Customer service software lets businesses engage their customers, receive and track inquiries, and improve the delivery of their services. The best products are affordable and come with a vast set of tools for ticketing, monitoring service performance, and communicating via email, live chat, text, phone, and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Based on our evaluation, we’ve identified the eight best customer service software for small business teams.
- Freshdesk: (Overall) Best for ease of use
- HubSpot Service Hub: Best free customer service software
- Help Scout: Best for engaging customers on digital channels
- Bitrix24: Best for client management
- Zoho Desk: Best for monitoring service performance
- Jira Service Management: Best for employee support and request management
- Zendesk Support: Best for managing support tickets
- ProProfs Help Desk: Best for help desk collaboration
- Best Customer Service Software for Small Business Compared
- Freshdesk: (Overall) Best for Ease of Use
- HubSpot Service Hub: Best Free Customer Service Software
- Help Scout: Best for Engaging Customers on Digital Channels
- Bitrix24: Best for Client Management
- Zoho Desk: Best for Monitoring Service Performance
- Jira Service Management: Best for Employee Support & Request Management
- Zendesk Support: Best for Managing Support Tickets
- ProProfs Desk: Best for Help Desk Collaboration
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Bottom Line
Best Customer Service Software for Small Business Compared
| Provider | Free Plan | Free Trial | Starting Monthly Price per User | Our Rating out of 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ✔2 users | 14 days | $15 | 4.63 |
| Visit Freshdesk | ||||
 | ✔2 users | X | $15 | 4.61 |
| Visit HubSpot Service Hub | ||||
 | ✕ | 15 days | $22 | 4.53 |
| Visit Help Scout | ||||
 | ✔Unlimited users | 15 days | $49 for 5 users | 4.35 |
| Visit Bitrix24 | ||||
 | ✔3 users | 15 days | $7 | 4.34 |
| Visit Zoho Desk | ||||
 | ✔3 users | 7 days | $58.33 for 3 users | 4.32 |
| Visit Jira Service Management | ||||
 | ✕ | 14 days | $19 | 4.25 |
| Visit Zendesk Support | ||||
 | ✔1 user | X | $19.99 | 3.99 |
| Visit ProProfs Help Desk | ||||
Freshdesk: (Overall) Best for Ease of Use
When to Use Freshdesk
- You’re looking for a robust yet easy-to-use customer service platform: Freshdesk’s ticket management tools include email-to-ticket, merge, activity tracking, tagging, and priority setting. You can also engage customers via email, live chat, and Facebook and run ticket automations at no cost. Despite its robustness, this platform retains its simplicity and intuitiveness, making it very easy to learn, use, and navigate.
- You want a solid tool to get insights on your service operation: Starting with the free plan, users can access solid dashboard reporting tools to track ticket volume trends. These capabilities slowly expand on the paid plans to time tracking in ticket resolution, customer survey metrics, and how efficient customer service agents or teams are at handling inquiries.
When to Use an Alternative
- You need lower-cost AI-powered customer service software: Freshdesk offers AI-powered insights and email chatbots via its Freddy AI tool. However, this feature is only available on its Pro plan ($49 per user monthly). Some providers offer this feature at a much lower cost or for free.
- Alternatives: HubSpot Service Hub and Help Scout both have a free plan with AI-powered tools. HubSpot’s Breeze Copilot tool offers AI-powered insights, content generation, and task automation capabilities. Help Scout, on the other hand, has AI tools for generating, editing, and summarizing text and conversations.
- You want more affordable skill-based ticket routing features: While Freshdesk has skill-based ticket routing, this feature is gated with its Enterprise plan at $79 per user monthly. This could be a steep cost for small teams or businesses with a limited budget.
- Alternative: Zoho Desk’s Enterprise plan ($40 per user monthly) allows users to automatically route tickets to agents based on their skills and availability.
