The Best Help Desk Software for 2023

Inevitably, every business will be asked to solve problems. Customers need support for the products and services they buy. Employees need service from the IT department. In either case, the best way to handle such issues is through a help desk, and a well-run help desk calls for help desk software. What’s more, today’s companies demand more of their help desk systems than they once did. The trend toward hybrid work means in-person visits from IT are a thing of the past for many workers. Similarly, as consumer buying habits have steadily moved online, so have their primary support channels.

Because of these and other trends, shopping for help desk software can be a daunting task. Where once a simple ticket-tracking system might have sufficed, today’s help desks must be integrated with chatbots, social media platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Faced with a bewildering array of options, it can be hard to figure out which help desk software will best serve your company’s unique needs. Fear not! We’re here to guide you through the issues you should consider in the second half of this article. But first, here are our top picks among the help desk systems we’ve tested.

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Why We Picked It

Zoho markets an extensive portfolio of business software, and Zoho Desk is one of its best offerings. It has an impressive feature set and the most competitive price tag of all the systems we tested. Its workflow designer, AI-based chatbot, and mobile apps are all particularly compelling features, but its capabilities hardly end there.

Who It’s For

We can’t help but be impressed by Zoho Desk’s long list of features, and we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to any company. If we had any misgivings, they would be that Zoho’s UI feels clunky and old-fashioned. Moreover, the sheer number of features might turn some customers off, especially if they struggle to learn how to use them.

PROS

• Tight integration with other Zoho products
• Huge list of features
• Highly configurable
• Excellent price

CONS

• Some advanced features only available at higher pricing tiers
• Stodgy user interface
• Somewhat complex to use and customize

Freshdesk

Best for Small Business Service Desks

Why We Picked It

Freshdesk is aimed squarely at powering customer-facing help desks for SMBs. (By contrast, the company’s other product, Freshservice, is intended for internal IT operations.) As a result, it aims to resolve customer issues as quickly and efficiently as possible, with minimal friction for customers and service techs alike. Advanced features, such as gamification and multiple customer touchpoint channels, set it apart from the pack.

Who It’s For

Small businesses that need help responding to customer issues will appreciate what Freshdesk has to offer. Particularly welcome will be Freddy, the product’s AI, which is basically a one-stop shop for integrating text and voice-enabled chatbots and phone-based IVR systems. However, if you’re looking for a system that can do double duty on your IT department’s internal support desk, Freshdesk might disappoint.

PROS

• Question-based query tool provides natural language data discovery
• Free tier allows smaller customers to get a feel for the system over a long period of time
• The gamification feature will appeal to younger customer service agents

CONS

• High-end analytic features only in beta version
• Many extended features require an upgrade to the highest pricing tiers

HaloITSM

Best for Distributed ITIL

Why We Picked It

HaloITSM is unabashedly “ITIL aligned,” meaning it aims to help businesses deploy IT help desks that follow the ITIL set of best practices. That means it’s more closely aligned with Vivantio Pro than it is with many of the other entries in this roundup, most of which are better suited to customer support help desks. But in its class, it’s one of the best.

Who It’s For

Enterprises are the most likely customers for ITIL-compliant help desks, but SMBs who insist on rigorous best practices may also need software like HaloITSM. If your IT support desk has a high ticket volume, this may be the solution for you. Just be aware that it won’t cover all your needs if you also need a customer-facing help desk.

PROS

• Highly customizable user interface
• Comprehensive and flexible reporting tools
• All features exposed at every pricing tier

CONS

• Customization is complex and can increase set-up time
• Basic knowledge base access control
• Custom reports require some knowledge of SQL

HappyFox

Best for Customer-Facing Help Desks

Why We Picked It

Although it’s pricey, HappyFox is one of the most comprehensive customer-facing help desk solutions on the market, and it’s also suitable for many IT help desk functions. It’s highly customizable, and features deep integrations with communications tools like Slack, making it easy to enter tickets without navigating to the HappyFox app.

Who It’s For

If you’re looking for a best-in-class help desk system, HappyFox should definitely be on your list to consider. It offers a robust set of features that should suit any sized company. One caveat is that its IT help desk capabilities are weaker than those of dedicated products. Although its pricing is competitive, it’s among the more expensive solutions we tested.

PROS

• Highly customizable user interface
• Tight integration with Slack
• Easy multi-step ticket management
• Excellent and free training resources

CONS

• Social media connections limited to Facebook and Twitter
• Some features such as asset management only available at enterprise tiers

Vivantio

Best for ITIL-Standardized Service Desks

Why We Picked It

Vivantio is built from the ground up to support ITIL best practices, making it an excellent choice for any company that needs a standards-compliant IT help desk. It’s more than capable of supporting businesses up to enterprise scale. It offers good reporting depth, and arguably the best overall customization of any product in its class.

