When your company is first starting out, email is usually enough to handle your customer requests. But as your company grows, you need a better way to handle those requests coming in, before your support team becomes overwhelmed.
That’s where a help desk ticketing system can come in. It will monitor all of the customer requests that come in, give them a unique ticket number for both you and your customer to track, and help you organize those requests so that you can reach the most important ones first.
Is your team ready to upgrade from email? Or are you a larger team who needs to find a better tool for their needs? This guide will help you pick the right ticket system for your needs.
This is a chapter in our Ultimate Guide to Different Ticketing Systems. When you’re ready, check out the other chapters:
What is a help desk ticketing system?
A ticketing system acts like a digital organizer for customer questions. When someone reaches out – by email, phone, chat, or online – the system makes a record. This record, or ticket, helps teams track each request until it’s solved.
Help desk systems do more than just track tickets. They often include tools to build answer libraries, set up self-service options, and boost team output. Many also work with other software your team uses, making the whole process smoother.
The benefits of using a help desk
While more commonly associated with customer service and IT, a help desk can benefit many teams across just about any industry. For instance, departments like human resources (HR) and maintenance also field a large number of requests, and help desk software can keep those messages from getting lost in the shuffle.
No matter the use case, dedicated software provides:
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Better collaboration and transparency: Help desks ensure that everyone on the team knows the status of every issue and provide tools that help agents work together without stepping on each other’s toes.
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Increased organization and efficiency: Ticketing tools include tagging, categorization, and analytics features that enable you to track performance metrics and trending issues. They also include productivity and automation tools to help teams streamline their operations.
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Improved customer experience: Help desk software allows you to provide a better user experience by giving users more agency over how they receive support. Whether it’s through self-service options or additional channels like social media, help desks increase customers’ access to help.
It benefits everyone when your agents can work together to solve problems without friction, issues are easily tracked and moved through the resolution process without getting lost, and users can find answers on their own terms.
Help desk features that enable teams to do better work
Help desk features can vary from platform to platform, but some main ones you should consider when setting out to choose a solution for your team include:
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Omnichannel ticketing: Most help desks support multiple communication channels, including email, chat, phone, social media, messaging, and video conferencing.
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Collaboration tools: Features like internal notes, ticket assignments, reply templates, and the ability to tag colleagues in on a case make it easier to work through the queue as a team.
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Self-service options: Many help desk solutions have knowledge base builders, community forums, and customer portals to empower people to find their own answers.
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Automation and AI: Help desks allow you to automate routine tasks like ticket routing. Some may also have AI features like a chatbot, writing assistants, and sentiment analysis, all of which help free up your staff for handling issues that require human expertise.
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Reporting: Unlike traditional email or phone systems, help desks include customizable reporting dashboards that provide insight into your team’s efforts.
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Integrations: Help desks can integrate with other tools in your team’s tech stack, such as bug-tracking software, CRM platforms, or ecommerce tools.
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Specialized features: Some platforms offer features targeted at specific industries or departments. For example, a platform focused on IT services may include tools for tracking devices like computers or other company-owned equipment.
There are plenty of ticketing solutions on the market. However, depending on your use case and the type of service you provide, each will have pros and cons. We’ve put together a list of 11 help desk tools below, including suggestions on who might benefit most from each option.
1. Help Scout – Best for customer support teams
Help Scout is a help desk platform that focuses on helping teams deliver delightful customer service experiences.
One difference you will notice right away is that we don’t use the term “ticket;” instead, we call customer interactions “conversations.” While this may seem like a strange stance for a help desk, we believe that no customer wants to be a number.
When your customers receive emails sent through Help Scout, they will look like regular emails — no crazy ticket numbers or prompts to reply above the line included.
Inbox
While customers will never see the impersonal side of help desk life, your team will still have everything they need to track and resolve customer issues. The platform supports email, live chat, and social media channels, and all communications are funneled into a shared inbox that can be accessed via your desktop computer or mobile app.