Freshdesk Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for two users
Key Features:
- Ticketing with routing capabilities
- Shared inbox
- Analytics and reporting
- Knowledge base
- Role-based access control
Cost:
- $15 per user
- $29 per user for Freshdesk Omni
Key Features:
- Everything in the free plan
- Customer portal
- Standard reports and real-time dashboards
- Task automations
Cost:
- $49 per user
- $69 per user for Freshdesk Omni
Key Features:
- Everything in the Growth plan
- Collaborators (5,000 external agents and third parties to assist full-time support agents)
- Freddy AI Agent (email bots for 24/7 customer engagement)
- Custom, real-time dashboards
- Multilingual translations for knowledge-base articles
- Agent availability dashboard
- Community forums
- Knowledge base article revisioning
- Ticket templates
- Multiple service level agreement (SLA) policies
- Round-robin and load-balanced ticket assignment
Cost:
- $79 per user
- $109 per user for Freshdesk Omni
Key Features:
- Everything in the Pro plan
- Custom objects analysis
- Approval workflow
- Skill-based ticket assignment
Freshdesk Add-ons:
- Freddy AI Copilot
- Day Passes
- Freshcaller
- Connector App Tasks
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans, though monthly billing and enterprise-level options are available at a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Freshdesk’s maker, Freshworks, is known for building apps with an intuitive user interface and little to no learning curve. Freshdesk’s ease of use, robust ticketing system, and wide range of support channels propelled it to the top spot in this list. The free ticket creation automations, collaboration tools, and dashboard reporting of ticket volume trends can add substantial value to a small business.
HubSpot Service Hub: Best Free Customer Service Software
When to Use HubSpot Service Hub
- You’re looking for free yet robust customer service software: HubSpot Service Hub is the best free solution in this list because it offers the most robust set of support tools at no cost. These include ticket management, an AI-powered assistant, email and live chat engagement, and meeting scheduling.
- You want a system that can handle revenue collection: Certain businesses may find invoicing and payment processing bottleneck in their customer service operation. HubSpot Service Hub addresses these pain points with its excellent features for creating one-time or recurring invoices with a Stripe integration and built-in automated clearing house (ACH) to collect and track payments from a single interface.
When to Use an Alternative
- You want more affordable knowledge base management features: HubSpot Service Hub, unfortunately, gets relatively expensive for certain service features such as SLA tracking, surveying, and most notably, creating a self-service knowledge base. These all start on the Professional plan for $90 per user monthly.
- Alternatives: Zoho Desk’s Free plan lets you administer a knowledge base and community forum for free. Other options with free knowledge base management features are Freshdesk and Jira Service Management.
- You need better automation capabilities for a lower cost: With HubSpot, you can get basic workflows like sending out customer emails or receiving notifications based on ticket status changes for just $15 per user monthly. However, more advanced functions like ticket creation and assignment, automated task management, or recurring emails for ticket activity require a Professional plan ($90 per user monthly).
- Alternatives: Zoho Desk’s Express plan ($7 per user monthly) has highly customizable automation to meet any workflow. ProProfs Help Desk offers free automatic ticket routing, canned responses, and autoresponses.
HubSpot Service Hub Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for two users
Key Features:
- Ticketing with one ticket pipeline
- Live chat
- Breeze Copilot
- VoIP integration
- Channel switching
- Ticket routing to AI chatbots
- Facebook Messenger integration
- Email tracking, scheduling, and health reporting
- Team email with a shared inbox
- Reporting dashboard
Cost: $15 per user
Key Features:
- Everything listed under free tools
- HubSpot-provided phone numbers and outgoing call credits
- Simple ticket automation
- Ticket tags
- Payment processing
- Conversation routing to agents
- Repeating tasks and queues
- Multiple currency support
Cost: $15 per user
Key Features:
- Service Hub Starter
- Sales Hub Starter
- Marketing Hub Starter
- Content Hub Starter
- Operations Hub Starter
- Commerce Hub
Cost: $90 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Service Hub Starter plan
- Conversation intelligence
- Customer feedback surveys and post-chat feedback
- Custom reporting
- Help desk with automation
- Breeze Customer Agent
- SLAs
- Service analytics
- Customer portal
- Call transcription and coaching
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans. Monthly billing and enterprise-level options are available for a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot Service Hub is our best-recommended software for managing small business customer service at no cost. It offers a highly robust free plan with tools for managing support tickets, meetings, and customer engagement. Its Breeze Copilot also improves your support team’s productivity and efficiency by automating chat flows and generating instant answers. Moreover, this platform has high usability ratings because of its simple and intuitive design.
