An IT ticketing system is software that streamlines and effectively manages the tasks of IT support teams. It provides mechanisms for users to raise issues or service requests and resource assignments, track progress and time taken for resolution, record interactions, and analytics.
The modern business environment is characterized by globally distributed workforces that capitalize on various work models — onsite, hybrid, and remote. The best IT ticketing software tools combine indispensable features in this environment: 24/7 accessibility, a centralized portal for common issue reporting and tracking, omnichannel support (portal, in-person, phone, virtual agent, and more), and user visibility into the status of customer issues.
The best IT ticketing systems offer many useful features to improve productivity, such as full context saving to facilitate seamless support through multiple technicians, a common knowledge base or help center for self-service, workflow automation, and AI assistance for agents.
Geekflare has tested dozens of IT ticketing systems based on their features, ease of use, pricing, and ROI. We have listed their pros, cons, best-fit customer segments, and most effective use cases.
- Freshservice – Best Overall for SMBs
- SuperOps – Best for MSPs
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus – Best for Medium to Large Businesses
- Zoho Desk – AI-powered Issue Resolution
- SysAid – Best for IT Asset Management Integration
- HappyFox – Best for Streamlined IT Ticket Management
- Jira – Best for DevOps Teams
- Spiceworks – Best Free IT Ticketing System
- SolarWinds – Best for Comprehensive ITSM Solutions
- ServiceNow – Best for Enterprise Scalability
- HelpDesk.com – AI-powered Ticket Summary
- InvGate – Best to Align with ITIL Practice
- LiveAgent – Best for Real-Time IT Support
- JitBit – Available as SaaS and On-premises
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Freshservice
Best Overall for SMBs
Freshservice is a full-fledged suite for IT service management from Freshworks. Freshworks is a business software company founded in India by Girish Mathrubootham in 2010. It is now headquartered in San Mateo, California, but most of its development centers are still in India.
Beyond IT Service Management (ITSM), the Freshservice suite scales to cover all IT activities by including IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management capabilities, and Project Portfolio Management. It also includes HR and admin services like employee onboarding and expense reimbursement.
Freshservice is integrated with Freshworks’ Freddy AI solutions for AI-powered automation and assistance for agents and users.
Here’s a snapshot of Freshservice’s rich capabilities.
- IT Service Management: AI-driven self-service, omnichannel support (email, phone, mobile app, AI chatbot, and more), automation of ticket assignment and prioritization, workflow automation, SLA tracking and management, a knowledge base for self-service, sandbox, AI-powered suggestions for agents, AI-powered analytics features, workload management, root cause analysis of problems, announcement scheduling for new deployments.
- IT Operations Management
- Alert management: Integrates with monitoring tools to automatically capture alerts and convert them into tickets, automated ticket assignment and prioritization, and AI insights to highlight critical issues among the alerts.
- On-call management: Customizable on-call schedules, automated escalation, and multi-channel notifications.
- Incident management: Customized workflows for major incidents, integrated collaboration tools’ (like MS Teams, Zoom) access from incident pages, automated post-incident reports for root cause analysis.
- Service health monitoring: Detailed data for quick resolution — associated incidents, blast radius, interdependencies between assets and services.
- IT Asset Management: Unified asset inventory, automatic capture of asset information with native and integrated discovery tools, advanced tools for managing cloud resources
- Integrated project management tools for IT initiatives
Freshservice Pros
Covers IT service management solution, IT operations management, IT asset management capabilities, project management, and enterprise service management in a centralized platform
Four-tiered subscription plan structure to deliver the right-sized solutions for different needs
Offers AI capabilities like AI chatbot, automatic suggestions for agents, automated post-incident reports, and AI-driven self-service
Freshservice Cons
Some users raised concerns about delays in customer service
Sometimes, the technical documentation is not up-to-date with the product upgrades
Freshservice Pricing
Subscription Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Ideal for |
---|---|---|
Starter | $19 | For starters |
Growth | $49 | For growing businesses across their LOBs |
Pro | $95 | ITSM + ITOM + Project Management for large organizations |
Enterprise | $119 | Service management solution for enterprises |
SuperOps
Best for MSPs
SuperOps is a unified PSA-RMM solution for MSPs (Managed Service Providers). Founded in 2020 by Arvind Parthiban and Jayakumar Karumbasalam, it is an Indian SaaS start-up focused on MSPs.
