Delivering exceptional customer support is essential to the health of any small company and help desk software gives you the capacity to manage customer inquiries and issues more effectively and efficiently, saving your little business both time and money. We looked in the industry leaders and up-and-comers and discovered Freshdesk, HappyFox, and Zendesk. These solutions covered the range for smaller businesses concerning features and price. Read on to our comparison and review of these three best help desk software options, as well as our top recommendations.
Best Help Desk Software for Small Businesses in 2017: Freshdesk
We advocate Freshdesk as the very best help desk software for small companies in 2017 because of its combination of ease of use, accessible features, and competitive cost — including the option of a free account.
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Help Desk Software Comparison Table: Freshdesk vs HappyFox vs Zendesk
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| Greatest For | Small companies that want the best combination of features and price | Small businesses that need to automate some of their Customer Care procedure | Enterprise-level businesses with the budget to match |
| Ease of Setup and Use
Learn More |
Easy | Easy | Intermediate to difficult |
| Differentiating Features
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| Integrations | Many | Many | Many |
| Mobile App | Android and iOS | Android and iOS | Android and iOS |
| Customer Support
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24/ 7 email service and 24/ 5 phone support, available to most cost packages | 24/ 7 email service and online chat and telephone service from 8am-5pm PST Monday to Friday, available to all price packages | Online knowledge base for lowest-priced packages and scaled email, phone, and online chat service for Team bundle and higher |
| www.Freshdesk.com | www.HappyFox.com | www.Zendesk.com |
Pricing
| Freshdesk | HappyFox | Zendesk | |
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| Monthly Pricing | From $25/ consumer | From $39/ consumer using a 3 user minimal | From $9/ user |
| Free Plan | Yes, using limited attributes | No | No, but free trial |
| www.Freshdesk.com | www.HappyFox.com | www.Zendesk.com |
Best Help Desk Software for Smaller Firms: Freshdesk
Freshdesk is our recommendation to find the best help desk software for small businesses because it finds the sweet spot between features and cost for most small business needs.
Freshdesk is in its best with its own ticket management procedure, which may automatically route tickets to specific support agents based on logic you specify. It can also automate several basic tasks, like responding to a ticket with an answer if it finds a often asked question. These tickets can be initiated through multiple communication channels between you and your customers, such as email, telephone, online chat, comments widgets, and social websites.
Actions on the tickets could be further automated and triggered by other factors, such as time elapsed (say, for instance, you would like a ticket to be escalated if its unresolved for a particular amount of time), stage on your workflow, or other events which may be scaled to accommodate several languages and time zones. This can aid your business establish, manage, and meet your customer’s expectations and adhere to some service level agreements (SLA) you have.
You might even use Freshdesk’s knowledge base to compile and answer your most frequently asked questions (FAQ) with various segments available for private (inner ) or general visibility. This knowledge base can then be skinned with your company’ branding and include the FAQs and neighborhood forums.
Finally, Freshdesk gives exactly the identical degree of customer support to all users irrespective of their pricing package. You may contact them 24/7 by email or 24/5 by phone. This surpasses HappyFox, which provides 24/7 email support and phone service from 8am-5pm PST Monday to Friday for all programs, and Zendesk, which merely supplies limited email and telephone support to their mid-priced plans and higher.
All this, plus a monthly fee that falls between HappyFox and Zendesk, make Freshdesk our recommendation to receive the best help desk software for small businesses. In reality, Freshdesk was the only solution we examined to supply a scaled down free program for unlimited users.
Although it lacks some of the higher-end attributes that some enterprise-level businesses may require, such as IP whitelisting and hooks to third party email servers (these are only available with the cheapest priced package whereas HappyFox includes them with their cheapest ), this helps to maintain it priced while still meeting the needs of most small companies with ease.
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Best Help Desk Software for Automation: HappyFox
We advocate HappyFox as the best help desk software for automating your customer support shipping procedure. Each the applications we reviewed offered some level of automation, like assigning tickets to encourage reps, organizing themescalating them, or placing their priority according to logic you define. However, HappyFox offers many integrations with third party apps which can help you automate and streamline your help desk jobs.