Help Scout: Best for Engaging Customers on Digital Channels
When to Use Help Scout
- You exclusively want to provide digital customer support: Help Scout lets you provide an excellent digital support experience to your customers. It’s equipped with a contact center with email, live chat, and social media channels, and it lets you centralize your conversations in a single inbox to help track, assign, and collaborate on service inquiries.
- You want to adopt AI and automation in your service operations: With Help Scout, teams can use AI to craft service responses for your reps and summarize support conversations. It has excellent features for administering self-service resources to customers, such as a knowledge base or website content pages. You can also deploy easy-to-use workflow automation to keep agents on track and streamline resolutions.
When to Use an Alternative
- You want a more robust ticketing system: Help Scout is mostly a digital contact center, in that all inquiries are “conversations” instead of tickets.
- Alternatives: If you prefer a ticketing system with a solid range of functions like email-to-ticket, merge, cloning, or autoassignment, we recommend Freshdesk or Zendesk Support.
- You need built-in telephonic capabilities: Unfortunately, Help Scout does not come with telephony out of the box. If you want to manage calls from Help Scout, you need to integrate it with a third-party app like Talkdesk. This entails additional subscription fees and integration processes.
- Alternative: Bitrix24’s Basic plan ($49 per month for five users) has a built-in contact center with a robust telephony system that does not require additional setup or integration. You can make and receive phone calls, route or transfer calls, set up voicemail greetings, automatically forward missed calls, record calls, and even use its automatic dialer.
Help Scout Pricing Plans*
Cost: $22 per user (maximum of 25 users)
Key Features:
- Two shared inboxes
- Email, live chat, contact forms, and social media communication channels
- AI assists in crafting service responses
- Phone and SMS integration
- Workflows and autoreplies
- Knowledge base and help widget
- Targeted messages
- Surveys, NPS, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings
- Prebuilt and custom reports
- Access to 100-plus third-party integrations
Cost: $44 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Standard plan
- Five shared inboxes
- 25 free light users who can just view and collaborate on stored records
- Advanced permission settings for users
- Team management with conversation assignment
- Custom fields
- Expanded AI tools for editing, translating, and summarizing conversations
- Unlimited history tracking for reports
- Premium integrations with Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot
Cost: $65 per user (minimum of 10 users)
Key Features:
- Everything in the Plus plan
- 25 shared inboxes
- 50 free light users who can view and collaborate on stored records
Help Scout Add-ons:
- AI Drafts: $50 per 100 conversations
- Messages: Starts at $40 for more than 2,000 unique viewers
*Pricing is based on annual billing and a per-month breakdown of the plans. Monthly billing for some plans and enterprise-level options are available at a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Help Scout has fully adapted to customer preferences for seeking support via email, live chat, and social media channels. It has a proactive Messages feature that helps you reach customers before they need your help. We like the centralized conversational inbox for teams to collaborate and stay on top of customer issues in real time. We also can’t overlook the sophistication of the platform through its unique AI capabilities and workflow automation options.
Bitrix24: Best for Client Management
When to Use Bitrix24
- You are a client-based business: Bitrix24 is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) software with built-in customer service tools for small businesses. It’s great for client-based companies that sell services to other businesses or consumers. Plus, it has a dedicated client profile module for storing contact data, tracking projects, monitoring account activity, and scheduling video conference calls.
- You need a complete contact center to handle support: As one of the top customer service platforms, Bitrix24 has a robust contact center system to receive inquiries and communicate with customers. The channels available include a phone system, email, live chat, video calling, and web form submission, all manageable from the CRM.
