email, live chat, and call center support.
LiveAgent allows you to enhance customer engagement through its customizable live chat widget. Based on the time spent on any specific web page, you can invite your customers to chat, answering their basic questions and helping them make the right purchase decisions.
The ticketing system is also commendable. Each ticket contains the full history of customer conversations, including emails, chat messages, and phone calls.
Huawei, BMW, Yamaha, O2, Slido, Forbes, AirBus.
LiveAgent offers the following plans:
- Free – This plan offers 7-day ticket history, one chat button, phone number, and email address to streamline support, and a customer portal and forum.
- Ticket – This costs $15 per agent, per month. Features include unlimited ticket history and email addresses, advanced reporting, and the ability to create custom rules and time rules.
- Ticket + Chat – This costs $29 per agent, per month. In addition to everything in the Ticket plan, you get unlimited chat buttons, feedback management, chat satisfaction surveys, and real-time visitor monitoring.
- All-inclusive – This costs $49 per agent, per month. In addition to everything in the Ticket + Chat plan, you get call center support, IVR, call routing and transfers, and unlimited call recordings.
Best For
LiveAgent is a great choice for companies of all sizes looking for a user-friendly and reliable customer support solution.
Spiceworks
Spiceworks give you access to all the features you would expect from a top-notch help desk ticketing system. This includes omnichannel support, automatic ticket assignment and management, and a self-service portal. What's more, there are no limitations on standard factors like the number of agent accounts, customers tickets and data storage, which is an issue with other free help desk solutions.
PROS
- Free helpdesk system with cloud and on-premise versions.
- Supports omnichannel query collection across channels.
- Mobile app enables managing support tickets on the go.
- Unlimited tickets with history retention.
- Supported by a large community of users giving one another prompt, expert responses.
- With Spiceworks, you can offer your customers omnichannel query collection to submit queries and share concerns across channels. You don't have to worry about how much it costs, thanks to the free service.
- Spiceworks offers both cloud-based and on-premise versions of its free helpdesk ticketing system, which is quite rare in the customer support niche.
- Spiceworks’ help desk isn’t only limited to your desk — it’s also available as an app for Android and iOS users. Thanks to this, you can manage support tickets on the go.
- Spiceworks provides an unlimited number of service tickets for each user. You can create as many decades as a situation needs, eliminating the need to delete tickets and allowing you to retain chat history. This also gives your team a reference point that they can go back to whenever similar issues or topics resurface.
- Spiceworks‘ large community is backed by dedicated IT professionals, specialized tech vendors, and other kinds of individuals willing to share their expertise when it comes to IT-related issues and help each other out. This ensures every member receives accurate and prompt responses to all their queries.
CONS
- Lacks a knowledge base, as well as ticket tracking and prioritization features.
- Limited reporting hinders productivity and customer support insight.
- Expect abundant forceful ads and promotional emails.
- Customer support is restricted to just email without other options.
- Due to Spiceworks’ limited feature set, it isn’t very flexible. It lacks some of the more desirable features, such as knowledge base management, interaction tracking, and prioritization.
- Spiceworks doesn’t offer advanced reporting options, which restrict your view into agent productivity and the kind of support your customers are receiving. Additionally, you have to streamline reports to remove redundancy.
- To enjoy Spiceworks’ free help desk, be ready to view forceful ads and receive promotional emails — lots of them.
- Spiceworks' direct customer support is limited to email. So you don't get chat, phone, and social media assistance options.
Spiceworks is deployable on the cloud for an online help desk or on-premise for a self-hosted platform. Use it to automate several manual tasks to free up your executives’ time. You can also create individual sites and user portals for each client your company manages to streamline efforts.
The help desk is designed to assist you in many ways, including getting answers to technical questions, learning from instructional resources, and troubleshooting IT issues. You can also launch Spiceworks within minutes to get started right away.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Untangle Inc., Arhaus, Sonic Corporation, Howard Brown, J2 Global, Inc.
Spiceworks differentiates itself from its rivals by providing all its products without any cost. If you're curious about how the company finances its operations, it does so through advertisements displayed in the background, which are financially supported by various IT vendors.
Best For
Spiceworks makes a great choice for any business looking for a no-frills help desk software. While its functionality is limited, the fact that the tool is free of cost with ample features makes it a boon for small and medium-sized businesses. Companies looking for free cloud-based and on-premise versions help desk will also find Spiceworks a good match.
Help Sesk Software FAQ
Why should businesses invest in help desk software?
Help desk software can help businesses streamline their customer support process by automating repetitive tasks, routing support requests to the appropriate team or agent, and providing a centralized repository for customer information and support history. This can save time and improve the overall efficiency of the customer support process, which in turn results in better customer experience.
How to select the best help desk software?
- Define what "great customer service" means for your company and targeted audience
- Establish customer and employee customer support expectations
- Consider the key help desk features you absolutely need
- Cross-check with software vendors about the availability of the said features
- Look for affordable and scalable options
- Narrow down to options offering a free trial
- Choose the help desk software that’s most easy for you to navigate and configure
What is the difference between a service desk and a help desk?
A service desk and a help desk are both customer support solutions that handle customer inquiries, complaints, and requests. However, a service desk typically has a broader scope of responsibilities than a help desk. While a help desk is focused on providing technical support, a service desk may also handle non-technical inquiries and requests, such as HR or payroll issues. Service desks may also have more advanced tools and resources at their disposal, such as knowledge management systems and self-service portals, to help them provide more comprehensive support.
Final Advice
Choosing the right help desk software for your customer support team doesn’t need to be based on assumptions or involve tedious long research processes. You can eliminate much of the confusion and hard work by identifying your company’s needs and scheduling demos with vendors that can best cater to them.
If you’re open to upgrading to a paid help desk software down the line, make sure to pick a solution that offers trial periods. This way, instead of relying on others opinions and viewpoints, you can get a first-hand experience of how the help desk fits within your tech stack and performs. If you aren’t sure where to start, you can browse our guide on the best IT help desk ticketing systems for businesses of all sizes.
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