5 Best Free Customer Service Software for 2022
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
This article is part of a larger series on Customer Service.
The best free customer service software allows businesses to manage customer support services efficiently while they scale. These platforms include essential support features such as ticket management, agent productivity, and team collaboration. We analyzed dozens of providers based on their user limits, features, ease of use, cost of upgrades, customer support, and expert scores to arrive at the top five options.
Our top picks, and their best uses cases, include:
- Freshdesk: Best overall free customer support software for unlimited users
- Zoho Desk: Great pick for support teams looking for a free help desk tool with service level agreement (SLA) management features
- LiveAgent: Top option for ecommerce businesses that need a free customer service tool
- UVdesk: Excellent choice for businesses wanting a free, open-source help desk system
- Drag: Ideal for free customer support app for teams that prefer a Gmail-based help desk tool
Best Free Customer Service Software Compared
Provider | Number of users on free plan | Free Trial for Paid Plans | Starting Price for Paid Plans* | Special Features | Help & Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Unlimited users | 21 days | $15 per agent, per month | Free plan includes widget tools | Community forums and 24/7 email support on all plans |
 | Up to 3 users | 15 days | $14 per agent, per month | Robust ticket management features | Customer forum, email tickets, and live chat |
 | Unlimited users (limited to 1 email address) | 14 days | $15 per agent, per month | Excellent user support on all plans | 24/7 chat, phone, social media, and email support |
 | Unlimited users | 30 days | $8 per agent, per month | Customizable workflows | Live chat and email ticketing |
 | Up to 3 users | 14 days | $5 per agent, per month | Email templates and tracking on free plan | Email and self-service support on free plan |
*Based on annual billing
Freshdesk: Best Overall Free Customer Service Software
Freshdesk
Overall Score: 4.86
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Offers a free plan that supports an unlimited number of agents
- Free plan includes basic reporting, collaboration, and help widget tools
- 24/7 email customer support across all tiers
What's Missing
- AI-powered agent assistant is available only in the highest-cost tier
- Limited workflow automation capabilities in the free plan
- Free plan does not include third-party integrations
Freshdesk Pricing at a Glance*
Support Desk:
- Free: Unlimited agents
- Growth: $15 per agent, per month
- Pro: $49 per agent, per month
- Enterprise: $79 per agent, per month
Omnichannel:
- Growth: $29 per agent, per month
- Pro: $59 per agent, per month
- Enterprise: $99 per agent, per month
Free trial: 21 days
Add-ons:
- Additional bot sessions: $75 for 1,000 bot sessions per month
- Field Service Management: $15 per field agent, per month
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at slightly higher rates.
Freshdesk, the customer service software by Freshsales, offers a free plan that supports an unlimited number of agents. This plan also includes basic help desk features such as email and social ticketing, ticket dispatch, a knowledge base, ticket trend reports, and team collaboration tools. On top of these capabilities, it is easy to use and gives users access to 24/7 email support across all tiers, making it the best choice for free customer service software.
Despite Freshdesk’s robust offerings for free plan users, it lacks third-party integrations available in LiveAgent and Really Simple Systems. Aside from that, the free tier does not include SLA management features, which Zoho Desk has. Still, the combination of its rich help desk capabilities, quality of customer support, and affordable paid plans make it our top choice among customer service software providers on this list.
Freshdesk Free Plan Features
- Ticket management: Email ticketing, automatic email notifications, merge tickets, ticket export, ticket activities, set priority, set status, and outbound email
- Agent productivity tools: Shared canned responses, public and private responses in tickets, dynamic placeholders (personalized automated emails), to-do lists, tags, and quick actions in ticket reply
- Workflow automation: Ticket assignment, setting ticket properties, triggering email notifications, and deleting tickets or marking them as spam
- Knowledge base: Public and private knowledge bases and the ability to convert agent replies to solution articles
- Help widget: Embeddable contact form and solution articles
- Social support: Basic Twitter and Facebook channels, track brand mentions, participate in conversations involving your brand, and re-tweet or pull up past conversation threads from within the help desk
- Collaboration: Chat and collaborate with your team using the Freshconnect integration
- Reporting and analytics: Default dashboard and ticket volume trends
- Customer management: Access and modify contact and company fields
- Customization: Public portal customization (update or rebrand logo of your Freshdesk account)
- Mobile app: iOS and Android apps
- Customer support: Knowledge base, community forums, and 24/7 email support
Omnichannel ticketing feature consolidates email, phone, chat, and social media tickets in one platform. (Source: Freshdesk)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
Freshdesk’s free plan offers limited capabilities for ticket management and collaboration. It is best to upgrade to a paid account once your team expands and needs more advanced tools to manage tickets, like ticket sorting, time tracking, triggered automations, and round-robin ticket assignments. Doing so also gives you access to service level agreement (SLA) management, Freddy AI (smart agent assistant), custom reports, and phone and chat support.