Who It’s For

If you know you need ITIL compliance in your IT help desk, your best bet is to go with a solution that caters specifically to that requirement. Vivantio will undoubtedly fill the bill there. On the other hand, if what you need is a help desk to provide external customer support, a different product may better cater to your needs.

PROS

• Excellent customization
• Useful reporting and data visualizations
• Includes asset and knowledge management
• Granular global search functionality

CONS

• Large enterprise edition required for full feature set
• Requires training for best use
• No direct social media support

Freshservice

Best for Internal IT Using ITIL

Why We Picked It

Freshservice is the IT help desk solution offered by Freshworks, making it the spiritual big brother to Freshdesk, the company’s offering for customer-facing help desks. It has a long list of features designed to enable your IT teams to manage assets and internal projects. It fully supports ITIL best practice guidelines. In addition, it’s also well-suited to managed service providers who need to maintain SLA compliance.

Who It’s For

Freshservice is well-suited to the needs of large organizations, but smaller companies might feel overwhelmed by its features. If the majority of your IT tickets involve simple tasks like password resets, a less-complex solution might save your support staff some time. On the other hand, if you need to manage complex IT projects—and particularly if you need ITIL compliance—Freshservice is a strong contender.

PROS

• ITIL support for change management
• Workflow support allows heavy customization
• Best-in-class gamification features
• Wealth of integration options

CONS

• Feature overkill and too expensive for small help desks
• Geared primarily toward internal customer base
• Lacks social media integration

Jira Service Management

Best for Existing Atlassian Customers

Why We Picked It

What was once merely Atlassian’s help desk offering has expanded into a much more versatile platform, mainly by the company acquiring and integrating tools from other companies. The current product lets you select the focus you need, whether that’s IT operations, facilities management, customer support, or something else. It also integrates team messaging and AI-powered problem resolution.

Who It’s For

Jira Service Management is a good all-around choice for help desk management. If you’d like to use the same tool for multiple job roles, the ability to set areas of focus should appeal. However, some customers might be disappointed that certain features cost extra, including social media integration and Active Directory support.

PROS

• Free plan for up to three agents
• New integration options for messaging channel
• Low-code or no-code intelligent form creation

CONS

• Customer access via social media channels requires third-party add-on
• Integration with various authentication services requires additional subscription

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

Best for Small Business IT

Why We Picked It

ServiceDesk Plus is another system geared toward internal support desks operated by IT professionals. It follows the ITSM standard for IT process and change management. The software recently added modules for handling IT problems specific to company departments, such as human resources (HR), finance, and others. And because ManageEngine is owned by Zoho, it offers tight integration with other products from both ManageEngine and Zoho.

Who It’s For

This help desk system isn’t for neophytes. It assumes your internal help desk is staffed with experienced IT pros. But if that describes your IT support teams, and they can handle a user interface that isn’t quite as user-friendly as some others, ServiceDesk Plus offers a wealth of features aimed at helping issues get resolved faster. However, you may find that some of the more compelling, advanced features are only available at the top pricing tiers.

PROS

• Full support for ITSM best practices
• AI-based self-service portal to answer common questions
• Tight integration with other ManageEngine and Zoho products

CONS

• Some advanced analytics and AI-driven features only available at the top pricing tier
• Pricing somewhat confusing due to extra charges for specific features
• Interface aimed at IT professionals, not neophytes

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Best for Small Businesses on a Budget

Why We Picked It

Spiceworks’ help desk system is sure to catch the eye of any buyer for one simple reason: It’s absolutely free. That doesn’t mean it’s not competitive against the other offerings in this roundup, however. While it has few frills, it provides basic ticketing and reporting features that should be suitable for small business IT help desks.

Who It’s For

You should pass Cloud Help Desk by if what you really need is a tool for customer-facing support. Much like the Spiceworks community itself, the company’s tool is focused squarely on the needs of IT help desks. Although we doubt it can scale to meet the requirements of large organizations (and it doesn’t adhere to ITIL), small companies with limited IT support needs can’t go wrong for the price.

(Editors’ Note: Spiceworks is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)

PROS

• Completely free help desk solution
• Solid functionality for basic internal IT ticketing
• Smart reporting plug-in

CONS

• Missing some features like social media links and chat support
• Little to no dashboard customization
• In-app advertising

Zendesk for Service

Best for Customer Experience Management

Why We Picked It

Zendesk has evolved from a basic help desk system to a full-fledged platform that consolidates several products under a single moniker. It has a broad marketplace that features more than 1,200 third-party apps and integrations, and it bundles functions like workplace management and messaging channels. That makes it especially attractive for companies looking to solve common vertical or compliance problems.

Who It’s For

Companies that are looking beyond implementing a simple help desk, and want to improve all aspects of the customer experience, should consider Zendesk. It emphasizes bringing all customer communications into one place, which can not only help service agents but improve other systems, such as your company’s customer relationship management (CRM). However, its many innovations come with a hefty price tag.

