Best Ticketing Systems of 2024

What sets Freshdesk apart is the shared inbox that makes it easy for teams to sort, assign, and collaborate on tickets. The software automatically converts incoming emails, calls, and even Twitter and Facebook support requests into tickets and prioritizes and assigns them to the right agents.

Freshdesk also uses automation to help you eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on tickets that need more attention. You can send customers automatic email notifications based on their ticket status, perform multiple actions on a ticket with a single click, or set tickets to automatically move to the next stage based on time and event triggers. It even comes with agent collision detection to prevent more than one agent from working on the same ticket.

Freshdesk’s paid plans offer integrations with many platforms, including Google Apps, JIRA, live chat apps, Zoho CRM, FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Dropbox, OneDrive, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, and many others through Zapier.       

All Freshdesk users also get 24/5 email support, and paid users also get 24/5 chat support. You can cancel the service anytime without fees or penalties and try it for free. There are some complaints, including canned responses from customer service and no notifications when tickets are entered, meaning tickets may sit for days without a response.

Zendesk was created in 2007 as a customer service platform focused on customer relationship management (CRM). Zendesk offers three paid plans suitable for small to medium businesses. A free trial is available and unlocks all of the features of Zendesk’s Professional plan. You can cancel your service anytime with no fees or penalties.

Like Freshdesk, Zendesk has a shared inbox that lets you gather customer inquiries from emails, live chat, voice, web widgets, and social apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. Its automation streamlines customer support, like canned responses, automatic triggers, customizable workflows, a customer portal, and an answer bot that can direct queries to relevant articles.

Where Zendesk differs, however, is its marketing-oriented help desk approach. Using integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Zoho CRM, the platform lets you gather valuable customer data to drive new leads to your sales pipeline. When a support ticket turns into a question about a product, you can hand the conversation off to your sales team. You can even automatically trigger live chat modules to help close the sale when a customer is lingering on a product or checkout page.

Zendesk gives you robust analytics and reporting and upgrade options for Sales Suite, which creates even more sales opportunities from your help desk. It also offers an app marketplace that lets you integrate with software like Slack, Aircall, Qualtrics, Trello, Google Play Reviews, Harvest, and many others. There is online, phone, and email support for business owners who need assistance. Additionally, there is a Zendesk Help Center and a user community.

Third-party customer reviews, however, do mention headaches with customer service, including getting their problems resolved in a timely fashion. Some users also report that the platform is not updated frequently enough, and there are often lags in the system.

Kayako boasts a roster of Fortune 100 companies and 131,000 customers worldwide. It focuses on ease of use and creating a personal conversation with customers through a clean and minimal dashboard it calls its SimpleView, a shared inbox. As with other modern ticketing systems, customers can send inquiries via email, live chat, social, or a self-service portal.

What differentiates Kayako from its competitors, however, is the ability to create multiple (what it calls multi-brand) help centers with unique content, live chat, automated conversation routing, and workflow automation. You can easily visualize your customer's journey, measure your agents' performance, and gather insights with at-a-glance dashboards and custom reports.

Finally, Kayako offers over 600 integrations through Zapier, including Salesforce, Slack, Mailchimp, and many more. The company offers only one paid plan, but its monthly fee is less than competitors' plans that offer the same or similar services. Where Kayako struggles is customer service. Third-party customer reviews note a lack of responsiveness to support requests, rude customer service representatives, and extremely slow loading speeds on the platform.

Like many of its competitors, Zoho Desk offers multichannel support, allowing customers to contact agents via email, live chat, a web form, or through Facebook and Twitter. It has telephony support, including call routing and automated ticket creation from phone calls.         

Zoho Desk uses a clear and intuitive dashboard that gives agents an overview of tickets and a separate dashboard for managers to track and analyze agent performance. You can customize and view reports and respond to tickets through an easy-to-use mobile app.

Zoho Desk features robust automation seen in similar help desk platforms that automatically assign tickets to the right agents, send alerts of changes in ticket status, escalate SLA violations, and allow you to create custom workflows. Zoho Desk supports dozens of integrations, including G Suite, Slack, Salesforce, popular email and project management platforms, and telephony solutions, including RingCentral.

You can connect Zoho Desk seamlessly to the company’s other native platforms, including Zoho CRM, SalesIQ, BugTracker, Analytics, Invoice, Survey, and more. Note: although Zoho Desk has a fairly high customer satisfaction rating, some users report difficulty integrating into their domains.

JitBit replaces pricing per agent with monthly pricing based on the total number of agents you have. You can start processing tickets in less than 30 seconds, and it is much less complicated than many of the other platforms we reviewed. That’s not to say that it’s more limited, however. Even though the software has a strong focus on email, you can also offer support via live chat and a web portal.

After connecting the platform to your email server, you can establish triggers that will send automatic replies, assign technicians to tickets, and set ticket due dates. A simple grid view shows the status of new and ongoing tickets, and you can filter and sort customer tickets.

Additional features include standard agent collision detection, customizable reports, suggesting articles from the knowledge base to agents so they can insert it into their reply, and importing and exporting data with other software. JitBit integrates directly with Slack, Jira, and GitHub and with hundreds of other platforms through Zapier.

JitBit offers four different plans designed to suit organizations ranging from one to nine agents. All of the plans come with a 10-day money-back guarantee, 24/7 support, and the option to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. And although JitBit customer reviews are mostly positive, some users indicate that the system is difficult to integrate forms and social media into the platform.

HappyFox’s dashboard makes it easy for teams to manage ticket requests across multiple channels, including Twitter and Facebook. While you can communicate with users by phone, HappyFox also provides communication through live chat, email, and social network ticketing.

HappyFox uses a round robin algorithm to identify which agents are available and can be fine-tuned to weigh agent limits and consider particular agents over others. Tickets can be automatically escalated to higher management if it’s nearing your SLA limits. The self-service portal connects to your knowledge base so customers can find answers to popular questions without creating a ticket. This helps cut down on calls and shows you which articles are the most helpful to your customers.

HappyFox’s powerful report engine makes it easy to create custom reports to monitor the performance of your agents. Customer data collected can be easily shared with other departments via the platform’s many CRM, marketing, and project management integrations.

HappyFox offers two plans suitable for small to medium businesses, with two others geared toward enterprise-level businesses. Although the company doesn’t offer a free trial, you can schedule a one-on-one demo to tour the product based on your needs.

HappyFox also offers plans determined by the number of tickets and custom fields rather than the number of agents. These plans range from $1,499 to $4,999. A self-service help desk for users allows you to support tickets there. Your access to personalized support grows with the plan you select. HappyFox gets fairly good customer reviews, but some users note a lag in receiving email notifications from the platform, resulting in delays in response to tickets.