Want to jump straight to the answer? The best help desk ticketing system for most people is Zoho Desk or Freshdesk.

Helpdesk ticketing software is an essential extension for many businesses, especially for those handling a high number of customer inquiries. Helpdesk ticketing systems can help you manage customer issues without needing an entire call center. 

The best helpdesk software will allow you to create a seamless workflow with omnichannel support and self-service options, no matter the industry. 

The Top 5 Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems 

• Zoho Desk – Best omnichannel ticketing system
• Freshdesk – Best for scalability and growth
• HappyFox – Best versatile ticketing system
• Jira Service Management – Best for ITSM support
• Zendesk – Best all-in-one ticketing system 

After reviewing dozens of help desk ticketing systems on the market today, we narrowed it down to the top five best systems for increased customer support. Continue reading to learn more about which option is right for you. 

Zoho Desk – Best Omnichannel Ticketing System

Trusted by more than 50,000 businesses, Zoho Desk is the best help desk ticketing system for most users. With comprehensive omnichannel software, Zoho Desk can help you interact with customers and build loyalty from any platform. 

With an intuitive interface and user-friendly features, Zoho Desk takes its multi-channel support to the next level. If you struggle to handle customer conversations or frequently miss high-priority issues, Zoho Desk can help you collect tickets from different channels and organize them in one place. 

Zoho Desk supports tickets through email, social media, live chat, telephony, and webform. Zoho Desk combines all of the channels into one easy-to-use ticketing tool, where you can manage and respond to all customer inquiries. 

The best software should save you time when assigning tickets, and Zoho Desk does just that. You can set up personalized assignment rules and send tickets to the right department or agent in one click. You can sort through tickets with different work modes and filters, such as urgency, priority, type of customer, or ticket status. 

You can also save time by encouraging your customers to find the answers they are looking for through Zoho Desk’s self-service portal. You can install this tool into your website and mobile apps. You can also customize the portal and create a multi-brand help center for all customer inquiries. 

With Zoho Desk, you will never lose sight of priority tickets again, as it offers an intuitive ticket view that highlights all of the important details, like ticket history and customer context. And speaking of customer context, Zoho Desk is the industry’s first context-aware ticketing system solution, so you can view all of the relevant customer data on the ticket screen. 

If you need to view metrics like ticket traffic, customer happiness ratings, and most threaded tickets, Zoho Desk offers HQ—a live dashboard that lets you view incoming and outgoing bandwidth. You can also create reports and monitor your team’s performance, making it easier for you to know when metrics are trending downwards. 

Zoho Desk is a versatile system with smart integrations, allowing you to implement applications and software into your system to improve your workflow. Not only does it offer popular integrations, like Zoom, MailChimp, and HubSpot, but it also offers specifically curated applications from Zoho itself, such as Zoho Bugtracker, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Assist, and Zoho Creator. 

You can try Zoho Desk for free with three agents, 24×5 email support, email ticketing, customer management, and a help center. However, Zoho Desk offers three paid pricing plans for more advanced features. Here’s a quick overview: 

• Standard — $14 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes social and community channels, product-based ticket management, 24×5 phone support, and self-service. 

• Professional — $23 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes multi-department ticketing, 24×5 chat support, automatic time tracking, ticket templates, and team management. 

• Enterprise — $40 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes live chat, multi-brand help center with customization, 50 light agents, KB auto-translation, and custom functions. 

Zoho Desk offers a 15-day free trial—no credit card required. 

Freshdesk – Best For Scalability and Growth 

Whether you want to engage in more meaningful customer conversations or make every agent a customer champion, Freshdesk can help you do that at scale. As an excellent solution for growing businesses, Freshdesk will skyrocket the speed of your service while unifying your digital experience. 

Meet the needs of your expanding customer base through the Freshworks Neo platform. Freshdesk has curated this platform to unify messaging API, easy integrations, and customizable analytics to help growing businesses expand while remaining flexible. 

The Neo platform will help you merge customer engagements, employee experiences, and integrations in one easy-to-use interface to innovate and scale effortlessly. 

Redefine your customer communication with an advanced omnichannel feature that spans popular messaging applications, such as SMS, Google Business Messages, WhatsApp, Apple Messages, and Line. 

The Neo platform also supports an app marketplace, developer portal, analytics, admin center, unified customer record, events and notifications, and collaboration tools. 

But even if you don’t have an actively growing business, Freshdesk offers a simplified ticketing system that works well for most users. Freshdesk lets you convert tickets from any channel, and you can view them on an intuitive interface.

Designed for team collaboration and agent productivity, Freshdesk offers a team inbox for collision detection, canned responses, notifications, custom ticket views, merging tickets, and activity logs. Never lose visibility of ticket ownership with collaborative ticketing, where your team can share tickets, split tickets, or even link and keep track of tickets related to similar issues. 