Each conversation within the inbox has a customer profile complete with different types of customer data, such as their name, location, previous conversations, and information pulled from third-party sources. This provides your team with the right information to provide contextual, personalized support.
Collaboration
Help Scout’s inbox offers typical features like the ability to assign conversations to specific agents. It also includes collision detection to ensure customers never receive duplicate responses and internal notes and @mentions for documenting case updates or asking teammates for help.
Productivity
The platform also helps your team kick busy work to the curb with productivity tools. Use workflow automations to handle repetitive tasks like conversation routing or tagging high-priority cases. Saved replies are short text snippets that let you respond to FAQs more quickly with a standardized response. Snooze and send later let you decide when to respond to a customer while keeping your queue clear.
Docs
Many customers prefer to help themselves, and with Help Scout’s knowledge base tool, Docs, your customers can do just that. Create a help center with answers to FAQs, how-tos, and videos. Customize the look and feel of your Docs site with your company logo and brand colors.
Once the site is live, make self-service even more accessible by adding a Beacon — Help Scout’s web widget — on any page of your site or within your app. Beacons let you serve up helpful articles in the moment without disturbing your customers’ user experience.
AI
Help your support team do their best work with AI features that boost productivity while freeing up time to focus on more valuable tasks.
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AI summarize can sum up a long conversation in just a few bullet points, enabling you to get up to speed quickly after an escalation, when handing off a case to a teammate, or when reviewing conversations as part of your quality assurance processes.
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AI assist is a writing assistant that can help with spelling and grammar, translating text into another language, or altering the tone or length of copy composed in any of Help Scout’s editors.
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AI drafts give everyone on your team a head start by drafting a reply to any email on demand. Responses use previous conversations and your knowledge base as source content; simply click AI draft, review for accuracy, and hit send.
Integrations
Help Scout works seamlessly with all of the applications you already have in your tech stack. Integrate with Jira to improve communication with your development team, sync up with a CRM platform like Salesforce or HubSpot, receive conversation notifications in Slack, or install an ecommerce integration like Shopify to allow your team to manage order details right from the conversation window.
In addition, our developer’s platform lets anyone with engineering know-how create their own custom solutions.
Reporting
Back up your decisions with data using Help Scout’s analytics features. You can track metrics like conversation or channel volume, employee performance, or even the success of your Docs site so that you can decide which articles are the most helpful and identify areas for improvement. Help Scout also offers customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and a happiness report to help you monitor your team’s rating and make appropriate adjustments along the way.
Best-in-class support
Help Scout is an obvious choice for teams interested in a customer-first approach to support. Our support pros are experts at what they do — after all, they’re Help Scout users too! We have tons of blog posts and classes to help you get the most out of our software, and the team is available 24/6, ensuring that you always have the care and support you need to be there for your customers.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $50 per month.
2. Jira Service Management – Best for engineering teams
Most SaaS companies are familiar with Jira, Atlassian’s project management software. Beyond typical project management features like product roadmaps, Jira is often used by engineering teams to track development work and bug reports.
If you’re looking to branch into customer or IT support and Jira is part of your tech stack, Atlassian’s help desk, Jira Service Management, makes a lot of sense. It has all of your basic help desk features like ticket tracking, assignments, a knowledge base and tools for incident, change, and asset management, all wrapped up in a familiar user interface (UI). Service management also allows for integrations with a wide range of apps including messaging services like Microsoft Teams and Slack, or you can code your own custom add-ons using Jira’s REST API.
Top features:
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Service desk for ticket management.
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Self-service portal w/knowledge base.
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Incident, change, and asset management tools.
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AI features.
Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $17.65/agent per month.
3. Freshdesk and Freshservice – Best for enterprise business teams
Freshdesk is a well-known help desk owned by the parent company Freshworks. Given its robust feature set, the platform is often compared with Zendesk, a tool covered further down on our list. Much like Zendesk, Freshdesk is best suited for enterprise teams, though it does offer plans for smaller businesses at reasonable prices.