Its service desk module, a part of its PSA (Professional Services Automation) suite, includes many convenient and helpful advanced features for technicians to deliver exceptional service.
The well-thought-out UI combines everything related to a ticket — full context, internal and external collaboration, help for technicians, and even effort tracking and invoicing — in a single pane of glass.
The PSA suite further includes features such as client management, quote management, contract management, automated time tracking, invoice management, automation of mundane and repetitive tasks, and appointment scheduling/calendar.
SuperOps’ RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) suite includes support for asset management capabilities, policy management, patch management, network monitoring, and alert management. AI-powered insights help MSPs to focus on the alerts that matter.
SuperOps is integrated with Splashtop, a remote desktop and remote support software, for remote access. SuperOps also has handy tools for project management and IT documentation management. Ready integrations are available for many popular third-party MSP tools.
SuperOps Pros
Combines PSA (Professional Service Automation) and RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) in a single platform for MSPs
Well-thought-out, intuitive UI combines everything related to a ticket (full context, internal and external collaboration, help for technicians, and even effort tracking and invoicing) in a single pane of glass for maximum efficiency
AI-powered insights to help identify alerts that matter
Mobile apps available for Android and iOS users
SuperOps Cons
Expensive for startups
Document sharing is only available in the top-tiered plan
SuperOps Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per license/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Standard (PSA Only) | $79 | AI capabilities, Ticketing automation, Advanced work management, Support whitelabeling |
Standard (RMM Only) | $99 | Remote troubleshooting, Advanced patching, Remote event logs, Network Monitoring |
Pro (Unified Basic) | $129 | Proactive monitoring, IT documentation, Basic reporting features |
Super (Unified Advanced) | $159 | Load based ticket assignment, Efficiency Reports, Schedule Reports |
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
Best for Medium to Large Businesses
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a unified service management platform featuring an IT Service Management (ITSM) suite and service desks for various other business functions, such as HR, Facilities, Finance, Legal, and Travel.
ManageEngine is the enterprise IT management division of the Indian SaaS company Zoho, founded by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in 1996. ServiceDesk Plus impresses with the breadth and depth of its feature set for ITSM. Its notable features are listed in a nutshell below.
- Incident management: Multi-channel support, automation of ticket lifecycle workflow, automation of assignment, SLA tracking and management, escalation, automated notifications, visibility for end users
- IT asset management: Automated asset discovery with agent-based scans, barcode scans, network scans, and more, software license management with detailed analytics
- Problem management: Facilitation for problem identification, problem control, and error control
- CMDB (Configuration Management Database): Centralized repository, relationship maps, CI download or fetch as .csv files and relationship maps using CMDB APIs
- Service Catalog
- Change management
- Release management
- Project management
- Self-service: Knowledge base, Zia — conversational virtual support agent
- Multi-site support
- Service desk scheduler
- Customization: Fine-grained authorizations, custom request templates, custom actions, unrestricted programmability with Deluge
- IT operations management: Alert management, network monitoring, anomaly detection, endpoint management, applications monitoring, cloud resources management
- Advanced analytics reports and dashboards
- Integrations with many business apps, including MS Outlook, MS Teams, Jira, TeamViewer, and ChatGPT
ServiceDesk Plus is available in both on-premises and cloud deployment models.
ServiceDesk Plus Pros
Out-of-the-box support for industry best practices in incident management, change management, problem management, and release management
Enterprise service management enables consistent service delivery across all business functions from a common portal
Choice of on-premises and cloud deployment models
Standards-compliant data security and privacy practices
ServiceDesk Plus Cons
A bit pricey compared to the competition
Learning curve needed for full utilization
ServiceDesk Plus Pricing
ServiceDesk Plus has a fairly complicated pricing structure. It’s best to contact their sales department for a customized quote.
