Help desk and customer support

Help desks turn customer email, live chat, social messages and calls into tickets or conversations that a support team works from one shared queue, with a public knowledge base so customers can find answers themselves. Support teams at software companies, online shops and service businesses use them, from a few agents to large contact centers. They differ in where they started (a ticketing suite, a chat messenger with an AI agent, a team email inbox), which channels each plan includes, how they bill AI agents, and which plan carries SLAs, single sign-on or a HIPAA agreement.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, whether the AI agent has a price, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan, and whether it includes live chat, a knowledge base and several agents; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 5 agents: the monthly cost for 5 agents on the cheapest plan with email ticketing, live chat and a public knowledge base, billed annually, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Channels and service levels: phone, WhatsApp and social messaging, SLA policies, CSAT surveys and several brands or knowledge bases, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and data residency: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a HIPAA agreement, and storing data in the EU.
• Admin, API and data export: SAML single sign-on, custom roles, an audit log, a REST API and a self-serve export of your tickets.

How quickly a team answers customers depends on the team, not the tool, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.