best help desk software for small business free

Zoho Desk

Zoho's free edition is the classic starting point for a very small support team: three user licences, email ticketing, and an easy path into the rest of Zoho's suite if you already use it. Zoho is explicit that the free plan is email ticketing right out of the box, so live chat, instant messaging and the knowledge base only arrive once you move to a paid edition, the cheapest being Express at US$7 per user a month. It suits a team that expects to grow into paid tiers rather than stay free forever.

Jira Service Management

Atlassian's service desk is free forever for three agents and, unusually for a free tier, takes requests through several routes at once: a customer portal, email, an embedded widget and chat in Microsoft Teams or Slack, plus alerting and on-call schedules. It is built around IT and internal service teams, so its vocabulary of requests, incidents and change management fits an internal help desk better than a customer-facing one. The step up to Standard is a steep $20 per agent a month, and it is worth checking whether your team will use the ITSM machinery before committing.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot's free tier gives two users a shared inbox, ticketing and live chat sitting directly on the free HubSpot CRM, so every conversation is attached to a contact record without any integration work. That CRM tie is why most small businesses pick it, and also why it is hard to leave later. Two seats is tight for anything but a founder-plus-one setup, and the features teams usually want next, a knowledge base and a customer portal, sit in the Professional tier far above the $7 Starter seat.

Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Spiceworks has run a genuinely free, ad-supported help desk for IT teams for years: the Core plan costs nothing, covers one to five technicians, and adds a customisable web portal so people can raise tickets without email. There is no server to run and no seat arithmetic, which makes it one of the shortest routes from nothing to a working ticket queue. The trade-offs are the ads, removed by the $5 per seat Premium plan, and an IT-department framing that fits internal support better than customer support.

Chatwoot

Chatwoot is an open-source, chat-first support platform you can either use on its cloud or run yourself. The cloud Hacker plan is free for two agents and 500 conversations a month and is limited to live chat, while the self-hosted Community Edition is free forever with no agent cap, which is where most small teams end up. Paid cloud plans start at $19 per agent a month, and the wider channels such as voice and the WhatsApp Cloud API are held back for those tiers.

tawk.to

tawk.to is the rare tool that is free with no agent limit at all: unlimited agents, unlimited chat volume and unlimited sites, funded by selling optionally hired chat agents rather than by charging for seats. It is live-chat-first with an omnichannel inbox behind it, so it suits a small business answering website visitors more than one running a formal ticket queue. Add-ons such as removing the tawk.to badge cost $29 a month, and there is no self-hosted option if you need the data on your own hardware.

Odoo Helpdesk

Odoo's One App Free plan is unusual: one app, unlimited users, no charge, which makes Helpdesk free for a whole team so long as Helpdesk is the only Odoo app you use. It pulls email, live chat and WhatsApp into one ticket view and inherits Odoo's automation and reporting. The catch is that boundary, since adding a second Odoo app moves you onto the Standard plan at around US$31 per user a month, so it fits teams that want a ticket desk and nothing else, or that were going to buy Odoo anyway.

osTicket

osTicket is the long-running open-source ticketing system, downloaded and run on your own PHP server, and it funnels email, web forms and API submissions into one queue with departments, ticket filters, SLA plans, canned responses and a customer portal. There is no seat charge because there is no vendor plan at all; the real cost is your server and the time spent keeping it patched. If you would rather not run it, the same team sells the hosted SupportSystem edition from $12 per agent a month.

FreeScout

FreeScout is a lightweight open-source shared inbox, deliberately modelled on Help Scout, that runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting and supports unlimited agents, tickets and mailboxes. Out of the box it centralises email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Slack and live chat in one place. The core application is free, but a good deal of what other tools bundle, including tags, time tracking and chat, is sold as separate modules under a lifetime licence per installation, so budget for a handful of them.

Hesk

Hesk is a 21-year-old PHP help desk aimed squarely at small and medium teams: install it on your own hosting and you get a ticket queue, canned responses, auto-assignment and a built-in knowledge base, with no per-agent billing anywhere. The free download carries a Powered by Hesk credit, and a one-time licence removes it without unlocking any extra features, so the free build is functionally the full product. Hesk Cloud exists from $299 a year, priced flat rather than per agent, if you would rather not run a server. It is plain rather than modern, which is much of the appeal.

UVdesk

UVdesk's open-source edition is free forever with no agent limit, installed on your own server, and is built on Symfony with a strong e-commerce slant: it ships integrations aimed at marketplace sellers alongside email, a form builder and social channels. That focus makes it a sensible fit for a small online retailer and an odd one for a services business. UVdesk's own hosted plans start at $8 per agent a month billed annually, with a two-agent minimum.

Zammad

Zammad is a fully open-source help desk under the GPL v3 that ships the complete feature set in its self-hosted build rather than a cut-down community edition, which is why teams wanting a serious ticket system without a subscription keep landing on it. It handles email, web forms, SMS, chat and Telegram, with LDAP integration, ticket templates and fine-grained permissions. Running it is more involved than uploading PHP, since it wants Ruby, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL, and Zammad's own hosted plans start at EUR 7 per agent a month if you would rather they ran it.