14 Best Free Help Desk Software for CX Teams in 2024

Zendesk is an AI-powered customer service software with powerful help desk functionality. It lets you organize support from multiple channels including messaging, email, voice, and social media in a single inbox.

The tool has features to help your team offer fast support. You can create routing rules so agents can answer tickets that best match their abilities, whether that is language or a particular type of product expertise. You can also use the chat widget to automatically collect extra details about the customer problem or identify intent so you can route them to the most relevant agent.

Another cool feature is the ability to create a customer community you can use to offer support. Your team can use this as an extra support channel, or you can encourage members to help each other.

It’s particularly useful because any community member can benefit from help you give in the community, not just the people who ask the question.

What's Free: 14-day free trial

Zoho Assist is a customer support software that lets you provide remote access assistance, both on-demand and unattended. This means your customer success team can troubleshoot issues and offer support by accessing customer devices. It's an especially helpful solution for providing support with digital products.

Remote access is available both on-demand and for unattended devices. That means that whether a customer is with their device or not, your team can access it to provide support. Unattended access allows for things like pushing updates in bulk, rebooting devices, or diagnosing issues whether or not you have the customer on the phone live. On-demand access allows for real-time troubleshooting and chat, video, or voice calling.

The software offers plenty of security safeguards to give both clients and support agents peace of mind. These include chat encryption, action logs to document all events, and inactive session timeouts.

A 15-day free trial is available, and paid plans start from $12 per user, per month. 

Front is a customer operations platform designed to facilitate team collaboration and manage communications across various channels. It stands out as a tool for collaborative customer service by combining the efficiency of a help desk with the personal touch of email, enabling teams to maintain strong customer relationships and improve operational efficiency.

I chose Front as a tool for 'free help desk software' because it offers a unique approach to managing customer interactions across various channels, including email, live chats, and SMS texts. Its collaborative hub stands out by enabling teams to work together seamlessly, which is essential for delivering exceptional customer service. I believe Front is best for collaborative customer service because it provides a single view of every customer, which is crucial for personal and efficient support.

Front provides a customer operations platform with a shared inbox that allows for team collaboration and efficient management of customer communications. It features omnichannel capabilities, enabling businesses to handle messages from various channels in one place. The platform also offers insights and analytics to track performance, automated workflows to save time, and a knowledge base to support customer self-service. Live chat functionality and integrations with other tools enhance the overall customer service experience.

Pricing for Front starts at $19/user/month for their Starter plan when billed annually, which supports up to 10 user seats.

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk solution that helps you manage support tickets through a customer service portal. The software collects interactions received by email, phone, chat, social media, or forms. Features include ticket assignment, notification rules, service escalations, and time-based actions.

You can set workflow rules to reduce the need for human intervention, schedule reports, and measure customer happiness rates. A graphical dashboard makes it easy to analyze customer satisfaction levels. You can also customize the system by renaming tabs, adding new departments, or customizing email templates.

This tool integrates with business applications such as Google Workspace, ScreenMagic, Jira, Slack, and Salesforce.

ZohoDesk offers a free plan for up to three agents.

monday Service is a versatile service management platform designed to improve service-related workflows across departments like IT, HR, legal, procurement, and customer support. It is highly customizable, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks through no-code automation so you can focus on more strategic activities. 

Its AI-powered automation enhances ticket management by automatically tagging and routing tickets based on priority, department, and urgency, ensuring timely resolutions. The ability to customize workflows also makes it easy to adapt the platform to the specific needs of your CX team, making your processes more efficient.

With real-time communication features, you can comment on tickets, share files, and update each other on the progress of customer issues, ensuring everyone is aligned. The platform’s integrations with other tools, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email, also help consolidate communication.

monday Service offers a 14-day free trial.

ServiceDesk Plus is the full-stack service management software for enterprises from ManageEngine. It provides a wide range of IT solutions that support IT service management (ITSM) workflows, no-code customizations, advanced reporting, native integrations, and smart automation.

