Skip to main content

With so many customer service software solutions available, figuring out which one is right for you is tough — especially if you're set on using free customer service software. You know you want software to help you manage your customer interactions and support requests, but you need to figure out which system is best. In this article, I'll help you make your choice easier by sharing my insights on the best free customer service software to address your customer service needs without straining your budget.

What is Free Customer Service Software?

Free customer service software are digital tools that offer basic features to help customer support teams resolve client issues in a timely and accurate fashion, without a monthly fee. They organize customer requests via a ticketing system, automate routine tasks, centralize customer communication, and track agent performance.

The main benefit of using free customer service software are the cost savings they offer. They can help you improve the efficiency of your customer support operations and increase your customer satisfaction, all without a monthly or annual fee. They're an excellent way for startups and small businesses to enhance customer support while remaining within a tight budget.

Overviews of the 10 Best Free Customer Service Software

Here’s a brief description of each of the best free customer service software on my list showing what it does best, plus screenshots to showcase some of the features.

Best for teams who need Microsoft, Slack, or WhatsApp integrations

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $18/user/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

Used by over 40,000 customer teams such as Panasonic, HP, and American Express, Freshdesk sticks to its “delighting its customers for life” slogan. With their simplified support features such as support tickets, collaboration, help widgets, and analytics, it’s easy to find a help desk solution no matter the industry, use case, or size of your team.

Another thing I really like about their software is the ability to access their Freshworks Academy and Resource Center to learn and improve customer relations.

Their “sprout” plan allows for unlimited free agents, ticketing, knowledge bases, and datacenter locations. If you want to try out any of their other paid plans, Freshdesk provides a 14-day free trial.

Best for remote access and troubleshooting

  • 15-day free trial available
  • From $12/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Zoho Assist is a remote support and remote access software that's designed to help IT support teams and customer service reps. One thing I like about this tool is its multi-platform support. Zoho Assist is compatible with various platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. This versatility ensures that customer service teams can support customers using different devices and operating systems. And if you happen to have a Raspberry Pi-powered device, you can access that too.

Zoho Assist integrates with Zendesk, ServiceNow, Jira, Spiceworks, Freshdesk, Slack, MS Teams, Zoho Desk, and ZohoSalesIQ. You can also build custom integrations with your current tech stack using the Zoho Assist API.

Zoho Assist is free to use for 15 days.

Best for omnichannel communication through social media, email, chat, and video

  • 15-day free trial
  • From $20/user/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

Zoho Desk has created tidal waves within automation, customer support, and productivity. As a leader in customer service software, this company used a context-focused outlook to improve agent productivity and customer self-service. Zia, Zoho Desk’s AI system, aids the context-focused process by creating a huge base of knowledge from current and previous customer interactions to ensure solutions and fix loose-ends.

Free for up to 3 agents, Zoho Desk’s plan includes email ticketing, customer management, help and knowledge centers, various integrations, and a multi-language help desk.

Best for scalability with growing teams

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $15/user/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.7/5

Hiver is a gmail-based customer service solution that helps teams manage shared inboxes right from their gmail interface. With Hiver, you can assign, track, and manage emails directly from your gmail account.

Hiver's integration with gmail makes it well-suited to small teams and startups, while the email delegation feature helps make it scalable as teams grow. As a team acquires more members and more responsibilities, a manager can assign emails to their team members without leaving their inbox. Managers can also track the status of emails and set up service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure timely responses to customer queries.

Hiver offers a 7-day free trial of its Elite plan. Once the trial expires, you can choose any of their plans. Their lowest tier plan, Lite, is $19 per user per month.

Best CX software for small businesses

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $45/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

If you’re looking for a heavyweight option, HubSpot is a marketing, customer service, sales, and content management system all within one easy-to-use software. Their platform uses an inbounding strategy to build and maintain meaningful relationships with your customers by taking a customer at a “prospect stage” and turning them into a promoter. HubSpot also offers a great customer feedback system, and allows your team to create custom surveys, objects, and videos.

HubSpot offers free plans for their CRM, sales, service experience, and marketing tools that never expire.

Best for marketing, sales, and management teams

  • Free Plan
  • From $49/month to help you scale up fast
Visit Website
Rating: 4.2/5

User.com is a flexible, free help desk software for your whole company—sales, marketing, management, and support will be able to collaborate and automate all on the same interface.

The personalized and customizable solutions let automation take over and deliver a great omnichannel communication system so the right customer receives the right message all the time. With User.com’s customer tracking, your team will be equipped with accurate customer data and timelines.

The free plan gives you a nice range of basic features that are free forever. If you’re looking for more, pricing for the personal plan starts at $49/month to help you scale up fast.

Best free customer service software for eCommerce companies that need customization

Visit Website
Rating: 4/5

With DiamanteDesk’s fully open-source software, you have control over everything—the code base, customizations, development, and seamless integrations.

The learning curve is a bit more steep than others on this list, and it’s aimed at companies who have teams that are familiar with Stack and Bootstrap. This is a unique software service with a diverse team with multiple language, programming, and managerial backgrounds that will help you along the way.

The software offers ticket system management functionality, a helpdesk, customer relations, customer requests, and data organization solutions.

Best for omnichannel customer support

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $58 /agent/month

UDESK is a customer service software that integrates AI to offer an omnichannel contact center solution, aiming to improve customer interactions across multiple channels.

The tool offers a suite of features aimed at improving customer service operations. Its omnichannel communication allows businesses to manage customer interactions across various platforms, ensuring consistent handling of inquiries. The live chat and video chat functionalities provide immediate and personal support, while the call center tools, including call routing and analytics, improve the efficiency of phone support. AI-driven chatbots automate responses to common questions, and the ticketing system centralizes the management of customer issues.

