Running a business also means having to deal with customer queries and issues. Yes, email support and shared inboxes are great for that! They keep everyone in the loop and make communication a breeze.
But here’s the thing, as your business grows, these methods might not be enough. You might start missing emails, struggling to keep track of tasks, and even making customers unhappy.
If these challenges resonate with you, it’s likely your business has outgrown its current email support system—and you need to start looking into service desk software.
Just so we’re on the same page, service desk software is a centralized hub for managing and resolving customer support tickets. There are many types of service desk software on the market, from simple tools that offer basic ticketing functionality to tools with advanced features like automation and reporting analytics. 📈
In this article, we’ll introduce you to the 15 best service desk software for IT support. We’ve carefully researched and handpicked these tools based on their features, customer reviews, and pricing.
15 Best Service Desk Software Tools for IT Support
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Should You Look for in Service Desk Software?
As you try to find the right service desk software for your business, consider asking these key questions about each option:
- Is the software easy to set up and use?
- Can I customize it to my business’s specific needs?
- Does the software offer automation for routine tasks?
- Does it provide detailed analytics and reporting?
- Can the software integrate with other tools that I already use?
- Is it accessible via the web as well as desktop and mobile apps?
- Can the software handle task management like assigning, tracking, and prioritizing tickets?
- Does it provide communication channels and collaboration features for instant information sharing?
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe 15 Best Service Desk Software to Use in 2024
Here are our top 15 best service desk software that can transform your IT support operations, supercharge your team’s productivity, and boost your customer satisfaction.
1. ClickUp
ClickUp is a comprehensive project management and productivity platform that can also serve as a flexible and effective service and help desk solution. Its powerful features offer a wide range of flexibility for managing customer support processes, ensuring that your IT and support teams stay on top of their tasks.
ClickUp forms are the foundation of your IT workflow. Use it to collect inquiries, issues, and feedback from your customers. The details captured in these forms seamlessly convert to tickets within ClickUp’s project management interface, making it easier to prioritize, track, and resolve issues. ✨
With over 15 different viewing options, including List and Kanban views, ClickUp allows you to visualize your tasks in a way that suits your workflow best. The List view provides a straightforward, detailed rundown of tasks, while the Kanban view allows for a visual workflow where tasks are moved across columns as they progress.
And if you don’t want to build these systems from scratch, ClickUp offers more than 50 pre-built templates, like the ClickUp Help Desk Ticket Template, designed specifically as an IT service management solution to support workflows. These can help your team quickly set up processes for incident management, problem management, change management, and more. 🤩
ClickUp best features
- Unlock key features with the free plan
- Create dynamic and interactive forms with conditional logic in ClickUp Forms
- Use custom fields to capture ticket details like incident type, description, and severity, and even include files like screenshots for additional context
- Create custom statuses to streamline and track the progress of tickets from start to finish
- Use ClickUp Dashboards with customizable widgets to monitor ongoing tickets, team workload, and business goal metrics 🧰
- Gain deep insights into team performance with the comprehensive reporting feature
- With about 100 integrations including Zapier and API access, easily fit ClickUp into almost any tech stack
- Collaborate with your team via task comments, chat, and ClickUp Docs
- Use ClickUp’s notification system to alert users about updates, deadlines, comments, and more, keeping everyone in the loop at all times
- Run automations to eliminate repetitive tasks like assigning tickets, setting deadlines, updating ticket statuses, and adding watchers to a ticket
- Summarize conversations and generate responses with ClickUp AI
ClickUp limitations
- New users might need to use ClickUp’s video tutorials to get up to speed with all its features
- Some features might be missing in the mobile app compared to the web and desktop versions
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
ClickUp ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (8,200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (3,700+ reviews)
2. Freshservice
Freshservice (developed by Freshworks) is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solution that offers incident, problem, and change management features to help businesses quickly manage and resolve IT and incident management issues.
With its workflow automation feature, you can auto-assign tickets to appropriate team members, based on predefined criteria—improving efficiency and response time in your customer support and service requests.