When to Use an Alternative
- You need an easy-to-use customer service tracking software: Bitrix24 has a lot of modules in its system to handle sales, marketing, service, operations, projects, human resources, and other business functions. Additionally, the pages often contain many buttons and menu options—ultimately making the platform tricky to learn and navigate.
- Alternatives: Freshdesk and HubSpot Service Hub are the best small business customer service software solutions that prioritize ease of use.
- You want more robust ticketing tools: While Bitrix24 does have a queue system to receive and track customer inquiries, it’s limited mostly to managing communications rather than actual issues. It doesn’t offer advanced ticket management capabilities like cloning, autoassignment, splitting, or priority setting.
- Alternatives: Freshdesk and Zendesk Support are among the top customer service software companies for their robust, multifunctional ticketing capabilities.
Bitrix24 Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for unlimited users
Key Features:
- Unlimited contacts storage and deals with timeline activity tracking
- Deal and contact management
- Contact Center with live chat, videoconferencing, and social media messaging channels
- Queue management for handling incoming inquiries from the Contact Center
- Automatic dialer and automated replies
- Team collaboration via internal feed and shared calendar
- Agent-facing knowledge base
- Project management module
- Tasks and checklists
- CoPilot
Cost: $49 for five users
Key Features:
- Everything in the free plan
- Email integration with communications tracking
- Built-in telephone
- CRM forms
- Video conferencing with customer
- Call back widget
- Analytics tools for CRM data
- Client conversation rating and call statistics
- Chat routing, distribution, and transfer
- Client call recordings
Cost: $99 for 50 users
Key Features:
- Everything in the Basic plan
- Multiple shared inboxes
- Task collaboration with time tracking and status summary
- Video calls and Zoom integration
- Chat statistics
- Project management module
- Business intelligence report builder
- Lead management
- Supervisor conversation rating
- Bulk text and email with prebuilt email templates
Cost: $199 for 100 users
Key Features:
- Everything in the Standard plan
- Calendar event planning
- Unlimited company knowledge bases
- Worktime tracking
- Project templates
- Task time tracking
- Task automation
- Sales intelligence report engine
- Workflows
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans. Monthly billing and enterprise-level options are available for a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Bitrix24 is a great option for bundling customer support tools in a sales CRM system. Any service-based business can get tons of value from this platform’s client profiles, project management, and activity-tracking capabilities. We also like how the contact center is integrated into the system, so you can easily receive inquiries and maintain customer conversations from where you’re closing deals, storing data, and collaborating on customer projects.
Zoho Desk: Best for Monitoring Service Performance
When to Use Zoho Desk
- You primarily need insights for your service operation: Zoho Desk is one of the best customer intelligence platforms and operational analysis tool with tons of data insights to improve service offerings. It comes with low-cost customer surveying and satisfaction monitoring that starts at just $7 per user per month. Low-tiered plans include ticket status, agent productivity, knowledge base usage, and ticket resolution reporting.
- You want free SLA tracking tools: While most customer services software tools will include SLA tracking on the high-tiered plans, Zoho offers basic functions at no cost. On the free plan, you can automatically monitor tickets to find ones that demand high-priority support based on whether they’re falling out of line with SLAs or contractual agreements.
When to Use an Alternative
- You need a more intuitive system for your customer service solutions: One issue with the Zoho products, including Zoho Desk, is that the interface appears clunky and outdated—making it hard to navigate and operate.
- Alternative: If you want the best customer service software for small business teams regarding user experience and system operability, we recommend HubSpot Service Hub.
- You want more affordable live chat communication features: While Zoho Desk can be used as a multifacet contact center, the live chat engagement features are relatively expensive compared with other customer service providers—starting at $40 per user per month.
- Alternatives: Bitrix24 and Freshdesk are the customer service solutions for small business teams offering live chat communications on their free-forever plans.
