The Top Help Desk Ticketing Systems Compared: Pros, Cons, and Features
Are you searching for the best help desk ticketing systems? Welcome, you’ve come to the right place! 👋
In this article, we’ll dive into popular ticketing systems’ pros, cons, and features, helping you make an informed decision.
What Is a Help Desk Ticketing System?
Before we begin, let’s get into the definition of help desk ticketing systems.
If you’re running a business, I’m sure you’ve come across the term “Customer Support” before. It’s something that most companies are familiar with and have to deal with.
Then, what is a helpdesk ticketing system? Hmm… 🤔
Imagine you’re a customer support team head or the go-to IT guru in your office. Either way, you’ll no doubt face a steady stream of questions, problems, and requests. Keeping track of all those tasks and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks can feel overwhelming. Enter the Help Desk Ticketing System here, your trusty sidekick!
A ticketing system is a centralized hub where you can manage and organize all incoming requests. When your users or team members encounter a technical issue or need assistance, they can submit a ticket through a user-friendly portal, email, or chatbot.
The ticket contains all the important details about the issue: who reported it, what it’s about, and some helpful screenshots or error messages.
Once the ticket is submitted, you can see them in a nice dashboard & where you or your support teammates can sort them based on urgency or importance, tackling the most critical problems first.
The ticketing system also helps your support team work together smoothly. The system also allows you to assign tickets to specific agents, add notes or updates, and collaborate with other team members to find the best solution for each customer. And don’t worry; the system keeps a record of all these interactions, so you’ll never lose track of what’s been done.
How to Choose the Best Help Desk Ticketing System?
By now, I’m sure you realize how crucial a ticketing system is for your business. And now, you might be wondering how to choose the best help desk ticketing system that helps you accelerate your support services.
With so many help desk tools out there, it can be quite overwhelming to make a selection. But don’t worry; we’ve already done the legwork for you and compiled a list of the top options.
However, if you want to be thorough and double-check, here are some Must-Have features you should consider when selecting a help desk ticketing system.
✅ Ticket Management
The most important feature to look for in your help desk ticketing system is how it handles ticket management.
Your ticketing platform should allow you to create, track, and manage support tickets in one place throughout their lifecycle. It should enable categorization, prioritization, and assignment of tickets to appropriate agents.
✅ Email Support
One effective method for handling inquiries from a larger audience is to offer support through email.
Email support allows customers to seek assistance at their convenience. Customers can send their queries or issues anytime, and support agents can respond when they are available, enabling flexible communication.
✅ Integrated Knowledge Base
A well-designed ticketing system should also offer self-service features such as a knowledge base or FAQs, where users can find solutions to common queries independently. Reducing ticket volume minimizes support load and improves the customer experience.
✅ Security and Privacy Controls
Ensure your help desk ticketing tool provides robust security measures to protect sensitive customer data. It should offer role-based access controls to manage permissions and restrict access to confidential information.
✅ Integration Capabilities
Each project has its own requirements. And building a perfect tool that meets every user’s needs is impossible. So before investing in any ticketing system, it’s essential to ensure it can integrate with other solutions, including project management tools and communication platforms.
✅ Intuitive interface
Last but not least, before choosing any tool, ensure its interface is intuitive and simple so that you or your support team don’t need to spend hours understanding its features and usability. At the same time, your customers should be able to raise support requests using the platform easily.
The Top Help Desk Ticketing Systems Compared in 2023
Now that you know what features to look for in a help ticketing system, let’s check out some of the best tools to streamline your support processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve overall efficiency.
In a hurry? Let’s quickly check the comparison chart:
Platforms | Free Version | Pricing (paid annually) |
1. KB Support | ✅ | Free WordPress Helpdesk plugin |
2. Help Scout | ❌ | $20/per user/month |
3. Heroic Inbox | ❌ | $199.50/year |
4. Zendesk | ❌ | $55/per agent/month |
1. KB Support
KB Support is the ultimate customer support and knowledge base plugin for WordPress. It is designed to help businesses or website owners create a self-service support system and provide help desk services to their customers or users.
While KB Support offers a plethora of advanced features, the two best features of this plugin are Advanced Ticket Assignment and flexibility to allow users to create Guest Tickets. (We’ll discuss these features in detail in our next section).
More than that, KB Support offers a built-in Knowledge Base functionality that allows you to create detailed documentation, how-to guides, reference docs, and support articles directly within your WordPress website.
You can leverage these guides to educate your users and allow them to find solutions to their queries during ticket submission, reducing the support team load and enhancing customer experience.
KB Support is a fully-fledged help desk tool that includes every feature of dedicated technical documentation software and ticketing system. You get the benefits of multiple tools in a single KB Support plugin. Woah! 👏
So if you’ve got a website built on WordPress, look no further and use KB Support to enhance & improve your customer support services.
Notable Features of KB Support
- Ticket Management: KB Support offers a ticketing system that enables users to submit support requests or inquiries. You can track and manage customer support tickets efficiently.