Freshservice best features
- Has a user-friendly interface and ticket management system that works well with Android and iOS mobile apps
- Includes a self-service portal where users can find solutions to common problems, track the status of their tickets, or raise new ones
- Allows you to create an organized, searchable customer database of helpful articles and solutions to common issues for access by users 🔎
- Provides detailed analytics and reports, helping teams understand service desk productivity and track overall IT performance
Freshservice limitations
- No free plan
- Slow and glitchy at times
- Limited project management functionality
Freshservice pricing
- Starter: $29/month per agent
- Growth: $59/month per agent
- Pro: $115/month per agent
- Enterprise: $145/month per agent
Freshservice ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5 (950+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (530+ reviews)
3. Vision Helpdesk
Vision Helpdesk is a help desk software and ticket management system for small businesses looking to organize support-related activities. You can keep track of customer queries, complaints, and support requests that come in from various channels, including phone calls, social media messages, and live chat across your customer service department.
Vision Helpdesk creates “tickets” for each customer query, allowing the support team to follow up and resolve issues systematically.
Vision Helpdesk best features
- Manage all customer queries in a central location
- Use the live chat tool for real-time communication with customers
- Let customers submit and track the status of their tickets as well as search knowledge base articles with the self-service client portal feature
- Enjoy multi-language support for email templates, portal, and knowledge management
- Use the automation feature for auto-assigning tickets to team members and closing tickets
Vision Helpdesk limitations
- There is no free plan
- Some users have said the mobile app is unstable
- You have to pay a $500 fee to remove Vision Helpdesk branding at the bottom of the customer portal (even if you’re on the highest paid plan)
Vision Helpdesk pricing
- Starter Help Desk: $15/month per agent
- Pro Help Desk: $25/month per agent
- Satellite Help Desk: $30/month per agent
- Pro Service Desk: $40/month per agent
- Ent Service Desk: $60/month per agent
Vision Helpdesk ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (30+ reviews)
4. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is an IT help desk solution designed for large enterprises. It offers comprehensive features like incident management, proactive issue management, alignment of IT services with business goals. The help desk software also includes customer service management features for streamlining customer-agent interactions.
ServiceNow best features
- Issue and incident management system allows you to quickly assign tasks and track progress in real-time
- IT Asset Management module lets you track inventory, automate asset requests, and run asset audits
- Fully customizable forms, workflows, dashboards, and reports help you tailor the platform to your specific business needs
- Integrated AI powers function such as search, virtual chatbot, predictive analytics, and routine task automation
- The help desk software easily integrates with external apps
ServiceNow limitations
- No free plan or trial
- Hidden pricing plans
- Steep learning curve for help desk software
- Slow load speeds at times
ServiceNow pricing
- Contact the ServiceNow team for pricing
ServiceNow ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (360+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (190+ reviews)
5. Rezo
Rezo is an AI-powered customer experience solution for large enterprises. It uses speech, intent, and sentiment recognition and analysis to automate customer interactions across all your voice and non-voice support channels. This facilitates faster issue resolutions and improved customer experiences.
Rezo best features
- Supports voice and digital channels like email and social media
- Conducts customer interactions in 30+ languages
- Gathers customer satisfaction scores and feedback across all your support channels for insights to improve
- Compiles agent performance insights so you can identify training opportunities
- Employs an intelligent routing feature to analyze support issues and route them to the relevant department
Rezo limitations
- No free plan or trial
- Hidden pricing plans
- Limited integrations and advanced service desk features
Rezo pricing
- Contact Rezo team for a custom quote
Rezo ratings and reviews
- G2: N/A
- Capterra: N/A
6. Exalate
Exalate is a synchronization platform commonly used for issue tracking and project management. Its main purpose is to facilitate seamless and secure data synchronization among various systems like Jira, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, GitHub, and Salesforce.
This is very helpful for cross-functional teams that require real-time data exchange across different platforms and systems. 🌐
Exalate best features
- Provides visual mode (drag-and-drop interface) or script mode to configure your integrations
- Allows for bidirectional (two-way) or unidirectional (one-way) synchronization, depending on the specific needs of your workflow
- Gives you complete control over what data should be synchronized, how, and when
- Shares only the necessary data, maintaining high levels of privacy and security
Exalate limitations
- Complex to set up, especially for non-tech users
- Occasionally experiences downtime
Exalate pricing
- Free Plan
- Exalate for Jira: $6/month
- Exalate for GitHub: $115/month
- Exalate for Zendesk: $115/month
- Exalate for Salesforce: $335/month
- Exalate for Azure DevOps: $335/month
- Exalate for ServiceNow: Contact for pricing
Exalate ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (60 reviews)
- Capterra: N/A
7. Slack
Slack is a cloud-based communication and enterprise collaboration tool that can be used by support teams to manage internal information flows. It uses chat rooms called “channels” for real-time communication and file sharing. Channels can be organized based on teams, projects, clients, or other relevant criteria.