Zoho Desk Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for up to three users
Key Features:
- Basic ticket management with email-to-ticket creation and agent collaboration
- Agent productivity tools and dashboard with quick ticket view
- Support channels through email, self-service help center, and web form widget
- Help desk automation for ticket progress notifications
- Help desk customization and personalization
- Priority-based SLA monitoring for tickets
- Contact and account management
- Agent-facing knowledge base
Cost: $7 per user (maximum of five users)
Key Features:
- Everything in the free plan
- Customer happiness tracking and satisfaction ratings from surveys
- Ticket merge, split, and clone functions
- Customer ticket timelines with read/unread tracking
- Social media support via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
- Workflow automation for the ticketing system
- Automatic ticket assignment
- Default priority-based SLA management with multilevel escalations
- Business hours and holiday setting for the help desk
Cost: $14 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Express plan
- Time tracking on ticket resolution
- Snippets and canned responses with email templates
- Team collaboration on tickets
- Community forum hosting
- Instant messaging support channels via WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat
- Public knowledge base for customers
- Product-based ticket tracking
- Ticket stage tracking
- Custom dashboards
- Native integration to Zoho products like Analytics, Projects, Zoho CRM, and Inventory
Cost: $23 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Standard plan
- Agent collision detection
- Telephone integration
- Round-robin ticket assignment based on agent capacity
- Customer-specific SLA design and management
- Help desk team management
- Multilingual knowledge base
- Automated time and activity tracking for agents
- Call reporting, SLA dashboards, and telephone availability monitoring for agents
- Gamescope integration for gamification
Cost: $40 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Professional plan
- Live chat support channel from the website
- Custom automated workflows between other Zoho apps
- Agent skills tracking with skilled-based ticket assignment
- Contract management for SLA
- Zia AI for customer-facing knowledge base
- Zia AI for making customer sentiment predictions and live chat engagement
- Zia AI for autotagging tickets and detecting anomalous ticket trends
- Multibranded help center
- Zia-powered dashboard for AI-generated insights and reports
Zoho Desk Add-ons:
- Light Agent
- Additional Department
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans, though monthly billing is available at a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Performance monitoring in your service operation is vital for goal tracking, coaching, and capacity planning. Zoho Desk has excellent features for ensuring customer satisfaction and quality agent performance, such as feedback widgets, customer happiness ratings, and performance monitoring. These features are advanced and cost-effective, with most analytics tools available on the free and low-tiered plans.
Jira Service Management: Best for Employee Support & Request Management
When to Use Jira Service Management
- You need a dedicated employee support platform for your business: Jira Service Management is purposely designed for IT support, development, and operations teams. It also offers a free IT Service Management (ITSM) project template for managing service requests, incident resolutions, changes, and SLAs.
- You want a service software with asset management features: When you subscribe to Jira Service Management’s Premium plan ($133.33 per month for three users), you can access its asset and service repository. This enables you to track and manage the lifecycle and ownership of company assets or services for inventory or audit purposes.
When to Use an Alternative
- You’re seeking an easy-to-use ticket management system: Jira Service Management has a complex interface and configuration that requires technical assistance.
- Alternative: If you’re looking for ticket management systems with simple interfaces that are easy to use, consider using HubSpot Service Hub, Freshdesk, or Zendesk Support.
- You need a customer-facing ticketing and help desk system: Jira Service Management is a dedicated ITSM platform that is best for IT support and development teams.
- Alternative: Zoho Desk is our top recommended small business help desk software for external customers. Its free plan includes ticket management, ticket collaboration, and SLA management. The Express plan ($7 per user, monthly) offers social media support and dashboard metrics for customer happiness and ticketing performance.