One of the key features of ServiceDesk Plus is its 13 distinct ITIL4-compatible practices including incident management, change enablement, and request management to help you improve your operations. The software also comes with comprehensive problem management features that provide IT support teams the ability to categorize, analyze, and resolve issues, while also identifying issues that are similar or repetitive so they can close tickets at a much faster pace.

The platform’s change management system is another feature that is designed to help IT teams better implement IT modifications with reduced risk, thanks to more streamlined planning, approval, and implementation processes. ServiceDesk Plus also has an integrated knowledge management system, a virtual assistant feature, and AI capabilities.

On the client side, the platform offers self-service portals where people can create requests and follow up on the status. It also has a live chat for real-time support, a knowledge base where you can record solutions to common problems for users, and help desk mobile apps that can help you get support whenever you need it.

Other capabilities of ServiceDesk Plus include automatic ticket routing, and escalation rule creation to avoid SLA violations.

Hiver is software that adds help desk functionality to your Gmail inbox. This means you can run support without any extra software or tools. When you install the plugin, you see a set of extra options in your Gmail sidebar. Managers can use this to assign inbound messages to members of their support team.

They can also add notes to this contact to provide further details. Agents can easily see all their assigned tickets in the inbox. They can also collaborate on replies by leaving notes and tagging other team members. It’s also easy for agents to see when someone is working on a particular ticket, therefore reducing the chances of collisions. Once agents finish support, they can easily mark tickets as closed.

The tool also supports automation. You can assign tickets to particular agents when the message contains a keyword related to their area of expertise. Or you can use round-robin rules to evenly distribute tickets to active agents.

Pricing starts at $19 per agent per month. You need to sign up for the pro or elite plan to access advanced features like analytics or round robin ticket assignments.

ProProfs Help Desk is a customer service tool that helps support teams keep track of customer request issues. Managers can prioritize, assign, and label tickets to ensure they are handled most appropriately.

Core features include a shared inbox, canned responses, collaborative email, ticket prioritization, and reporting. You can apply filters and sort by labels, assignees, milestones, status, or workflow configuration.

You can also use Round-Robin or advanced ticket assignment to ensure that tickets are evenly distributed. The Gmail-style interface ensures that agents will feel comfortable using the system.

This tool integrates with business tools such as Survey Maker, Chat, and Knowledge Base.

ProProfs allows you to start with a free plan and upgrade when you are ready.

It lets customers contact your support team from within your product or website, as well as via channels like social media and email. Meanwhile, agents can access important customer information such as past conversations and issue details. The stand out features are all the self-help options.

You can add resources to your chat widget and even customize what shows up depending on the page.Or you can use proactive support functionality to solve customer problems before they even occur. For example, you can send automated messages when users perform a particular action, such as spending a certain amount of time on a particular page.

Other self-help options include the ability to create product tours to help people get up to speed with your features, and automated messages that go out when customers show signs of struggling with your product.

The tool also has plenty of features that streamline live help. These include a help desk ticketing system, collaboration, ticket routing, and templated responses.

Intercom has a starter plan for very small businesses that costs $74 per month when billed annually. Larger businesses should contact the sales team for pricing information.

HelpScout is help desk software built for email and live chat. All contact is collected in the shared inbox which has plenty of features like private messaging, ticket management, and the ability for managers to assign tasks.

Agents can access customer data from within the inbox, including information from other apps. For example, you can connect Shopify to see the customer’s purchase history.

You can also create automations using a simple if/then No-Code builder. Just choose an action to act as a trigger and then select what happens when this occurs. For example, you could assign all messages with the keyword “product demo” to someone in your sales team.

The tool has a powerful website chat widget. This allows customers to contact your support team from the webpage they are browsing. You can also add information to the widget, for example, documents or a knowledge base search bar. With thisin place, customers can access the information they need without contacting your support team, therefore reducing inbound contact volume.

You can also provide relevant help by proactively sending automated messages to people as they browse your website. HelpScout integrates with plenty of business tools including Slack, Google Apps, and Mailchimp. Further integrations are available via Zapier.

The tool starts at $25 per user per month but proactive messaging to over 2,000 unique website viewers costs extra. You can sign up for a free trial on the website.