- Customizable Submission Forms: You can display multiple customizable submissions anywhere on your WordPress website without adding code.
- Guest Tickets: Users can raise a support ticket without creating their account on your website.
- Multiple Departments: With KB Support, you can create different departments to assign specific queries related to a particular department for better management.
- Advanced Ticket Assignment: This feature makes the ticket assignment more streamlined by automatically assigning tickets to different department agents based on various rules.
- Role-Based Permissions: This feature ensures that only assigned agents and the customer involved in the ticket can view its contents.
- Custom Ticket Status: KB Support plugin provides standard statuses (New, Open, On Hold, and Closed) that can be assigned to a ticket. However, with its Custom Ticket Status feature, you can create and define additional statuses according to your business needs.
- Email Notifications: KB Support sends notifications to users and administrators when a support ticket is created, updated, or resolved.
- Knowledge Base: You can create a comprehensive knowledge base with articles and documentation to address common queries and issues. With its AJAX-based search functionality, users can easily search & browse the knowledge base to find answers.
- Categories and Tags: Organize your knowledge base articles and support tickets using categories and tags, making it easier for users to find relevant information.
- Built-in Spam Protection: KB Support has a built-in spam protection feature to prevent spam submissions.
- Works Smoothly with EDD and WooCommerce: KB Support is fully compatible with Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce, ensuring you can offer seamless support services for your online stores.
- Integrated with 3rd Party Tools: You can accelerate KB Support’s functionality by combining it with web-based applications such as Zapier and MailChimp.
- Canned Replies: You can send answers to frequent and repetitive questions directly from saved canned replies.
- Customization: KB Support provides customization options to match the look and feel of your website. You can customize colors, fonts, and layouts to maintain brand consistency.
KB Support Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
👍 Comparing web-based help desk tools, KB Support is easy to use and cost-friendly. | 👎 KB Support is a WordPress-dedicated plugin, so it can’t be used with any other CMS. |
👍 Developer friendly, KB Support offers hooks & filters so that users can customize its settings per their needs. | 👎 The core version of KB Support is not flooded with all the features, so you need different extensions per your business needs. |
👍 Comes with knowledge base guides and detailed documentation, helping you get started with KB Support effortlessly. | |
👍 KB Support offers extensions and support integrations with other WordPress plugins, allowing you to enhance its functionality and integrate with other tools. |
KB Support Pricing
- KB Support is a FREE help desk WordPress plugin. However, you can try its premium extensions to enhance the features and functionality.
2. Help Scout
Help Scout is a popular web-based customer support software. It offers powerful help desk features such as Shared Inboxes, Automated Workflow, Reporting, and Integrations.
Apart from that, Help Scout’s Ticket Management functionalities caught our eye, and as a result, it made the cut in our list of help desk ticketing systems.
Help Scout allows you to create, prioritize and categorize tickets based on status, urgency, or type. Although these are not some extraordinary features, many help desks provide the same features, but in Help Desk, you get these advanced ticketing features at a very affordable price.
As we know, the world is going GAGA towards AI; Help Scout also joins the race by introducing the AI Summarize. This feature condenses all the important information, making it super convenient for you to grasp the main points of the conversation quickly and effortlessly. No more sifting through long threads – just clear and concise summaries for easy understanding!
Notable Features of Help Scout
- Shared Inboxes: Help Scout allows you to centralize all customer inquiries into a shared inbox. You can easily manage and organize customer support tickets, assign them to specific team members, and track their status in real-time.
- Reporting and Analytics: Help Scout provide insights into your support operations. You can track customer satisfaction ratings and team performance metrics such as response and resolution times.
- Collaboration and Notes: With Help Scout, your customer support team can collaborate effectively. Multiple team members can work on the same ticket, add private notes, and have internal discussions without the customer seeing them.
- Automation: Help Scout offers automation features to streamline your support processes. You can create rules and workflows to automatically assign tickets, send predefined replies, tag tickets based on specific criteria, and more.
- Knowledge base: You can create a knowledge base or help center where customers can find self-service information and answers to common questions. Publish articles, tutorials, and FAQs, making it easy for customers to find solutions independently.
- AI Summarize: With Help Scout’s handy AI Summarize feature, you can transform lengthy support conversations into easily digestible bullet points.
Help Scout Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
👍 Easy to use and comes with an interactive interface. | 👎 Limited customization options. |
👍 Commendable support service. | 👎 Basic necessary features like Live Chat only come with higher-paid plans. |
👍 Offers real-time chat feature. | |
👍 Integrates with web-based tools such as Trello, Slack, Outlook, Zira, and more. | |
👍 Integrates with popular CMS, including WordPress. |
Help Scout Pricing
- Help Scout offers a 15-day Free trial, and the paid plan starts at $20 per user per month. (If paid annually)
3. Heroic Inbox
Yet another WordPress helpdesk and customer support plugin is Heroic Inbox. This tool is quite popular and trusted by some famous brands, including Airbnb and Pagely.