For private or small group conversations, Slack also provides direct messaging.
Slack best features
- Support teams can collaborate in real-time using web, desktop, and mobile devices
- Channels can be used to bring together people from different departments when cross-functional collaboration is needed to resolve a ticket 👥
- Extensive integrations make it easy to connect with other programs in your tech stack
- Huddle feature allows you to video call and screen share with your team
- Whether a team member is in a meeting, out for lunch, or on vacation, they can update their status to keep everyone informed
- Slack automatically detects and displays the local time for each team member in their profile, making it easier to work with global teams across different time zones
Slack limitations
- Search functionality is limited for older conversations and files
- Pricing may be expensive for small teams on a budget
- Huddle lacks advanced features like virtual backgrounds and breakout rooms found in dedicated video conferencing tools
Slack pricing
- Free plan
- Pro: $7.25/month per user
- Business+: $12.50/month per user
- Enterprise Grid: Contact sales
Slack ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (31,500+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (23,000+ reviews)
8. Jira Service Management
Building upon the success of Jira Software, Atlassian developed Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) as a specialized tool for IT teams. It enables them to efficiently handle tasks such as incidents, service requests, and changes.
Jira Service Management best features
- Has a customizable self-service portal where customers can find answers to common questions or request help from the support team
- Allows you to set up and manage service level agreements (SLAs) with real-time tracking, ensuring they’re met consistently
- Seamlessly integrates with Confluence to create a knowledge base, enabling users to find solutions to common issues independently 🧑💻
- Offers ITIL-certified service desk processes, which ensures IT practices align with international IT service management standards
Jira Service Management limitations
- Overly complex and difficult to navigate for new users
- Slow and buggy at times
- Cluttered user interface
Jira Service Management pricing
- Free plan
- Standard: Starts at $21/month per agent
- Premium: Starts at $47/month per agent
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Jira Service Management ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (5,000+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (13,000+ reviews)
9. Help Scout
Help Scout is a help desk system designed for small to medium-sized businesses. It provides features to manage support documentation, customer interactions, and ticketing systems.
The help desk software has an intuitive interface that allows teams to quickly delegate tickets and monitor progress to ensure the timely resolution of customer queries. ⏰
Help Scout best features
- Allows you to provide customer support via email, live chat, and a knowledge base
- Promotes team collaboration within support teams through its collaborative inbox function 📧
- Offers automations to handle repetitive tasks like ticket assignments and sending bulk replies
- Has 50+ integrations with SaaS tools like Slack, Trello, and Salesforce
Help Scout limitations
- Can’t assign multiple team members to a ticket
- Only has basic mobile app features
- Has limited language support
Help Scout pricing
- Standard: $25/month per user
- Plus: $50/month per user
- Pro: Contact for pricing
Help Scout ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (390+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (200+ reviews)
10. GoTo Resolve
GoTo Resolve (formerly GoToAssist) is a specialized IT management software that allows support teams to remotely fix user issues, set up new software, or explain how to use an application. Its strong, reliable, and secure connections have made it an invaluable tool, particularly for remote teams handling sensitive data.
GoTo Resolve best features
- Provides remote support to customers via email or a link, without having them download any additional software 🙌
- Lets other IT personnel join remote sessions when needed to provide extra support
- Records remote support sessions for future reference
- Integrates with popular tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zendesk
GoTo Resolve limitations
- Occasionally experiences glitches
- Limited reporting and analytics
- A lack of extensive integrations
GoTo Resolve pricing
- Free plan
- Remote support: Starts at $50/month
- Standard: Starts at $70/month
- Premium: Contact for pricing
GoTo Resolve ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (400+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (190+ reviews)
11. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a service desk software that prioritizes user satisfaction. It simplifies the customer support process, making it easier for support agents to provide assistance and for customers to find solutions to their problems.