Jira Service Management Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for three users
Key Features:
- 2GB file storage
- Help center with unlimited service portals
- Embedded knowledge base
- Request management with omnichannel support, configurable workflows, and SLAs
- Incident and problem management
- Chat conversations via Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom
- Customer service management template and request escalations
- IT service registry
- Automation
- Reporting and analytics
Cost: $58.33 for three users
Key Features:
- Everything in the Free plan
- 250GB file storage
- Custom-branded help center
- Service dependency for tracking correlation status between services
- Audit logs
Cost: $133.33 for three users
Key Features:
- Everything in the Standard plan
- Unlimited file storage
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- Virtual service agent with 1,000 assisted conversations
- Atlassian Intelligence
- Incident and problem management
- Change management
- Asset and configuration management
Jira Service Management Add-ons:
- Assets
- Virtual Service Agent
*Pricing is based on annual billing and a per-month computation of the plans for a minimum of three agents. Monthly billing is available at a higher cost, and an Enterprise plan is available for teams of at least 201 agents. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Jira Service Management provides IT, development, and operations support teams with a single platform for managing employee service requests, resolving issues, and deploying changes. Its free plan includes a self-service portal, service automations, and customizable support queues. In addition, its Premium plan (starts at $133.33 per month for three users) offers asset discovery, tracking, and management features.
Zendesk Support: Best for Managing Support Tickets
When to Use Zendesk Support
- You’re looking for an easy way to manage support tickets: While Zendesk Support has a sharp learning curve because of its advanced features, it employs a traditional approach to ticket management. You can use the same platform to collect requests from different channels, including email and chat. From the same system, you can access a shared inbox, track customer interaction history, and respond to issues quickly.
- You want to leverage conversation routing to improve service quality: Regardless of your Zendesk Support plan, you can automatically route customer conversations based on availability and capacity. The Support Professional plan ($55 per user monthly) allows you to route conversations based on ticket priority, while the Support Enterprise plan ($115 per user monthly) unlocks the skill-based routing feature.
When to Use an Alternative
- You need a free ticket management system for your small team or business: Unfortunately, Zendesk Support does not currently offer a free plan. Its entry-level plan costs $19 per user monthly, which could be costly for teams with tight budgets and those who are not yet ready to scale up.
- Alternative: HubSpot Service Hub is included in our list of the best AI chatbots for customer service because it offers a free ticket management system with routing capabilities to AI chatbots. Freshdesk also has a free plan with ticket management, automatic ticket routing, a knowledge base, ticket trend reports, and out-of-the-box reporting and analytics tools.
- You’re seeking a solution with built-in AI tools for ticket insights and routing: Zendesk Support’s out-of-the-box AI tools are limited to smart chatbots with automated ticket resolution capabilities. Advanced AI tools for proactive ticket insights and routing come at an additional $50 per user monthly.
- Alternatives: HubSpot Service Hub’s free plan comes with its Breeze Copilot tool, which provides users with AI-powered insights and recommendations for customer engagement. ProProfs Help Desk also offers free automatic ticket routing.
Zendesk Support Pricing Plans*
Cost: $19 per user
Key Features:
- Ticketing system with customer interaction history
- Email, web widget, and social media messaging support channels
- AI-powered chatbots with automated resolutions
- Unified agent workspace
- Workflows with ticket sharing and conversation routing based on status and capacity
- Predefined responses
- Unified staff management
- Prebuilt analytics and dashboards
Cost: $55 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Support Team plan
- Customer satisfaction ratings and follow-up survey
- Custom agent statuses
- Automated ticket sharing
- Conversation routing based on ticket priority
- SLA management
- Live agent activity dashboard
Cost: $115 per user
Key Features:
- Everything in the Support Professional plan
- Contextual workspaces
- Conversation routing based on agent skill
- Multiple ticket forms
- Business rules analysis
Zendesk Support Add-ons:
- Zendesk Workflow Management: $25 per user monthly
- Zendesk Quality Assurance: $35 per user monthly
- Advanced AI: $50 per user monthly
- Advanced Data Privacy and Protection: $50 per user monthly
- Zendesk Workforce Engagement Bundle: $50 per user monthly
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans, though monthly billing is available at a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
Zendesk is the grandfather of help desk tools and has already mastered streamlining customer support. Zendesk Support’s unified agent workspace makes it easy for customer service teams to manage and respond to tickets. It provides a single platform for viewing customer interaction history, sharing tickets, routing conversations, and sending predefined responses.