Read our full Freshdesk review to learn how this customer service software helps small businesses meet the needs of their customers.
Zoho Desk: Best Free Customer Support Tool With SLA Management Tools
Zoho Desk
Overall Score: 4.51
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Free plan includes basic SLA management
- Robust ticket management capabilities
- 24/5 email support across all plans
What's Missing
- Free plan is limited to 3 agents
- No collaboration tools in the free plan
- Social media integration is not included in the free tier
Zoho Desk Pricing at a Glance*
- Free: Up to 3 agents
- Standard: $14 per agent, per month
- Professional: $23 per agent, per month
- Enterprise: $40 per agent, per month
- Free trial: 15 days
Add-on for paid plans:
- Light agent: $6 per light agent, per month**
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at slightly higher rates.
**A light agent is a default profile that can be assigned to users outside of your support team without having to pay for additional seats.
Zoho Desk offers a free plan with robust ticket management tools that include ticket tags and history. Its omnichannel support channels enable agents to address customer queries from emails, the help center, feedback widgets, and web forms from a single platform. It also has SLA management features that let you automatically set due times for ticket responses and pause the time counter when progress cannot be made on a ticket.
What Zoho Desk lacks in its free tier are real-time collaboration tools and social media integrations. Aside from that, the free plan is limited to three agents. Choose Freshdesk if you want a free solution that supports an unlimited number of agents, has collaboration tools, and integrates with social media sites. Drag also allows you to collaborate with your team using Kanban-style boards.
Zoho Desk Free Plan Features
- Ticket management: Email tickets, comment in a ticket, spam ticket, ticket history, ticket resolution note, and 10 tags per ticket
- Agent productivity tools: Quick Ticket View, response editor with rich text support, response draft, and advanced search (search across all modules from a single place)
- Customer support channels: Email, help center, feedback widget, and advanced web forms
- Automations: Notification rules and macros (manually apply combined actions that are performed quickly on tickets)
- SLAs: Default priority-based SLA and option to stop the SLA clock
- Customizations: Default templates, custom form fields, and custom tabs
- Help center: Private knowledge base for agents and article revisioning
- Customer management: Contact and account information management, private notes for contacts and accounts, and dedicated owners for contacts and accounts
- Integrations: Google Workspace and Zoho Assist
- Mobile app: iOS and Android apps
- Customer support: Knowledge base, community forums, customer portal, and 24/5 email support
Zoho’s Zia AI feature identifies the customer sentiment behind every incoming ticket. (Source: Zoho Desk)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
While Zoho Desk’s Free plan offers a robust set of basic ticket management features, it does not include tools for collaboration, help desk customization, activity management, and reporting. A paid subscription also allows you to add light agents, track time spent on tickets, and make, receive, and log calls from your help desk. Aside from that, you get access to more app integrations and priority support via live chat and phone.
Check out our in-depth Zoho Desk review to explore its rich feature set and learn more about how it helps teams engage customers.
LiveAgent: Best Free Customer Service App With Ecommerce Integration
LiveAgent
Overall Score: 4.51
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Wide variety of ecommerce integrations
- Free plan includes live chat and call center support
- 24/7 multichannel support across all plans
What's Missing
- No SLA management feature in free plan
- Time tracking is available only in higher tiers
- Social media messaging costs extra
LiveAgent Pricing at a Glance*
- Free: Limited to 1 chat button, 1 phone number, and 1 email address
- Ticket: $15 per agent, per month
- Ticket + Chat: $29 per agent, per month
- All-inclusive: $49 per agent, per month
- Free trial: 14 days
Add-ons:**
- Social media messaging: $39 per account, per month
- Time tracking: $19 per account, per month
- Customizations: Ranges from $5 to $19 per account, per month
- Time report: $19 per account, per month
- Audit log: $9 per account, per month
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at slightly higher rates.
