The best ticketing software of 2026

Zendesk brings email, messaging, calls and social messages into one ticket queue, and its plans scale from a small email team to a large contact center. Support Team, at $19 an agent a month billed yearly, covers email ticketing, ticket routing, pre-built analytics dashboards, saved replies, customer context, and automations and triggers. That is enough for a team that only answers email.

Most teams will want Suite Team at $55 an agent a month billed yearly, because that is the plan that adds messaging and live chat, phone support and omnichannel routing, along with Zendesk's AI agents, an AI knowledge base and an AI action builder. Suite Professional ($115 billed yearly) adds skills-based routing and an IVR phone menu, and Suite Enterprise is priced by sales. Paying yearly saves 20% against monthly billing.

The weak spot is cost at scale. Ten agents on Suite Professional cost $1,150 a month before any AI charges, and Zendesk bills automated resolutions on top of the plans. Its European pricing page lists those per resolution in euros; we could not confirm the US price, so ask before you switch the AI agent on. Zendesk offers a 14-day free trial with no card, and early-stage startups can apply for a six-month trial of the Suite for up to 50 agents.

Freshdesk matches Zendesk's entry price and includes more on it. The Growth plan, at $19 an agent a month billed yearly, has ticketing and a shared inbox, a customer portal with a knowledge base, analytics and reporting, internal threads and tasks on tickets, and roles and permissions. Every plan also comes with the first 500 sessions of Freddy AI Agent, Freshworks' customer-facing bot. That allowance is given once per account, and further sessions cost $49 per 100.

Freshdesk labels Pro, at $55 billed yearly, its most popular plan. Pro adds intelligent routing, multiple SLA policies, a multilingual help desk, custom dashboards and external collaborators. Enterprise ($89 billed yearly) adds skill-based routing, a sandbox, audit logs and IP allow lists. Freddy AI Copilot, which helps agents draft replies, costs $29 an agent a month on Pro and Enterprise. Yearly billing saves 20%.

Day passes help teams with occasional helpers: on Growth, someone who answers a few tickets a week can log in for a day at $2 a pass instead of taking a full seat. The 14-day trial starts you on Enterprise, and the account is suspended at the end unless you choose a plan. Freshdesk's pricing page lists no free plan.

Help Scout centers its product on a shared inbox that pulls in email, live chat, text, social and phone conversations, so a small team works from one list instead of a ticket queue. Customer and company profiles and custom fields sit beside each conversation, and the knowledge base publishes help articles under your brand. Its AI drafts replies with one click, summarizes long threads and adjusts tone, length and language. Help Scout connects with more than 100 apps.

The free plan is generous on users and tight on volume: 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 knowledge base site and 100 contacts a month, with limits of 10 saved replies, 10 tags and 10 articles. It suits a new business or side project answering a handful of emails a day.

Paid plans charge per user and remove the contact limit. Standard is $25, Plus $45 and Pro $75 a user a month. The page offers 16% off for yearly billing but does not say which billing period those figures show. AI Answers, Help Scout's customer-facing AI, costs $0.75 per resolution, new accounts get three months of unlimited resolutions to test it, and you can set a monthly spending cap. Standard and Plus have a 15-day trial with no card.

Help Scout doesn't list IT service features such as asset tracking or change approvals. For those, see Freshservice or Jira Service Management below.

Zoho Desk has the lowest per-agent prices among the full help desks in this guide. The free plan gives 3 users a basic email ticketing system. Express costs $7 a user a month billed yearly ($9 monthly) and adds support across several email addresses, a social module for Instagram, Facebook and X, web forms that create tickets from any page, rule-based assignment, workflows, multi-level escalations and your own support domain. Express also includes AI agents that run on your own OpenAI or DeepSeek key or on Zoho's model, with up to 30 million free tokens a month.

Standard ($14 billed yearly, $20 monthly) brings a live chat widget, messaging through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeChat and LINE, an answer bot that replies from your help articles, a community forum and the knowledge base itself. Professional is $23 billed yearly ($35 monthly) and Enterprise $40 ($50 monthly). Yearly billing saves up to 34%.