While Freshdesk is a good choice for customer service, enterprise companies looking for a solution that can work for teams across the business — think HR, finance, IT, and facilities — should try Freshservice. Freshservice is the service-focused offering from Freshworks, and its Enterprise Service Management (ESM) plan lets your business manage everything from employee onboarding to billing to asset management all in one place.
Top features:
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Omnichannel ticket management and self-service features.
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Incident and asset management tools.
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Workspaces, a tool enabling multiple teams to securely manage their own data and settings within a single Freshservice account.
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Freddy AI plan add-ons (writing assistance, summaries, reporting insights, etc.).
Price: Free trial available for both products. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month, and the Freshservice ESM plan starts at $119/agent per month.
4. JitBit – Best self-hosted system
Despite offering features like live chat, chatbots, and a knowledge base, JitBit is a help desk service provider that considers itself to be “email-first.” They support multiple email protocols (IMAP, POP3, SMTP, etc.) and have built-in spam protection. The platform also has all of your basics, like a shared mailbox, workflows, reporting tools, and more advanced features like AI drafting capabilities to help you respond to users more quickly.
One of the more notable features of JitBit that sets it apart from the tools we’ve discussed so far is that it has both a cloud-based ticketing system and a self-hosted option. While most businesses will prefer the SaaS option for ease of use, companies with strict security and safety requirements might appreciate the ability to self-host.
Top features:
Price: Free trial available. Self-hosted plans start at $2199; cloud-hosted plans start at $24.92 per month.
5. HappyFox – Best for troubleshooting
HappyFox is a help desk that enables teams to manage email and social media requests from a shared inbox. This solution can be used by either customer support or IT teams as it has all of the ticket management tools required by both departments (assignments, canned responses, tagging, ticket actions, workflows, a knowledge base builder, SLA management, a reporting dashboard, etc.) as well as items typically included in IT ticketing systems like asset management tools for keeping track of company property and the ability to view tickets as a kanban board.
One of the more unique things HappyFox offers is its Agent Scripting tool. It enables you to create scripts that agents can use during a call or customer interaction. Scripts help ensure agents ask good questions and provide the best troubleshooting steps possible. Given that you can add detailed instructions for each step in the script, it can be a useful feature for teams that support software or hardware products or teams looking for a way to help new agents onboard more quickly.
Teams that require bots, live chat, and other channels should note that HappyFox packages these features separately.
Top features:
Price: Free trial available. Paid plans start at $9/agent per month. For plans that include agent scripting start, contact for pricing.
6. ProProfs – Best for customer feedback
ProProfs is a company that offers a suite of productivity and business tools. One of those tools is Help Desk, which allows teams to provide email support. If you are a team of one, ProProfs’ solution can be appealing: Its free plan has everything you need to start supporting customers, like unlimited tickets, canned responses, auto-responders, labels, and even a mobile app for easy support via a portable device.
While a free plan helps keep service costs low, one of ProProfs’ paid products, Customer Service Suite, is a better choice for larger teams. One feature worth a callout is their feedback tool, Qualaroo, which helps you ask the right customers the right questions at the right time. It also offers sentiment analysis powered by IBM Watson to help you better track your customers’ moods and feelings toward your brand.
Top features:
Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $19.99/user per month, and Customer Service Suite plans start at $99/user per month.
7. Solarwinds – Best for IT service management (ITSM)
While many options on the list will work well for customer service and IT use cases, some lean more toward one group than the other. Much like Help Scout is highly suited to support, Solarwinds is a web help desk made for IT teams and service providers.
While the UI is basic, Solarwinds is an IT ticketing system built to meet Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards. It includes tools to help teams with problem, incident, change, asset, and knowledge management. It also has tools for time billing and lets you create reports to monitor things like technician performance, asset inventory, and customer survey responses.
Top features:
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Ticketing software.
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Knowledge base tool.
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Custom reporting.
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Meets ITIL standards.
Price: Free trial available. Contact for pricing.