Its lowest tier plan — “Standard” — is free for up to five technicians and 500 nodes (i.e., IT assets). There are three other plans: Professional, Enterprise, and Asset-only.
The plans start at $13/technician/month.
Zoho Desk
AI-powered Issue Resolution
Zoho Desk is help desk software from Zoho. Zoho is an Indian SaaS company founded by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas in 1996. It is well-known for its Zoho Office suite.
Zoho Desk comes with many standout features to ace customer service. Here’s a recap of its features.
- Ticket Management: Omnichannel (email, live chat, messaging, social media, telephone, webforms), organize agents into teams, filter and organize tickets, different views of ticket backlog, save ticket views, ticket peeks, private notes, collision detection, ticket tags, ticket sharing, time tracking, pulls up all info related to the customer when their name is typed in the search bar, custom fields, business hours and holiday list
- Automation: Ticket assignment, notifications, Service level agreements (SLAs) and escalations, workflows
- AI: Answer bot (based on the knowledge base) for customers and agents, auto-tagging of tickets, sentiment analysis, anomaly detection, auto-generation of responses, predict ticket fields to ease agent workload
- Self-Service: Guided conversations, embed self-service into websites and apps, knowledge base, community
- Multi-department and multi-brand support
- Reporting: Dashboards, time-based reports (first response time, average response time, and average resolution time), agent performance parameters, mobile app for analytics for managers, knowledge base usage, custom reports, customer satisfaction surveys, set up emails for reports
- Integrations and APIs
- Mobile apps
- Audit log
Zoho Desk Pros
Great set of AI features, including answer bot, auto-tagging of tickets, sentiment analysis, anomaly detection, auto-generation of responses, and ticket field prediction
Multi-department and multi-brand support
Mobile apps for Android and iOS
Integrates well with other Zoho products like Zoho CRM
Zoho Desk Cons
Customization features such as ticket templates, multi-department support, etc., are not available in the standard plan
UI is confusing for beginners
Zoho Desk Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per user/month) | Description |
---|---|---|
Standard | $14 | All the essential support features to augment your customer service team |
Professional | $23 | Simplified collaboration and process automation functionalities for fast-growing teams |
Enterprise | $40 | Advanced AI and customization capabilities to enable enterprise-grade support |
SysAid
Best for IT Asset Management Integration
SysAid is an ITSM software tool that emphasizes Gen AI to help both end users and agents. It is an Israeli ITSM software company founded by Israel Lifshitz in 2002. SysAid offers three plans—Help Desk, ITSM, and Enterprise—to cater to companies of different sizes and needs.
Here’s a round-up of SysAid’s notable features.
- Ticket Management: Access to info about all relevant users and assets inside the ticket, automations for assignment and escalation, visibility into the entire timeline of the ticket, UI and record fields customization, users can submit tickets with screen captures and videos, email integration
- Self-service: Self-service portal, GenAI chatbot, automated password reset and one-click issue submissions, knowledge base, search functionality
- IT Asset Management: Remote control, advanced discovery, real-time alerts, CMDB, software license management, patch management
- Problem Management: ITIL-aligned, create a problem record, add incidents from within the incident, link assets, configuration items, tasks, and FAQs, and access the CMDB for effective analysis of root causes
- Change Management: Based on ITIL
- Workflow Automation: For tasks like employee onboarding
- GenAI: AI chatbot for end users and agents, AI chatbot in MS Teams, AI Emailbot
- Reporting and Analytics: Summaries of the previous week’s data, forecasts, and recommendations based on industry benchmarks
SysAid Pros
Support for GenAI-based chatbots and email bots
Access to assets, problem records, change requests, and more inside the incident tickets
Out-of-the-box integrations with many popular business software apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, etc.
ITIL-aligned problem management and change management support
SysAid Cons
Pricing information is not available
A few features, like the self-service portal and knowledge base, can be improved
SysAid Pricing
SysAid offers a free trial for evaluation. Contact SysAid for pricing.
HappyFox
Best for Streamlined IT Ticket Management
HappyFox is a versatile stand-alone help desk software application. It can be used by any business function—such as IT, Customer Support, HR, Finance, or Facilities—for its help desk operation.