The savings add up: ten agents on Standard cost $140 a month billed yearly, against $550 for ten on Zendesk Suite Team. The trial lasts 15 days with no card.

HubSpot's free tools include basic ticketing, a shared inbox and live chat for up to 2 users, with no credit card. Tickets and chats sit in HubSpot's free CRM next to each contact's marketing emails and sales deals, so a support rep can see that the customer with a complaint is also halfway through a renewal.

Paid Service Hub plans charge per seat. Starter lists at $20 a seat a month, with a new-customer offer from $7, and adds time-saving automations and simple metrics. Professional, at $90 to $100 a seat a month plus a $1,500 onboarding fee, is where the knowledge base, customer portal and advanced reporting appear. Enterprise costs $150 a seat a month plus $3,500 onboarding and adds customer success tools, custom objects and advanced permissions.

That jump from Starter to Professional is steep, and Professional is the plan where help desk basics such as a knowledge base begin. A team that only needs tickets will pay less on Freshdesk or Zoho Desk, both of which include a knowledge base on cheaper plans. HubSpot gives the most value to a business already running sales and marketing on HubSpot, where support history on the same record saves people from switching between tools.

Jira Service Management is Atlassian's service desk, now sold as part of its Service Collection. It suits IT, HR and operations teams that take requests from colleagues, and teams that already plan their work in Jira. Requests arrive by email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, an embedded widget or a portal, and you shape them with request types, custom forms, drag-and-drop workflows and queues. Templates come set up for service management and customer service, with more for HR and marketing.

The free plan covers 3 agents with 2GB of storage, community support, an embedded knowledge base, alerts and on-call schedules, and 1,250 automation steps a month. Standard costs $21.50 an agent a month and adds Atlassian's Rovo AI agents, search and chat, asset and configuration management, a help center on your own branded URL, unlimited email notifications and 3,000 automation steps per user a month. Premium is $55.28 an agent a month. Both are monthly prices for the team size shown on Atlassian's page, and the per-agent rate changes with team size; yearly billing saves up to 17%. Standard and Premium have a 14-day trial, and a free account that goes over its limits moves to a Standard trial automatically.

A consumer support team will get running faster on Zendesk or Help Scout, which need less configuring.

Freshservice is Freshworks' IT service desk, the sibling of Freshdesk for teams supporting employees rather than customers. Starter, at $19 an agent a month billed yearly, covers incident management, a knowledge base, task management and a support portal, with tickets arriving by email, phone, chat, a widget, or a ServiceBot in Microsoft Teams and Slack. Every plan includes CSAT surveys and access for occasional agents.

Growth ($49 billed yearly) adds a service catalog where employees request things such as a new laptop or software access, SLA management, on-call management, cloud management and an MSP mode for running several client portals from one account. Pro ($99 billed yearly) adds problem, change, release and major incident management and workload management. Enterprise is priced by sales. Freddy AI Copilot costs $29 an agent a month on Pro and Enterprise.

SLA policies begin on Growth, and most IT teams will want them, so budget $49 an agent rather than $19. Each sign-up includes 3 free day passes for occasional agents, with more from $3 each. The trial lasts 14 days with full access to every feature. A small business with one IT person may find Jira Service Management's free plan enough.

osTicket is open-source ticketing software that you download free and run on your own server. It covers the core of a help desk: custom fields on ticket forms, ticket filters that route incoming tickets and trigger actions, help topics that send web tickets to the right department, agent collision avoidance that locks a ticket while someone is answering it, SLA due dates with overdue alerts, auto-responses and a customer portal with a knowledge base.

The free edition comes with community support only, and you handle installation, upgrades and backups yourself. That suits a small business or IT team with someone comfortable running web software, and anyone who wants ticket data on their own hardware.

If you like osTicket but not the server work, the cloud-hosted edition starts at $12 an agent a month, with a 30-day free trial. It adds managed upgrades and maintenance, daily backups, email and phone support and a walk-through session. A virtual appliance edition is priced on request.

osTicket's features page doesn't mention live chat or AI, so expect a plainer help desk than the hosted products above.