**Some add-ons are applicable only to specific plans.
LiveAgent’s Free plan offers a variety of customer communication channels, including a customer portal, contact forms, customer forums, email, live chat, and phone. It has a rich set of ticket management tools that allow you to view ticket history for up to seven days, send file attachments, conduct ticket satisfaction surveys, add custom tags, and transfer tickets. This platform also boasts of a wide set of ecommerce integrations like Shopify and BigCommerce.
Unlike Zoho Desk, LiveAgent does not offer SLA management features with its free plan. Plus, you must spend extra to respond to customers’ messages on social media. Freshdesk, on the other hand, lets you track brand mentions and access the Twitter and Facebook functions directly from within your help desk.
LiveAgent Free Plan Features
- Communication channels: Customer portal, contact forms, Slack notifications, customer forums, email ticketing, live chat, and call center support
- Ticket management: Ticket system history (seven days), merge tickets, custom ticket fields, split tickets, internal notes for tickets, file attachments, ticket mass actions, ticket satisfaction survey, custom tags, real-time ticket dashboard, ticket transfer, chat transcripts, file sharing over chat, mobile chat window, and call queueing
- Customizations: Application programming interface (API), contact form widgets, chat widgets, and call widgets
- Reporting: Analytics overview and performance report
- Integrations: Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, WordPress, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Zapier, Magento 2, PrestaShop, Shopify, and OpenCart
- Mobile app: iOS and Android apps
- Customer support: Knowledge base, multiple language support, multiple website support, and White Glove Setup (LiveAgent sets up your help desk account for you), 24/7 support via live chat, email, phone, social media, and customer portal
Canned responses on LiveAgent (Source: LiveAgent)
LiveAgent’s Free plan offers a wide range of customer communication channels, including live chat and call center support. However, you’ll need more productivity tools like canned responses and customer email templates once you start hiring more agents to accommodate larger ticket volumes. Paid plan subscribers also get access to time tracking, call routing, and SLA management, as well as agent and channel reporting capabilities.
Learn more about this customer service platform by reading our comprehensive LiveAgent review to discover if it suits your business needs.
UVdesk: Best Free Open-source Customer Service Software
UVdesk
Overall Score: 4.09
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Offers a free plan that supports an unlimited number of agents
- Customizable workflows
- Free plan includes email templates and robust ticket administration tools
What's Missing
- Free plan does not offer social media and ecommerce integrations
- No reporting and task management tools included in free plan
- Live support is available only during office hours on Indian Standard Time
UVdesk Pricing at a Glance*
- Open Source (Free): Unlimited agents
- Pro: $8 per agent, per month (minimum of 2 agents)
- Enterprise: $15 per agent, per month (minimum of 2 agents)
- Free trial of paid plans: 30 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at slightly higher rates.
UVdesk has a free and open-source plan that supports an unlimited number of agents and has customizable ticket assignment and condition-based workflows. Its ticket administration features allow you to create email tickets, write private notes for agents, use canned responses, prioritize tickets, and add collaborators. You can also create an unlimited number of knowledge base articles and respond to customer queries via email and website tickets.
The features that are notably absent from UVdesk’s Open Source plan are task and email management, as well as ecommerce and social media integrations. In addition, it does not offer 24/7 customer support, unlike Freshdesk and LiveAgent. Consider Drag if you want a free help desk tool that offers task and email management tools.
UVdesk Free Plan Features
- Ticket formation: Ticket category, Google ReCAPTCHA (Google’s free spam protection service), and custom ticket fields
- Ticket administration: Email ticket, delete ticket thread, forwarding tickets, secret notes, saved responses, ticket priority, ticket status, ticket tags, add collaborators, and group creation
- Email management: Email setting, placeholders, and customizable email templates
- Multichannel support: Unlimited mailbox and website support
- Knowledge base: Unlimited knowledge base folders, categories, and articles
- Customizations: Logo, ticket create option, and homepage content
- Workflows: Customizable ticket assignment, condition-based workflow, and event-based workflow
- Customer support: Knowledge base, webinars, personalized demo, blog articles, support center, multilingual support, support via email, live chat, and phone from Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Indian Standard Time (11:30 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time)
Binaka provides quick support to your customers on your website via an integrated knowledge base. (Source: UVdesk)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
You’ll need to move up to a paid plan if you decide to include social media in your customer support channels. This decision entails more responsibilities for your agents. UVdesk’s Open Source plan does not offer tools for increasing productivity, like task management, customer follow-up, data importation, file viewer, form builder, and reporting. A paid plan gives you access to additional ticket administration tools like agent collision detection and to-do lists.