PROS

• Highly customizable user interface
• Comprehensive reporting and query tooling
• Large marketplace of apps and integrations

CONS

• Steep entry-level price
• Only Enterprise levels let you customize pre-built dashboards

Gorgias

Best for E-Commerce Desks

Why We Picked It

Gorgias takes a different approach than most of the systems we tested in that it caters exclusively to e-commerce companies. It integrates with popular e-commerce platforms and has unique features that cater to sellers. For example, its AI-based sentiment analysis tools can scan social media to find customer reactions and surface them in the app. It also allows you to customize your help desk to cater to your business, store, and product type.

Who It’s For

Gorgias is an unusual offering, but you may find value in it if your business is a small or midsize e-commerce operation. Even then, it only integrates with three major e-commerce platforms: BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify, although it has an app store with other add-on integrations. However, if you need a broader set of help desk features, such as remote control or SLA management, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

PROS

• Email-like user interface offers a familiar environment for most agents
• Broad and growing list of integrations with popular e-commerce and add-on apps
• Unique features help its e-commerce orientation

CONS

• Tightly focused on only e-commerce customers
• Pricing model could impact high call volume customers
• Reporting features limited to canned reports with basic export except for niche BI tools

Buying Guide: The Best Help Desk Software for 2023

What Is Help Desk Software Used For?

Help desk software automates key functions to make a support staff more responsive and efficient. At their core, help desk solutions typically revolve around “ticketing.” No matter which channel your customer uses, any request gets put into a digital ticket format that contains all its associated information. That includes a request or problem summary, the customer ID, the time reported, the channel used, and which service rep was assigned to work on it.

How a system manages these tickets is the primary differentiator between help desk solutions, so you should weigh this heavily in your purchasing decision. For example, some help desk software, such as Freshdesk or Zendesk for Service, includes social tie-ins that can turn questions and requests from social media websites into tickets. This could be an essential feature for a company that deals with a large customer base, but not necessarily for one that just needs an internal IT service platform.

On the other hand, Jira Service Management and similar software provide additional security measures and identity management (primarily single sign-on or SSO) features, which may be key differentiators for larger companies.

Essential Help Desk Software Features

Although modern help desk software features, such as AI, IVAs, and sophisticated chatbots, might sound flashy and even daunting to implement, they’re hardly mandatory. In fact, you’d do well to first concentrate on making sure a given solution fills your baseline needs in a help desk system. You’re looking for four key capabilities:

1. The ability to create, route, and track a trouble ticket.

2. The ability to modify and close the ticket, while maintaining a record of the closure.

3. The ability to share ticket data with other systems.

4. The ability to receive tickets via multiple channels, such as chat, email, SMS, and social media.

Another near-essential feature is the ability to create a self-service portal, which adds value to both basic help desk scenarios: the internal IT help desk and the external, customer-facing product support help desk. This typically centers around a knowledge base that contains step-by-step instructions for solving everyday questions like “How do I reset my password?” or “How do I access the company VPN?” It might also be used as a central point for everyday tasks, such as accessing a download library or registering a new phone with the company’s mobile device management (MDM) system.

For customer-facing support sites, help desk software offers product registration, the ability to manually download software updates and product documentation, and back-end hooks to the customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems that automatically market related products and upsell opportunities to appropriate customers.

This ability to integrate with other apps is another worthwhile capability. Help desks operate at the nexus of operations and user or customer interaction, so they collect precious data. Help desk tickets can reveal how customers use software to do business, where it’s breaking down, and how that’s impacting the organization. Similarly, they can shed light on what customers are buying most, and what they like most (or least) about what they buy. Further, you can slice and dice help desk data based on audience segment, geography, and a host of other factors.

Do You Need ITIL?

If you’re implementing a help desk for an IT management company, or one that manages large custom software development projects, check out support for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is an established set of best practices that set forth how to use the checklists, procedures, processes, and tasks that help an organization handle various problem scenarios in a more structured and efficient fashion.

Each help desk system we tested broadly falls into one of two camps: those that follow ITIL’s guidelines—such as Editors’ Choice winners Freshservice and HaloITSM, as well as Jira Service Management and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus—and those that don’t.

That’s no knock on any of the others that don’t stick to ITIL, however. They can be every bit as feature-rich as the ITIL-compliant ones. In fact, ITIL isn’t the best bet for companies looking to support customers and products. If you’re in one of those organizations, look at the customer- and marketing-related features found in Editors’ Choice winners Freshdesk and HappyFox.

Vivantio Pro
(Credit: PCMag)

What Is the Best Help Desk Ticketing Software?