HappyFox, Inc., founded in 2011, is a SaaS company headquartered in Irvine, California. The software includes ticketing, business intelligence, chat, an AI chatbot, and workflow automation.
HappyFox bundles many standout features for efficient help desk operation. Here’s an overview of its features.
- Omnichannel: Email, phone, chatbot, social media, messaging, and web requests
- Ticketing: Categorization, private notes, templates, actions such as clone, relate, merge, and split, canned responses, task management (break down complex tickets into tasks and manage them inside the tickets page)
- Self-Service: Knowledge base, multi-lingual support, no-code support portal builder, chatbots
- Out-of-the-box integrations: With many popular SaaS apps like CRM, online stores, call centers, and project management tools
- Automation: Automate mundane tasks with smart rules, set auto-assignment rules, automate escalations and ticket re-assignment for SLA targets, automatic notifications on email, Slack, and MS Teams, cross-platform automations for business processes
- Reporting: Ticket inflow report, agent activity report, performance report (resolution, response time, closure), custom fields report, ticket distribution report across status, category, priority, and assignee, satisfaction survey report, customer reports, automation reports, custom reports, and visualizations
- Customization: Custom roles and permissions, custom portal UI, custom fields, custom ticket queues
- Asset Management: Asset repository, easy import and export of asset data, bulk update, link assets to tickets and users, custom fields, add assets by scanning barcodes and QR codes, REST APIs for asset data sharing with other apps
- Compliance: Audit logs, automatic ticket deletion/redaction
- Contact Management: Live repo of customers (or end users)
- Enterprise-grade Security
- Mobile apps
HappyFox Pros
Versatile help desk software usable across business functions
Relatively quick implementation and easy set-up
Includes contact management
Out-of-the-box integrations include many popular SaaS apps such as Okta, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
HappyFox Cons
Not a unified solution for enterprise IT teams
Asset management capabilities are only available in the pro plan or above
HappyFox Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per agent/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Basic | $9 | Unlimited Tickets, 5 agents, SLA Management |
Team | $39 | Multi-brand Helpdesk, 24/5 Email Support |
Pro | $89 | Proactive Agent Collision, Task Management, 24/7 Email Support |
Enterprise PRO | Custom | Agent Scripting, 24/7 Phone Support, Customer Success Manager |
Jira
Best for DevOps Teams
Jira, a project management tool popular with agile development teams, has been repurposed to create an ITSM solution — “Jira Service Management”.
Jira Service Management is a product of Atlassian, an Australian company founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. Jira Service Management is a great choice for DevOps and IT teams of SaaS and e-commerce companies whose development teams use Jira.
When integrated, Atlassian’s suite of products covers the entire DevOps lifecycle. They provide a unified platform connecting developers, IT operations, and business teams, enabling easy collaboration and improved efficiency.
Customers can also conveniently integrate tools of their choice (other than Atlassian) into the chain. Jira Service Management includes advanced features, which are listed below.
- Request Management: Service desk portal, AI-powered virtual service agent, request queues, automated request assignment, a self-service portal, knowledge base, SLA tracking, automated escalations, analytics reports, and dashboards, built-in tool for collecting customer feedback, Slack and MS Teams integration — two-way sync between messaging conversations and tickets, form builder for requests, form templates
- Incident Management: Set on-call schedules, routing rules, and escalation policies, centralized alert management, link support tickets to major incidents, updates to stakeholders using multiple notification channels (like SMS, email, mobile push), direct integration with status page, analytics on major incidents, post-mortem report templates in Confluence
- Problem Management: Problem logging, group and link incident tickets to problem tickets, access information from Assets, root cause analysis — visibility into related code deployments and commit details, initiate change procedures
- Change Management: Visibility into the full context for change requests, automated risk assessment, visibility into assets and the service registry for dependencies and potential impact, approval workflow configuration, authority to groups to avoid bottlenecks, automate the approval and deployment of low-risk changes, out-of-the-box automations, change calendar, connect to CI/CD tools to keep records of changes without manually creating requests, deployment gating to automatically push low-risk changes to production, or to require additional approvals when necessary
- Asset Management: Asset tracking, access asset details from Jira tickets, asset discovery through network scans, asset reviews
- Configuration Management: Dependency mapping, infrastructure discovery through network scans, automations
- Knowledge Management: Knowledge base repository, analytics, AI-powered search
Jira Service Management is available as a mobile app for iOS and Android.