Zoho Desk best features
- Multi-channel ticketing system means customers can contact you via email, phone, chat, social media, and self-service portals
- Agent productivity features include ticket sharing, collision detection, and automation to streamline support processes
- Comprehensive analytics and reporting to monitor support team performance and identify areas for improvement
- Integrations with other Zoho products and third-party apps enhance communication and workflow
Zoho Desk limitations
- Steep learning curve when first using the software
- Limits on the number of ticket views in the free plan can restrict the software’s usefulness.
Zoho Desk pricing
- Standard: $20/month per user
- Professional: $35/month per user
Enterprise: $50/month per user
Zoho Desk ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.4/5 (4,700+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (2,000+ reviews)
12. Spiceworks
Spiceworks is a service desk software solution specifically designed for IT professionals. It is an IT ticketing system that helps manage and respond to user requests.
Spiceworks best features
- Help desk software offers ticketing, inventory, and a user portal to cover all your IT support needs
- Network monitoring tools keep tabs on your servers, printers, switches, and more
- A learning hub with instructional content helps IT pros stay in the loop with the latest trends and technologies
- A vibrant user community forum for IT pros to share advice, solve problems, and discuss the latest in IT
Spiceworks limitations
- Lacks a thorough reporting system for detailed analysis of IT issues
- Occasional performance issues with the software
Spiceworks pricing
- Free for all users
Spiceworks ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (300+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (540+ reviews)
13. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a powerful all-in-one customer support platform that serves as a help desk solution for businesses of all sizes. It combines many channels into one platform, making customer communication more efficient.
LiveAgent best features
- Provides a universal inbox for all customer queries from various channels, such as email, social media, chat, and phone calls
- Advanced automation tools that help streamline support processes
- Comprehensive support ticketing system with a built-in CRM
- Features a customer portal for self-help, including a knowledge base, forums, and feedback system
LiveAgent limitations
- The software’s interface, while being highly functional, sometimes lacks a modern feel. Some users also report difficulties with the software’s mobile responsiveness.
LiveAgent pricing
- Small: $9/month per agent (billed annually)
- Medium: $29/month per agent (billed annually)
- Large: $49/month per agent (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $69/month per agent (billed annually)
LiveAgent ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (1,400+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (1,300+ reviews)
14. Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is service desk software equipped with customer service solutions that enhance customer relations by unifying all customer inquiries from different channels into a single, intuitive interface. It is known for its wide range of features like intelligent case routing, omni-channel interactions, and self-service portals.
Salesforce Service Cloud best features
- Extensive CRM functionalities with customer journey mapping, communication tracking, and contact history
- Omni-channel customer communication, integrating social media, emails, messages, or calls
- Advanced case management with intelligent routing, prioritizing and automatically assigning cases based on case data and agent skills
- Integrations with Salesforce’s comprehensive software ecosystem for seamless operation across all business departments
Salesforce Service Cloud limitations
- Users have reported a steep learning curve and complex user interface
- Lack of pricing clarity with many features requiring additional costs
Salesforce Service Cloud pricing
- Starter: $25/month per user (billed annually)
- Professional: $75/month per user (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $150/month per user (billed annually)
- Unlimited: $300/month per user (billed annually)
Salesforce Service Cloud ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.2/5 (2,200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (700+ reviews)
15. SuuportBee
SupportBee is a simplistic cloud-based help desk software that allows teams to manage customer support emails, tickets, and comments from a singular platform. It aims to streamline customer service workflows by acting as a unified inbox, delivering every customer interaction straight to the teams.
SupportBee best features
- Uncomplicated ticketing system that converts all incoming customer emails into tickets
- Collaborative inbox, enabling team members to comment and collaborate on customer solutions
- Integration capacity with popular tools like Slack, Asana, and Trello
- Mobile applications to keep track of customer inquiries on-the-go
SupportBee limitations
- Limited functionality compared to other help desk software
- No native live chat or call support features
SupportBee pricing
- Startup: $13/month per user
- Enterprise: $17/month per user
SupportBee ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.1/5 (5+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.3/5 (25+)
Summarize this article for me pleaseBoost Your Customer Experience With the Best Service Desk Software
Choosing the right service or help desk software for your business can go a long way to boost team productivity and customer service experience.
And when it comes to achieving these goals, ClickUp stands out from the rest. Its intuitive interface and comprehensive features make issue tracking, ticket management, and team collaboration effortless. ⚡️
Sign up for ClickUp today, and try it for yourself!
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