HappyFox also incorporates with the telephony app, Twilio. Once the two providers are connected, you may use Twilio to get voice calls from your clients, which the program then transcribes to text it uses to automatically create and populate a HappyFox ticket with. An audio file of this message is attached to the ticket to your service representatives to confirm that the data entered is correct.
Along with Twilio, HappyFox also incorporates with third-party providers like Freshbooks and QuickBooks for accounting; Salesforce and Zoho for CRM; Nicereply and SurveyMonkey for collecting customer feedback; also, Facebook and Twitter for social websites — most of which help automate a few fundamental procedures, saving your organization time and money. Freshdesk and Zendesk also offer you a vast range of third-party program integrations within their various app shops, but HappyFox offered more options at their lower priced packages.
However, HappyFox is more expensive than Freshdesk and we did not believe there was enough additional value to offset the extra price.
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Not Suggested for Smaller Firms: Zendesk
Unfortunately, we are unable to recommend Zendesk more than Freshdesk or even HappyFox for smaller businesses due to their limited features at comparable price points. Zendesk is a pioneer among help desk software providers, but their service is much better suited to much larger businesses with all the budgets to match.
At first glance, Zendesk is apparently the most affordable choice over Freshdesk and HappyFox. However, both lowest-priced plans at $9 and $25/month per user only provide a limited variety of attributes — many of which Freshdesk and HappyFox include, such as customer service. To get a comparable set of features with Zendesk, you may have to subscribe to their own Professional program or greater which starts at $59/month per user.
For instance, phone and online chat support are only available at an additional price irrespective of the bundle you select. Internal knowledge bases and community forums can only be bought at the expert plan or higher. Similarly, ticket management features such as specifying your company hours time monitoring, and SLA arrangements are only available at the Professional plan or greater. Freshdesk and HappyFox include each of these attributes in their free and lowest-priced plans.
Zendesk does include several basic help desk management attributes in their lower-priced plans. Users may perform essential tasks such as getting tickets by email, social networking, or internet widgets. And after a ticket has been assigned to them, support agents can share tickets along with different representatives, attach up to 1MB of documents, and examine the ticket’s history. But, again, Freshdesk and HappyFox contain the same, or better, features in their spare and lowest-priced bundles.
For smaller businesses that are seeking to set up a help desk software solution, Zendesk is a powerful and comprehensive tool. But to take advantage of this, your monthly prices will quickly grow nicely over what you will pay for a better or similar set of attributes from Freshdesk or HappyFox.
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In-Depth Review: Freshdesk vs HappyFox vs Zendesk
Ease of Setup/Use
Among the most important advantages of help desk software is to automate as much of the ticketing process as you can, saving your business time and money. In order for this to take place, the automation logic must be comprehensive enough to include your most frequent usage cases while at precisely the same time being intuitive enough that it is simple to set up and use.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk includes more ticketing and automation features in their free and lowest-priced paid bundle compared to HappyFox and Zendesk, which help make it the most intuitive and easy to use option of the three. All of the ticket’s details, such as priority, status, and that it’s assigned to are clearly visible, organized, and editable.
The visually appealing user interface helps you to explore each one Freshdesk’s options, although not everything is clearly labeled. However, Freshdesk helpfully pre-fills several fields with examples that will help you use more complex features such as workflows.
Freshdesk also publishes some very helpful content on their site, which although not directly about the product might still be educational or enlightening to your company.
HappyFox
HappyFox’s initial setup is very simple, composed of regular account development and email confirmation then a collection of guided steps that include an introduction to the software’s various management and configuration tools, adding and managing staff members, and upgrading the skin to match your business’ branding. These measures can be as simple or as involved as your technical knowledge permits for; for instance, you can upgrade email hosts or IP address limitations, or bypass them entirely.
The automation features which HappyFox includes also enable activities such as round robin ticket missions, limiting assignments to active support agents, and escalating tickets according to SLA rules or the number of times each customer has been in contact with a representative.
While Freshdesk and Zendesk also supply basic ticket management automation attributes, HappyFox surpasses them both in the number of attributes and their versatility.
Zendesk
Zendesk provides an impressive array of features and can be a powerful help desk solution when they are optimally used. However, most small companies will find this to be the software’s primary fault. Being spoiled by choice makes Zendesk too costly and inaccessible with no tools of an enterprise-level IT team behind you.