Heroic Inbox allows you to manage all your emails directly from your WordPress dashboard, eliminating the need for any 3rd party platform. You can create multiple inboxes to handle different tickets from different departments. Plus, you can manage all the inboxes in a single place.
Including Heroic Inbox’s ticketing management features like Saved Replies, Ticket History, and Auto Responders, its Collision Detection feature is something worth investing in.
Collision Detection streamlines the workflow by stopping scheduled messages from being sent if any incoming message is detected. This helps avoid conflicting actions or responses that could lead to confusion and inefficiency in customer service.
Notable Features of Heroic Inbox
- Unified Inbox: Heroic Inbox offers a unified inbox feature. No more juggling between multiple platforms or missing important messages. It’s all there in a single, organized dashboard, making it easy for users to keep track of conversations.
- Ticket Collaboration: Heroic Inbox enables seamless collaboration among your support team members by allowing them to assign tickets to specific colleagues, add internal notes, and even have internal discussions about customer inquiries.
- Automated Ticket Assignment: With Heroic Inbox’s intelligent automation, you can define rules that automatically assign incoming tickets based on criteria such as keywords, tags, or the sender’s information.
- File Attachments: Heroic Inbox gives you an experience of Gmail messaging. Apart from sending/receiving emails, you can view your file attachments directly in your WordPress dashboard, eliminating the need to switch between platforms.
- Ticket History: Keep account of all the events throughout the ticket’s lifecycle. Heroic Inbox ensures you’ll never miss a single detail; from Ticket Creation to Ticket Resolution, you get a record of all.
Heroic Inbox Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
👍Unlimited users and conversations. | 👎Only compatible with WordPress |
👍Interactive and user-friendly interface. | 👎 No lite version available.https://www.zendesk.com/ |
👍Full control over data | |
👍 Translation ready |
Heroic Inbox Pricing
- Heroic Inbox is a premium WordPress plugin. If offers 3 paid plans with starting pricing $199.50/year.
4. Zendesk
Zendesk is a popular and robust helpdesk software that many businesses love for its comprehensive ticketing system and wide array of features.
It is a centralized platform for businesses to manage customer inquiries and support interactions across various channels, including email, chat, social media, and more.
With its intuitive interface, automation capabilities, and robust reporting tools, Zendesk streamlines support processes, enabling you to deliver timely and personalized customer responses.
Including the help desk features, Zendesk offers advanced AI and bot capabilities in its premium Suite plan. It helps you extend your support team abilities by providing plenty of instant solutions through AI-powered tools.
Notable Features of Zendesk
- Omnichannel ticketing system: You can easily create, track, and manage support tickets from email, web forms, social media, and chat. The beauty here is that with Zendesk, you can get all the incoming inquiries neatly organized into a centralized ticketing interface, making it a breeze for your support team to stay on top of customer issues.
- Automation: You can create automation rules to streamline repetitive tasks and save valuable time. For example, you can set up automatic ticket assignments based on the subject or category or even escalate urgent issues to specific team members.
- Knowledge base: With Zendesk’s integrated knowledge base, you can create a treasure trove of articles, FAQs, and customer guides. This empowers users to find solutions to common problems independently, reducing the number of incoming tickets and lightening the workload for your support team.
- Built-in issue ticketing system: Zendesk’s integrated issue tracking system allows your support team to detect issues as soon as customers report them promptly.
- Ticket Views and Reporting: Zendesk offers customizable ticket views that help users organize tickets based on criteria like priority, status, or due date. This feature enables your team to focus on high-priority issues and keep a handle on pending tasks.
- Advanced Integrations: Zendesk integrates 1000+ third-party apps and tools like CRM systems, project management tools, and e-commerce platforms. This way, you can extend Zendesk’s functionality to suit your business needs and workflows.
Zendesk Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
👍 1000+ integrations. | 👎 Not a beginner-friendly tool. |
👍 Built-in issue ticketing system | 👎 Most of the essential features are only available at higher-paid plans. |
👍 Mobile ticketing system | 👎 Complicated pricing structure |
👍 Advanced reporting and analytics | |
👍 Live chat via Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and more |
Zendesk Pricing
- Zendesk provides a 14-day free trial, and its premium plan starts at $55/per agent/month. (Suite Team)
Wrapping Up: The Top Help Desk Ticketing System!
These are top finders of the help desk ticketing systems. We agree there are a lot more tools available in the market; we’ve only listed the few options for particular business types. For instance:
If you have a WordPress website & are looking for a free or budget-friendly help desk plugin, KB Support is undoubtedly the best you can use.
Owning a mid-size or small business and looking for a simple tool to enhance customer survival? Help Scout could be your best pick.
If you’ve got the budget and are looking for a dedicated helpdesk & support plugin for WordPress, consider investing in Heroic Inbox.
For big websites with hefty budgets and experienced customer support teams, Zendesk is worth looking into.
Each of the tools we’ve listed has its pros and cons. Before investing, we always recommend reading online reviews and trying the ticketing system software’s free version (or trials).