Top Free and Paid Ticketing Software

By Tek-Tools on August 31, 2020

With more and more websites offering customers instant gratification, quickly resolving issues or concerns is imperative. Problem resolution has become more critical. While some organizations are employing chatbots to resolve the issues quickly, others are leveraging artificial intelligence to set up automated ticketing workflows. However, finding the right ticketing software could be daunting.

What Is Ticketing Software?

An IT ticketing software, also referred to as help desk software, helps organizations handle end-user requests efficiently. It keeps track of each issue separately and helps support personnel handle issues efficiently. Moreover, as organizations have been amplifying their digital transformation initiatives, the demands placed on ticketing software are only increasing, which is evident from how ticketing software evolved. They support end users of all types, both employees and customers, offer features to manage third-party vendor and contractor requests, and help manage the organizational IT assets such as software and hardware. Today, even finance and HR teams can employ ticketing software to streamline their request processes. Modern ticketing software such as SolarWinds® Web Help Desk® go beyond and support various IT processes such as change management, incident management, and integrate with IT monitoring tools to help address issues faster.

This article discusses five of the top free and paid ticketing software organizations can employ to scale their help desk’s efficiency.

Web Help Desk

WEB HELP DESK
© 2020 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

Web Help Desk helps streamline your entire ticketing process and offers unified ticket, knowledge, asset, and change management. It offers modern features like SLA reporting, incident tracking, and remote support integration. The tool provides features beyond what ticketing software traditionally offers, such as:

  • Ticketing automation—Helps assign tickets automatically, creates tickets via email alerts generated by third-party IT monitoring tools, and offers native alert integration with SolarWinds monitoring products
  • Built-in knowledge base functionality to facilitate self-help for end users
  • IT asset management—Helps manage the use, availability, and health of hardware and software assets and offers a built-in tool for asset discovery.
  • Change management—Helps automate change request approval via voting of top-level management involved in processes and to set up escalations and notifications
  • Compatibility—Offers compatibility with FIPS 140-2 security requirements

Web Help Desk offers both perpetual and subscription licenses per technician basis; Web Help Desk Free Edition is free forever with one technician login and limited features.

SolarWinds Service Desk

SOLARWINDS SERVICE DESK
© 2020 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

SolarWinds Service Desk is a multi-tenant SaaS ticketing platform and an ITIL-ready solution with service management and IT asset management. Conforming to the norms of the ITIL framework, Service Desk is both internally focused and end user-focused. The solution can:

  • Automate incident management and simplify ticketing management following ITIL best practices
  • Increase efficiency with artificial intelligence
  • Simplify release management deployment and document changes in audit logs, and help you check approvals, visualize updates, and ensure transparency in the process
  • Support more than 40 languages to help organizations serve end users who need support in their local languages
  • Integrate with more than 200 cloud applications, including single sign-on (SSO) integrations with services such as Google SSO, Active Directory, and Microsoft Azure, among others
  • Provide Android and iOS apps for ticketing management on the go and push notifications to notify important updates

SolarWinds Service Desk offers a fully functional 30-day free trial and has a range of subscription plans from Team to Enterprise for various organizational needs.

Zoho Desk

ZOHO DESK
© 2020 Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Zoho is a SaaS ticketing platform focused on customer service via multiple channels such as email, social media, telephony, web form, and live chat. It provides advanced process automation capabilities, contextual views for agents, and SLA management. Moreover, Zoho Desk offers features such as:

  • Multi-brand and multi-department support
  • AI assistant that performs sentiment analysis, tags tickets, sends notifications for unusual activity, and automatically suggests solutions from the knowledge base
  • Knowledge base and community features to enable self-help for end users
  • Android and iOS apps for ticketing management on the go
  • Integrations with other Zoho apps and third-party apps such as Slack, Trello, and Asana

Zoho Desk offers a free plan with email ticketing and usage up to three agents. For more features, such as multi-channel ticketing support, you should upgrade to paid plans.

Jira Service Desk

JIRA SERVICE DESK
© 2020 Atlassian Corporation Plc. All rights reserved.

Jira Service Desk is an ITIL-certified ticketing management solution focused on IT service management with both cloud-based and self-managed deployment options. It also offers features to streamline processes such as incident management, problem management, and change management. Jira Service Desk includes:

  • SLA management—Helps set up SLA policies, prioritize tickets, and automate escalations
  • Root cause analysis—Helps link related problem and incident tickets and facilitates root cause investigation
  • Configuration management—Helps integrate your configuration management database (CMDB) and manage vital data pertaining to people, software, contacts, and facilities
  • Atlassian Marketplace—Helps integrate your choice of asset management and CMDB tools

Jira Service Desk provides a free forever plan for three agents on its cloud-based offering.

HubSpot Service Hub

HUBSPOT SERVICE HUB
© 2020 HubSpot, Inc. All rights reserved.

HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service software designed to help organize your customer service teams more efficiently. It offers various features for the efficient delivery of customer service. Service Hub provides a universal inbox that binds multiple channels, including emails, live chats, and Facebook messenger. You can also turn these conversations into tickets to track them more effectively. Additionally, Service Hub offers features such as:

  • Built-in automation for ticket routing, request prioritization, and agent response time measurement
  • Knowledge base for self-help enablement and built-in reporting to measure the effectiveness of the knowledge base
  • Feedback and advocacy tools to help keep track of your customers’ feedback and turn happy customers to advocates

HubSpot Service Hub offers a free plan with limited features and is available as a SaaS deployment.

Conclusion

Free ticketing software is beneficial to small business owners and startups, as it lets you drive customer service efficiently without significant monetary investment. You can raise tickets, track progress, and ensure the help desk is seamless. However, as you grow to be a more complex organization with a larger customer base spread globally, these free ticketing software solutions may not help you scale. Multi-national, complex enterprises looking to scale help desk and improving customer retention should certainly look to paid ticketing software. While evaluating a paid software, consider the capabilities and features it offers. As per our findings, SolarWinds Web Help Desk offers the best of both worlds. It’s suitable both for small businesses and large enterprises looking for comprehensive ticketing software.

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