8. Zendesk – Best for enterprise customer service teams
When it comes to help desks, you’d be hard-pressed to find a platform more popular than Zendesk. It’s extremely versatile, loaded with tons of great features, and can partner with just about any piece of software in your tech stack. It has an omnichannel ticketing tool, macros for handling common issues, workflows to help with busy work, a knowledge base builder, a community forum, analytics for tracking ticket volume and business drivers, and powerful AI abilities, such as a virtual agent to provide ticket deflection and reduced resolution times.
While a feature-packed platform provides a lot of flexibility and power, smaller teams should know that setting up and configuring a Zendesk account can be tricky, especially if you’ve never done it before. You can find some support in their community forums, but most folks will need to set aside resources (in-house developers or outsourced Zendesk pros) to help with implementation.
Top features:
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Omnichannel ticketing including email, chat, social, messaging, and ticket forms.
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Help center and community forums.
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1,000+ apps and integrations.
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AI-first features, including AI virtual agents for faster resolutions.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.
9. Spiceworks – Best free tool
Several tools on the list offer a free plan, but Spiceworks is the only help desk we’re covering that only has a free plan. The software itself isn’t very flashy but still covers all of the bases: ticketing software, customer portal, knowledge base tool, basic workflows, canned responses, reporting dashboards for measuring KPIs, and compliance assurance with service level agreements (SLAs). It also has a mobile app for teams that need to field service requests on the go.
One thing to note is that Spiceworks can provide its tool for free because it generates revenue from in-app ads. However, if you aren’t bothered by the ads, it makes a lot of sense to save money and take advantage of a free tool.
Top features:
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Cloud-based ticketing solution.
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Knowledge base.
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Reporting features.
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Mobile app.
Price: Free.
10. Groove – Best for teams supporting multiple brands
Teams looking for solid features at a reasonable price will like Groove. You can manage customer support requests via email, live chat, and social media, build a knowledge base, automate tasks with rule-based workflows, distribute cases using round-robin routing, keep track of performance via reporting dashboards, integrate with Shopify to review orders and delivery information, and respond to customers from anywhere using a mobile app. There are even AI tools that can automatically suggest tags, summarize support tickets, and help with writing.
One use case that could be particularly useful to teams that support multiple brands is the platform’s unified “all inboxes” view, which lets you view all conversations from all of your mailboxes in a single view. While you can find ways to accomplish this goal with other tools, it’s nice that Groove makes it simple.
Top features:
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Shared inbox to manage email, live chat, and social media conversations.
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Workflows based on rules and round-robin ticket assignments.
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Reporting dashboards.
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Unified “all inboxes” view.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $16/user per month.
11. Hiver – Best for Gmail users
Hiver differs from all of the other options we’ve discussed because it is not a standalone help desk but an extension that works within an existing Gmail inbox. Ideal for teams of a smaller size, the tool lets teams create shared inboxes that are visible within the Gmail UI and comes with specialized help desk tools like email assignments, private notes, and collision detection that can’t typically be found in standard email clients.
You can also answer live chat messages from within your inbox, create a knowledge base for self-service, and track trends with reporting dashboards. Hiver has even hopped on the AI train, offering summarize, auto-close, and email template suggestion features to help reduce the amount of effort your team is dedicating to each case.
If you want to stay in Gmail while adding a ton of functionality, Hiver should be at the top of your list.
Top features:
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/user per month.
Best practices for choosing the right help desk software for your business
In the words of one of our support pros, there’s no such thing as a “best” software platform or even a tool that works for most organizations. There is only what is best for your business right now. Take a moment to consider what problems your team is trying to solve with a help desk, what features you need to achieve your desired outcome, and which of the tools above is the best fit for getting you there.
Once you have your list, consult with colleagues, check out reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra, and consider taking advantage of free trials. Many platforms — Help Scout included — let you sign up for free, no credit card required.
If you’re looking for a customer-first help desk that provides a delightful support experience for both your customers and team, we hope you’ll give Help Scout a try.