Jira Service Management Pros
Part of a unified and open toolchain for DevOps
AI-powered virtual service agent
Vast apps marketplace for out-of-the-box integrations
Jira Service Management Cons
Asset and Service Configuration Management is not available in the standard plan
Complex setup process
Jira Service Management Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per agent/month) | Description |
---|---|---|
Free | $0 | Free forever for 3 agents |
Standard | $19.04 | Everything you need to get started |
Premium | $47.82 | Scale your service management |
Enterprise | Custom | Advanced analytics, scale, and security for enterprises |
Spiceworks
Best Free IT Ticketing System
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is a completely “free for life” help desk system. It is part of a free Cloud Tools ecosystem that includes online inventory (including an IP scanner), a Connectivity Dashboard, remote support, and vendor contracts.
Spiceworks is a for-profit community for IT professionals. It also runs a news portal covering news, trends, and tech-related topics.
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk has notable features, which are listed below.
- Ticket Management: Customizable service portal, automated categorization and assignment, custom ticket queues, filter tickets based on multiple criteria, automated responses
- Customized knowledge base that can include both private and community content
- Reporting and dashboards: Power BI Desktop Data Connector is available to view reports in Power BI
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk Pros
Completely free cloud-hosted help desk solution
Sufficient features for many small businesses
Free community support
Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk Cons
Not HIPAA compliant
As a free tool maintained by a for-profit business, it is uncertain about future support. The risk impact is greater as it is cloud-based.
SolarWinds
Best for Comprehensive ITSM Solutions
SolarWinds ITSM is a software suite that supports IT ticketing, asset management, and remote support. SolarWinds Corporation is a public American software company that develops software for monitoring and managing networks and IT infrastructure.
SolarWinds supports the following functions of IT Service Management.
- Ticket management / Help desk
- Asset management
- Reports and dashboards
- Remote support
SolarWinds Pros
Offers Chat feature in the service desk between users and techs
Out-of-the-box remote support feature
Increase productivity with the help of integrated workflow task management
Offers 30-day free trial to explore its fully functional features
SolarWinds Cons
User reports frequent lag in the mobile app
Require some time to understand its features and capabilities
SolarWinds Pricing
Contact Sales for a customized quote.
ServiceNow
Best for Enterprise Scalability
ServiceNow is the market leader in cloud-based ITSM solutions. Located in Santa Clara, California, ServiceNow is a public company offering a wide range of cloud-based business software solutions, mostly in enterprise service management.
ServiceNow has invested heavily in AI in the last few years and positions it as a key differentiating feature of its software.
ServiceNow ITSM bundles various notable features for ITSM.