To learn more about this customer service platform, read our comprehensive UVdesk review to learn more about its features and best-for scenarios.
Drag: Best Free Help Desk Tool for Gmail Users
Drag
Overall Score: 3.68
OUT OF 5
What We Like
- Easy-to-use Kanban boards
- Email templates and email tracking available on free tier
What's Missing
- Free plan does not include workflow automation
- Limited collaboration tools on free plan
- No customer service management tools
Drag Pricing at a Glance*
- Free: Up to 3 users
- Starter: $10 per user, per month
- Plus: $10 per user, per month
- Pro: $15 per user, per month
- Free trial of paid plans: 14 days
*Based on annual billing. Monthly pricing is also available at slightly higher rates.
Drag is a Gmail-based help desk tool built for support teams using Google Workspace. It features shareable drag-and-drop Kanban boards you can use for organizing tickets, creating checklists, and logging activities. You can also put due dates on tasks to ensure your team meets important deadlines. In addition, this app allows you to use email templates and tracks emails when they are opened.
One of Drag’s biggest disadvantages is the lack of customer service management tools for ticket management and customer communication. The only collaboration feature available in its free tier is the ability to create 10 Kanban boards. If you are looking for customer service software that offers ticket management tools and multichannel customer support within a free plan, check out Freshdesk and Zoho Desk.
Drag Free Plan Features
- Collaboration: Create 10 Kanban boards in Gmail
- Productivity: Solo boards, lists, tasks, email notes, checklists, activity logs, sort and filter boards, and drag-and-drop functionality
- Basic workflow: Personalize up to 10 email templates and track when emails are opened
- Integrations: Google Calendar, Google Groups, Gmail add-on
- Customer support: Help center guides, live chat, and email support
Drag turns your Gmail into your support team’s workspace. (Source: Drag)
Why You Might Want to Upgrade
While Drag’s has a useful free plan, a paid plan is more appropriate for a growing support team that needs more advanced productivity and collaboration tools. The paid plans allow you to create more Kanban boards and shared inboxes. They also help lighten your team’s increasing workload and manual tasks with its tools for agent collision detection, conversation assignment, and workflow automation.
How We Evaluated the Best Free Customer Support Apps
The best free customer service tools provide small and growing businesses with a free plan that supports an unlimited number of agents and includes basic ticket management features. It also boosts agent productivity with canned responses and quick ticket views. Aside from that, it allows you to manage customer queries via multiple channels, including email, chat, phone, and social media.
With a score of 4.86 out of 5, we’ve evaluated Freshdesk as the best overall choice for support teams wanting free customer service apps. It gained the top spot in this category because its free plan supports an unlimited number of agents and offers a robust set of ticket management and agent productivity tools. It also includes multichannel customer support, ticket reports, mobile apps, and 24/7 email support for users.
The tabs below offer more insight into our evaluation process for selecting the best free customer service platforms:
40%
Pricing
20%
General Features
15%
Ease of Use
15%
Help & Support
10%
Expert Score
40% of Overall Score
Small business owners need customer service that is free and supports an unlimited number of agents. Here, we considered the maximum number of agents included in the free plan and the cost of upgrading to a paid tier. We also factored in the availability of a monthly billing option.
20% of Overall Score
We evaluated the overall set of features offered in each provider’s free plan. These include ticket management, team collaboration, agent productivity, customer communication channels, reporting, and analytics. We also looked at the availability of a mobile app and third-party integrations.
15% of Overall Score
The best customer support software that is free should not require technical skills to understand and use, and it should also have an intuitive interface. Each solution on this list was evaluated on how easy it is to set up and operate.
15% of Overall Score
Business users looking for free customer service software favor solutions that come with 24/7 customer service via phone, live chat, and email. We assessed the platforms in this article to see the quality of help and support they offer their users.
10% of Overall Score
We checked customer reviews on reputable sites to learn how satisfied their customers are. We also noted common issues the users had. Apart from reviews, we weighed the features that stood out, their value for money, and their popularity to narrow down the best free customer service platforms.
*Percentages of overall score