Navigating through Zendesk’s listing of add-ons and customizations to tailor the applications into your business’ requirements is a significant barrier to entry for most small businesses who are working with limited time, budget, and resources.
Characteristics
Any help desk software should include several basic characteristics that are crucial for their performance. These include giving your service team the capability to make tickets, to edit themand then to close them when their problem is solved. Help desk applications should also let you specify how tickets are assigned, organized, and prioritized and allow you to see who is working on what to prevent any potential duplication. The way the help desk software manages these jobs may differ, but the implementation of these is requirement.
Other common features include the ability to get tickets by email and the inclusion of a knowledge base that can customize its content depending on who is seeing it — customers or service staff.
Freshdesk, HappyFox, and Zendesk all fulfill these basic requirements. Beyond the basics, all three also incorporate with Facebook and Twitter allowing your clients to use social media as a channel to achieve you as well.
Let us look at some of the ways in which they differ.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk might not have the longest list of features on paper compared to HappyFox or even Zendesk, but its strength lies in just how well they’re integrated with each other, the friendly user interface they’re wrapped in, and also the value your business receives for the price — notably with their spare and lowest-priced programs. And once your company has Freshdesk installation, they offer you the best customer support of the three.
Like HappyFox, Freshdesk also offers many third party integrations to customize and extend how the program fulfills your business’ needs. Zendesk provides some app integrations too, but only if you are subscribed to their Team plan or higher. Together with Freshdesk, email and CRM programs can be incorporated even with their free plan.
HappyFox
The ticket production and management process is really where HappyFox’s automation features show their value, running the first actions in your ticketing workflow on auto-pilot. Tickets may be manually created, clearly, but more conveniently they could be mechanically generated as entries are received through various channels, including email, phone, online chat, or societal media. The software automatically detects the necessary information from the submission and populates the corresponding areas from the ticket.
Even voicemails can be transcribed into text and also the text then utilized to make a ticket using available third-party integrations. Neither Freshdesk nor Zendesk provide this level of automation.
The mission, status, and priority can also be automatically set or upgraded through an assortment of built-in tools that are very similar to email filtering principles.
Zendesk
Zendesk’s list of available attributes is very similar to Freshdesk’s and HappyFox’s. But they scale in line with the price plan you’re registered in and a few that Freshdesk and HappyFox include as standard in their own lower-priced packages require you to invest more with Zendesk.
1 noteworthy exception is that Zendesk is multilingual with support for 28 languages included as standard in their lowest-priced package. Freshdesk and HappyFox both offer multi-language support also, but only with their higher-priced bundles.
Much like HappyFox, Zendesk also offers more comprehensive reporting options at lower cost points than Freshdesk.
Finally, and surprisingly, Zendesk was the only software of the three we examined to offer two-factor authentication natively. All 3 services associate with third-party sign-ons, such as Google, but Zendesk additionally adds this extra layer of safety.
Client Support
Freshdesk, HappyFox, and Zendesk all offer varying levels of customer service that correspond with their respective values and our recommendations. This is how they disagree.
Other Help Desk Software Options
There are lots of other help desk software options available on the market which could possibly be a better fit for your business’ needs. Here are a Few of the others that we enjoyed and what makes them unique:
| Software Name | What Makes It Unique? |
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| Freshdesk | Greatest complete combination of features and price |
| HappyFox | Extensive automation capacities |
| Zendesk | Feature-rich, but expensive |
| Vivantio Guru | Adheres to ITIL standards |
| Jira Service Desk | Fully functional trial period |
| Kayako | Best for live chat and telephone support attributes |
| Zoho Support | Integrates with additional Zoho company software |
| SupportBee | Fundamental functionality that is easy to use for beginners |
| Desk.com | Seamless integration with Salesforce CRM |
| ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus | A help desk software designed for IT management software. |
| Web+Center | Open-source and may run on PC, Mac, tablets, tablet computers, and through any browser |
The Bottom Line
There are lots of very competent help desk software solutions for small companies on the marketplace. Businesses that are looking for more automation alternatives might want to contemplate HappyFox — while more costly than Freshdesk, it does add value by saving your customer support team time. But, Freshdesk makes our recommendation as the best help desk software for small companies for its blend of features, cost, and access to customer support.
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