Freshdesk also offers AI-powered ticketing, known as Freddy AI. Freddy is tightly integrated into the ticketing system and can help you do away with mundane and repetitive tasks. Freddy can automatically suggest ticket fields to categorize, prioritize, and route incoming tickets while recommending fitting solutions and preventing the reopening of tickets when customers respond with thank you. 

Freddy AI also works with Freshdesk’s self-service portal by automating answers to further enhance your customer support. The best part about Freshdesk’s self-service portal is that it supports 42 languages, making it easy to support customers in multiple languages and run a global support operation. 

Freshdesk also offers a free forever plan for up to 10 agents, email and social ticketing, ticket dispatch, team collaboration, and a knowledge base. However, it offers other affordable pricing packages, as follows: 

• Growth — $15 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes automation, collision detection, time tracking, custom email server, and helpdesk report. 

• Pro — $49 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes up to 5,000 collaborators, custom roles and dashboards, a multilingual knowledge base, and custom apps. 

• Enterprise — $79 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes skill-based routing, email bot, 5,000 bot sessions per month, social signals, and audit log. 

Freshdesk offers a 21-day free trial with no credit card required. 

HappyFox – Best Versatile Ticketing System 

Software versatility is critical for success, and HappyFox is exceptionally adaptable for different industry needs. Whether you need to give IT support or answer general customer inquiries, you can count on HappyFox to help. 

Not only does HappyFox provide an advanced ticketing system for general customer support, but it also offers specialized tools for IT operations and HR and marketing inquiries. You can streamline your IT service delivery, workflows, and communications with the HappyFox IT help desk. 

You can also manage your hiring, onboarding, payroll, time-off, employee data, and HR workflows with HappyFox’s marketing help desk. Both industry help desks offer organized processes to help you tackle complex communication. 

HappyFox elevates your customer support with automation and lets you secure data and gauge staff performance with specific reporting and analytics tools per industry. But it doesn’t matter what industry you work in because HappyFox can provide you with a configurable ticketing system for any operations team.

Some of the eye-catching functionalities that HappyFox offer include:

• Tickets queue — Create custom queues with filters based on priority and responsibility. 
• Categories — All tickets are categorized into sections, like customer support, sales, marketing, and billing. 
• Omnichannel ticketing — Manage customer conversations through email, social, chat, and phone calls. 
• Ticket status — Section off tickets into manageable chunks based on status. 
• Pinned tickets — Similar to a daily to-do list that helps you prioritize and organize your time better. 

You can handle all support requests as quickly as possible with HappyFox, especially with additional features like quick reply, bulk action, and search and filter. Not only will you be able to respond quickly, but you can simplify all of your operational tasks through integrations. The HappyFox marketplace allows you to integrate your favorite apps, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp. 

Unfortunately, HappyFox doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can request a free demo. Here’s a quick overview of the rest of its pricing plans: 

• Mighty — $29 per agent per month. Includes omnichannel ticket creation, SLA management, custom domain mapping, basic reporting, and smart rule automation. 

• Fantastic — $49 per agent per month. Includes custom ticket queues, multi-brand support center, satisfaction surveys, multilingual knowledge base, and round-robin ticket assignment. 

• Enterprise — $69 per agent per month. Includes task management, uptime SLA, proactive agent collision, advanced reporting, and contact group custom fields. 

• Enterprise Plus — $89 per agent per month. Includes agent scripting, 2TB attachment store, advanced audit logs, 24/7 email, chat, and phone support, and customer success manager. 

All HappyFox plans require a minimum of five help desk agents. Non-profit and educational organizations are eligible for a 10% discount on any plan. 

Jira Service Management – Best For ITSM Support

Handling customer inquiries can be difficult in the IT industry, but Jira Service Management specializes in IT customer service. Jira offers ITSM software features that empower teams to deliver value at high speeds.

Jira offers a flexible platform for you to manage complex situations and improve your overall customer communications. With Jira’s request management feature, you can manage work across teams within one platform and help your customers as quickly as possible with an intuitive service desk portal. 

As software that prides itself on being flexible, Jira lets you customize and tailor each request form to meet each team’s unique requirements with its new form builder tool. Within the request management function, you get request queues to bring together requests from email, chat, your service desk, and other channels. 

Dive into customer satisfaction reports with Jira’s reports and metrics system that allows you to monitor and optimize your team’s workflow. Not only does its metrics help create a seamless workflow, but Jira works with Slack and Microsoft Teams to create a two-way sync between conversations to reduce context switching and information gaps. 

Jira is excellent for ITSM because of the several other robust features it offers, including incident management, problem management, change management, asset management, configuration management, and knowledge management. 

Jira lets you bring your development and IT operations teams together to respond to and resolve incidences while empowering them with the tools they need to make better decisions and minimize risk. You can also build custom add-ons with its robust API and enable self-service to foster team collaboration. 