Additionally, UDESK's customer insights provide valuable data on customer behavior to inform service strategies.

The software offers a 14-day free trial of any of its plans that will help you decide if it is the right solution for your team.

Best software for managing customer invoices, expenses, and bills all from one place

  • From $16/month/user

Another cloud-based help desk, Taimer can be accessed from any device, anywhere. They aim to replace your applications with their business management solution that helps to eliminate switching between them.

As you can see, Taimer is all about unified solutions, so they combine CRM, project management, resource planning, invoicing, and reporting to simplify work. Get real-time data with the account manager, which measures customer KPIs and metrics to measure risk and customer progress.

With their free plan, Taimer allows up to 2 users. Features with the free plan include mobile use (android and iOs compatible), CRM, sales, marketing, and team chat options. Their most popular “sales management” plan starts at $16/month/user.

Best free customer service software for home service businesses

ServiceSight, by Protean Software, was created for small businesses—they know how vital startups and small businesses are to the economy. By providing a functional cloud based software, ServiceSight offers scheduling, quote creation, tracking, and collaborative updates with your customers and support team.

ServiceSight allows up to 5 free users with everything a business needs to manage jobs, workers, and customers.

The Best Free Customer Service Software Summary Table

Tools Price
Freshdesk From $18/user/month
Zoho Assist From $12/month
Zoho Desk From $20/user/month
Hiver From $15/user/month (billed annually)
HubSpot From $45/month
User.com From $49/month to help you scale up fast
DiamanteDesk No price details
UDESK From $58 /agent/month
Taimer From $16/month/user
ServiceSight No price details
Preview Image - 
<h2  class="c-block__title b-summary-table__title c-listicle__title h3" >
	Compare Software Specs Side by Side</h2>

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

Other Free Customer Service Software Options

Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list, in case you’re looking for something specific.

  1. NABD

    Best multi channel service for healthcare and medical businesses

  2. Tidio

    Best build-your-own AI chat widget for SMBs

  3. LiveAgent

    Best to manage a help desk and knowledge base

  4. Jira Service Management

    Best for communication between development and operation teams

  5. ProProfs Help Desk

    Best issue tracker and smart reports

  6. Userlike

    Best advanced features for data privacy

  7. Kommunicate

    Best for customer chat support

  8. Spiceworks Help Desk

    Best for IT professionals and tech brands

  9. EngageBay

    Best for teams who need telephony, sales automation, and multi-deal pipelines

  10. Froged

    Best for fixing and avoiding churn rate with customers

  11. Bitrix24

    Best for solo entrepreneurs

  12. SysAid

    Best for manufacturing sectors

  13. Customer Thermometer

    Best for customer service surveys

  14. Mint Service Desk

    Best for incident and asset management

  15. Agile CRM

    Best for integration with Google and Twilio

  16. LiveAgent

    Best for social media integrations

How I Selected The Best Free Customer Service Software

What do I look for when selecting the best customer service software? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria: 

  1. User Interface (UI):  What kind of customization does the software provide? Is the navigation and UI well-organized? Are there too many features or options for your business? 
  2. Usability: Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Does the free version offer enough tools to make the software useful for your business or team? Is there a mobile app?
  3. Integrations: How easy is it to connect with other tools? Are there pre-built integrations? How many third party applications can the software integrate with? 
  4. Value for $: How appropriate is the free plan for the features and capabilities, with respect to your use case? 

Best Free Customer Service Software Key Features

  1. Real-time, instant customer feedback
  2. Data and end user analysis capabilities
  3. Active team communication
  4. Mobile usability
  5. Lead capturing
  6. Chat and messaging history and analytics
  7. Customer reports
  8. Shared inboxes
  9. Internal and external help desks
  10. Language optimization

You might also like: 10 Best Customer Service for Small Business.

Frequently Asked Questions

If your customer service team is looking for a free online customer system, you might have a few questions before signing on. Let's take a look at some FAQs regarding the free customer service software solutions contained on this list.

What are the benefits of free customer service software?

Free customer service software has many benefits. The leading customer service software generally share the following:

  • Helping teams organize incoming customer issues via a ticketing system
  • Tracking customer issues so that customers do not need to repeat themselves as an issue is escalated
  • Service level agreement (SLA) management
  • Fast and easy support for your customers
  • FREE and therefore perfect for small business and startup budgets

How does free customer service software work?

Free customer service software allows customers to connect with your company via the web. Customers can use a live chat bot directly on your website, or connect with you on social media.

The best customer support solutions offer omnichannel support, meaning that all customer issues are contained within a singular interface whether they originate on your website, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

When a customer submits a request, the online customer service system delivers it to your team according to routing rules that you establish. From there, customer issues can be tracked as they are escalated and eventually resolved.

Other Free Software Reviews

Curious what other customer software you can get for free? Here are some of my other reivews.

What Do You Think?

A recent study by Kayako shows 52% of customers are more likely to remain loyal to a company that has live chat. When your company chooses to upgrade customer service with the best software for customer support, you're not only enhancing customer experience, but also brand loyalty.

So what’s the bottom line? If you run a small business or have a small customer support team that isn’t making use of customer service software yet, it's time to get started. 

Have you tried any of the customer service software listed above? Do you have a CX tool or customer experience management software that you would add to the list? Let me know in the comments!

For more about digital experience management and customer experience management, I invite you to subscribe to The CX Lead newsletter. You can also join the waitlist for The CX community

Related Read: 10 Best Customer Relation Management Software