ProProfs Desk: Best for Help Desk Collaboration
When to Use ProProfs Help Desk
- You want free help desk software with tools for inter-department collaboration: ProProfs Help Desk’s Free plan enables startups and small businesses to create multiple inboxes for different teams, such as sales, support, and billing. In addition, this platform supports department-based ticketing, enabling businesses to send tickets to specific departments or teams.
- You’re looking for a single platform that supports internal and external customer support: Customer-facing service teams, billing departments, and IT teams can all use ProProfs Desk to provide support via email, live chat, and help center. This platform also has automation capabilities for streamlining your workflow, such as ticket routing and autoresponse messages.
When to Use an Alternative
- You provide customer support via social media: ProProfs Help Desk does not offer an option to support customers via social media sites and messaging channels.
- Alternatives: Help Scout is our top option for digital support, which includes social media communication channels across all plans (starting at $22 per user monthly). If you run a team with five members or less, consider using Zoho Desk Express ($7 per user, monthly), which enables you to provide social media support via X, Facebook, and Instagram.
- You need small business customer service software with skill-based routing features: Skill-based ticket assignment results in better first-time resolution rates since the requests are routed to the agent best-suited to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, ProProfs Help Desk’s automatic ticket routing is limited to round-robin ticket assignments.
- Alternatives: If you want to improve your call times and first-time resolution rates through skill-based routing, subscribe to Zoho Desk’s Enterprise plan ($40 per user, monthly). Freshdesk also offers the same feature with its Enterprise plan ($79 per user, monthly).
ProProfs Help Desk Pricing Plans*
Cost: $0 for one user
Key Features:
- Unlimited tickets and conversation history
- Multiple inboxes
- Multiple departments and teams
- Autoresponse messages
- Canned responses
- Internal notes in tickets
- Ticket ratings
- Ticket routing
- Audit and admin controls
- Roles and permissions
Cost: $19.99 per user (minimum of two users)
Key Features:
- Everything in the free plan
- Single sign-on
- Dedicated onboarding and success manager
Cost: Starts at $99 per user (minimum of six users)
Key Features:
- Everything in the Team plan
- ProProfs Live Chat (support automation via chatbot)
- ProProfs Knowledge Base
- ProProfs Survey Maker
- Qualaroo (customer and user feedback software)
- CRM solution
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown of the plans, though monthly billing is available at a higher cost. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing.
Our Expert Opinion
ProProfs Help Desk is perfect for startups and small businesses needing a free or low-cost ticket collaboration and internal service management solution. It’s a single platform for managing multiple inboxes, such as @support, @billing, or @info. Agents can also use internal notes to collaborate on tickets and to avoid task collisions. Plus, it has a pleasantly simple user interface despite its robust features.
How We Evaluated the Best Customer Service Software for Small Business Teams
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are CRM tools for customer service?
CRM tools for customer service are programs with features for managing sales activity and boosting customer satisfaction. These tools leverage case management and communication features to enable reps to oversee customer activities and assist customers from the same platform.
What are the different types of customer software?
There are several types of customer service software, including CRM, help desk, live chat, and knowledge base software. A CRM system is a centralized platform for managing all aspects of customer relationships, while help desk software helps you track, prioritize, and answer customer queries. Live chat tools help you converse with customers in real time, and knowledge bases serve as a directory of information about your products.
How do I set up customer service for my business?
To set up customer service for your business, determine which communication channels you’ll support and identify the most relevant metrics for your service. Next, organize your incoming request and case escalation processes. Then, choose the customer service tools you’ll use—whether live chat, help desk, or a combination of several. Finally, train your reps to use these tools and regularly evaluate your processes and performance.
Bottom Line
The best customer service software for small business teams offers centralized systems to manage tickets, store customer data, engage customers, and track performance metrics. While we ranked Freshdesk as the best overall small business service software for its ease of use, other providers could be better based on your needs. HubSpot Service Hub, for example, offers the most robust free option, while Zoho Desk offers the best performance monitoring tools.