Take your ITSM on the go with Jira’s mobile app, where you can submit, approve, and resolve issues quickly, no matter where you are. 

Just like most of the help desk software on this list, Jira also offers a free forever plan with up to three agents, one site, unlimited customers, and 2GB of file storage. Here’s a quick overview of the rest of the plans: 

• Standard — $20 per agent per month. Includes 5,000 agents, unlimited customers, one site, a cloud support team, and 250GB of file storage. 

• Premium — $45 per agent per month. Includes 5,000 agents, 24/7 premium support, 99.9% uptime SLA, and unlimited storage. 

• Enterprise — You will have to contact Jira, but the plan is billed annually. Includes 5,000 agents, unlimited sites, dedicated senior support, and 99.95% uptime SLA.  

Jira doesn’t currently offer a traditional free trial, but you can sign up for a free live demo or start with its free forever plan.

Zendesk – Best All-in-One Ticketing System 

If you’re looking for an all-in-one ticketing solution, Zendesk has got you covered. You can deliver conversational customer relationships, manage complex and agile issues, and create an enjoyable employee experience all at once with Zendesk. 

Meet the Sunshine platform, the foundation of Zendesk and the solution for an all-in-one help desk service. Zendesk can help you create the best customer experiences as soon as possible through Sunshine, as you can have it up and running in weeks. Designed for agility, the Sunshine platform lets you modify Zendesk to meet your business needs perfectly. 

As an all-in-one ticketing system, you get access to conversational tools to help you unify messages across channels, orchestrate conversation from one thread, and extend functionality with unique conversation extensions that allow you to create custom interactive experiences. 

Zendesk offers a robust suite of apps and frameworks that you can customize without code. And you can make support that little bit easier for customers with embedded native support for your mobile app or website. 

Automation is important to Zendesk, and it offers plenty of options to make customer support easier for you and your team. You can enable AI with Zendesk’s Answer Bot or connect your own chatbot. With its workflow tools, you can create smarter workflows that offer instant resolutions with low code customization for custom fields and macros. 

Zendesk offers three different pricing plans for everyone’s unique business needs. Here’s a quick overview: 

• Suite Team — $49 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes an industry-leading ticketing system, multi-channel messaging, up to 50 AI-powered automated answers, and 1,000 apps and integrations. 

• Suite Growth — $79 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes customizable ticket layouts, up to 50 light access licenses, multilingual support, and AI-powered knowledge management. 

• Suite Professional — $99 per agent per month, billed annually. Includes private conversation threads, integrated community forums, conversation routing, data location options, and a self-service customer portal. 

You can sign up for a free trial or request a live demo of Zendesk.

How to Find The Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems For You 

There are a few factors that go into finding the best help desk ticketing system. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose the right software, so we put together this methodology of the three most essential elements to consider before investing in a ticketing system for increased customer support.

Workflow Integrations 

Many help desk ticketing systems will offer additional integrations that will improve the workflow of your software, and it’s crucial that you stick with these options. Workflow integrations will not only make your life easier but there’s a high chance that it will stop your system from breaking. 

When it comes to integrations, think of some of your favorite third-party apps that will improve certain functions of your software. Smart integrations can help you resolve bugs, track progress, and administer workflows with ease.

Omnichannel Support 

The best helpdesk ticketing systems will offer the highest level of omnichannel support possible. It would be counterproductive for your customers to only have the option to contact you via email and not phone. 

It’s imperative to find a system with omnichannel support for email, social media, live chat, and telephone, so you can keep your customers happy. Keep in mind that not everyone enjoys phone calls, and not everyone has social media, so excluding certain communication avenues won’t help you address every customer concern. 

Self Service 

Although a self-service portal isn’t crucial for the success of a help desk ticketing system, it’s beneficial to find software that offers one. Having a self-service portal will save you time and money by enabling customers to find quick answers by themselves. The best software will offer this service on both website and mobile application, so customers can inquire on the go. 

The Top Help Desk Ticketing Systems in Summary 

Overall, Zoho Desk and Freshdesk are our top two recommendations for the best help desk ticketing systems on the market today for most people. 

Zoho Desk is excellent omnichannel software that offers an intuitive interface and user-friendly features. As the industry’s first context-aware ticketing system, Zoho Desk can help you view all relevant customer data and respond promptly. 

On the other hand, Freshdesk is perfect for any growing business that needs an advanced platform to scale. With its Neo platform, you can expect to merge all of your customer engagements, employee experiences, and integrations into one easy-to-use interface. 

And HappyFox, Jira Service Management, and Zendesk are still excellent alternatives for anyone looking for extremely versatile, all-in-one ticketing software. 

Source: quicksprout

Best Help Desk Ticketing Systems