As mentioned earlier, issues that reach the help desk typically arrive as “tickets.” These start as summaries of each support request and the filer’s contact information, and then grow from there. Every interaction concerning a particular issue is recorded in the ticket, as are the support agent’s responses and a description of the eventual resolution. That’s not the end of it. If you’ve integrated your help desk with your sales or marketing technology systems, you might have upsell, survey, and even purchasing data to add.

But don’t get carried away. Support staff are a harried breed. Requests never stop, which means ticketing never stops. How those tickets get routed to your staff, how they access them, and how they route them onward is a process that varies between businesses. There’s rarely only one right way.

This is a crucial discussion to have before you pull the trigger on a help desk system purchase. Sit down with your support agents and your sales, marketing, and business intelligence leads. Brainstorm about the kinds of data your technicians take in, and how it might benefit other parts of the business. What data can you get by asking your help desk clients a few additional questions, and how do you want to capture and disseminate it?

Help Desk Chatbots for Customer Service

Another feature that’s become a staple of modern help desk software is support for chatbots. These increasingly sophisticated software services can often take over, or at least augment, the live-chat capability of your support website. Many of the products in our roundup offer this feature.

Think of chatbots as a high-stress help desk’s first line of defense. Customers who engage with a chatbot often believe they’re discussing their issues with a real person, when in fact they’re chatting with a rule-based program that uses detailed questions and natural language query processing to discover problems. If possible, the chatbot resolves the issue by giving a canned answer to a common problem, displaying alternate information resources, or triggering an automated process.

Failing that, a chatbot’s next most important function is contact routing. If the bot can’t solve a problem, it hands the customer off to an actual person, ideally one armed with specific domain knowledge. It can even route the customer to the right service representative based on the rep’s experience with similar issues. Sometimes the customers know about the handoff, but sometimes they’re left none the wiser.

Chatbots aren’t limited to text messaging, either. Increasingly they are voice-enabled, too. Today’s voice synthesis can be very convincing, and many customers may prefer to resolve their problems over the phone or another voice channel, rather than typing in text. 

This is aided by the fact that machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been primary drivers of innovation in the help desk space. These technologies have a variety of applications, from more intelligent contact routing to improved language processing and beyond.

But what about customers who despise automated service systems and immediately click off or hang up? They might be fewer than you think. According to a Capgemini Research Institute report(Opens in a new window), “customers increasingly prefer to use voice assistants,” and 58% of the organizations that responded to its study said the benefits of automated voice response and chat “met or exceeded their expectations.”

Integrations: How Help Desks Get Smart

Companies typically implement help desks as customer satisfaction platforms. They focus on providing their customer service reps with the most effective tools to keep customers happy. However, that’s often not a well-researched journey. Unfortunately, having support customers rate the experience with 1-5 stars is often the only real effort many companies make on this front. Such ratings are certainly important metrics, but they’re subject to a lot of whims, not the least of which is the fact that customers are impatient to get back to their normal routines.

One way to arm a support rep for a more robust customer conversation is to let customer data flow from other software systems into the help desk system through integrations. We mentioned earlier that data gathered by the help desk can inform other operations, such as sales and marketing. However, data from other systems can flow into the help desk system, too.

For example, it’s often handy to have data from the sales CRM inform the help desk technician of the customer’s purchase history. What other products have they purchased over how long a time? How happy do they seem with those purchases, and what were the particulars of those deals? Other popular integration targets might include analytics tools, like Tableau; collaboration software, like Slack; and even sales platforms, like Zoho CRM. All of these can sink their hooks into a ticket management system and establish a two-way data flow.

Look for a list of prebuilt integration modules on the help desk maker’s website to see if the vendor provides easy integration with your other software. Alternatively, a more technical solution would be representational state transfer (REST) APIs, which have become a standard for integrating cloud software services. If your help desk system supports them, you’ll be able to hire developers to build custom integrations.

Zendesk
(Credit: PCMag)

How to Choose the Right Help Desk Software

It should be clear by now that before settling on a help desk solution, you should consider many factors. First, look at how tickets are created, routed, and closed and make sure those capabilities work the way your business needs them. How does the system communicate with your users or customers on one side, and how does it aid your help desk staff on the other? 

You should consider which channels the system supports and how it supports them. This can be particularly important if you need your help desk ticket-routing system to tie into an email, social media, or voice-over-IP (VoIP)-based call center. Finally, you’re looking for how the system collects and stores the data that runs through it and how easily you can leverage that data in other areas of the business.

All of the vendors in our roundup support some combination of the capabilities we’ve discussed, with varying degrees of success. While our four Editors’ Choice award winners represent the best overall values, all of our contenders offer different ability levels in various feature areas. It pays to read our reviews, because your business could match up particularly well with a more specialized contender that didn’t make the Editors’ Choice cut.

For more on business software, check out 7 Ways to Future-Proof Your Business VoIP for Hybrid Work.