- Request Management: Multi-channel support, chatbot-embedded service portals, service catalog builder, single-pane agent view, drag-and-drop request workflows, two-way automatic notifications, AI-powered assistance for agents, Kanban-style task boards, service operations workspace
- Knowledge Management: GenAI-powered knowledge creation from closed incidents and other sources, out-of-the-box process for user feedback management, Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) v6 verified, powerful search functionality, analytics about content use, timelines, age, feedback, and gaps, subscriptions to notifications about updates to articles and knowledge bases, translation management
- SLA Management: Centralized SLA repo, visual service timeline, configure SLA flows using a drag-and-drop interface, SLA timer with potential breach warnings, automated status notifications, reporting and dashboards
- Incident Management: Out-of-the-box best practices workflows to identify, track, and resolve high‑impact incidents, incident response playbooks, on-call scheduling
- Performance Analytics: Purpose-built metrics and dashboards, real-time visibility, automatic alerts about anomalies, blend in-platform results with Excel worksheets or JDBC data sources
- AI Features: Search summarization, chat summarization, incident summarization, resolution notes generation, knowledge generation, classification and routing of tasks, cases, and incidents, task and content suggestions for agents, major incident detection, flag similarity across common issues, predict time to resolution
- Configuration Management Database (CMDB): CMDB workspace, single consolidated record from multiple sources, automatically map services to IT infrastructure, multiple ways to ensure data correctness, completeness, and compliance: an automated mechanism to prevent duplicate CIs, comprehensive health dashboards, on-demand and scheduled data certification, and automated remediation workflows
- Digital Product Release: Release readiness dashboard (release start and end dates, status of tasks and policies, change requests, and more), release templates with mapped tasks and policies for each phase of the release, out-of-the-box policies to automate readiness checks, import features from CI/CD tools to visualize and plan products into release versions
- Change Management: Tailor change activities and flows to specific use cases, risk scoring, automate approvals for low-risk changes, change calendar, CAB workbench
- Problem Management: Out-of-the-box best practices, automated notifications, reports, and dashboards to proactively analyze service performance and configurations, visibility into known errors and workarounds
- Asset Management: Asset database, asset tracking, asset procurement and PO creation, contract management
- Digital Portfolio Management: Unified view of related services, applications, and products
- DevOps Change Velocity: An add-on feature connects dev tools to change management for automatic ticketing and approval, out-of-the-box policies and workflows, creating customized policies and workflows
- Continual Improvement Management
- IT Operations Management is available as a separate module
ServiceNow ITSM Pros
Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) v6 verified knowledge management module
Advanced AI features like search summarization, chat summarization, incident summarization, resolution notes generation, knowledge generation, and task and content suggestions for agents
Certified integrations with leading business software and IT support applications such as Jira, DocuSign, etc.
ServiceNow ITSM Cons
Setup process is time consuming
Non-technical users need extra training to use it
ServiceNow ITSM Pricing
Contact Sales for a customized quote.
HelpDesk.com
AI-powered Ticket Summary
HelpDesk.com is a cloud-based ticketing software solution with a neat UI and thoughtful features such as team collaboration, analytics, reporting, and more. It doesn’t include any IT-specific features. It can be used to build help desks for any function in any organization—IT, customer support, HR, Finance, Facilities, and more.
HelpDesk is a product of a Polish public company named Text. Here’s a summary of HelpDesk’s features.
- Ticket Management System: Single feature-rich portal for agents, custom fields, rich text message area (AI-based text formatting, links, images, attachments, screen recordings), audit log
- Team Collaboration: Collision detection, ticket assignment, group agents into teams, private notes
- Automation: Automated workflows, auto-assignment (round-robin), canned responses, automation templates, macros for updating tickets with a preset series of actions
- AI-powered features: Ticket summarization, text enhancements (tone adjustment, grammar, spelling), automatic ticket language detection
- Analytics and Reporting: Six out-of-the-box reports, export data, weekly summary reports, feedback request
- Personalization: Custom domain and reply address, create custom views, add signatures to responses, multiple email templates
- APIs for integrations
HelpDesk.com Pros
Rich text features like AI-based text formatting, links, images, attachments, and screen recordings
Offers Gen AI features such as Ticket summarization, text enhancements, automatic ticket language detection
Versatile software suitable for any service desk
24/7/365 customer support
HelpDesk.com Cons
Can not export ticket metadata for a specified date range in the team plan
Security assistance is only available in the enterprise plan
Doesn’t include self-service features like knowledge bases and chatbots; they are sold separately
HelpDesk.com Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per agent/month) | Ideal for |
---|---|---|
Team | $29 | For growing teams with entry-level needs |
Business | $50 | For businesses with multi-brand operations |
Enterprise | Custom | For corporations requiring an individual approach |
InvGate
Best to Align with ITIL Practice
InvGate is an ITSM software with a neat, thoughtful, and modern UI. It is aligned with ITIL best practices and fully certified in 7 Pink Verified ITIL4 best practices.
InvGate is an Argentine company founded in 2008 by Ariel Gesto, a former IT manager. It offers two products: “Service Desk” for ITSM and ESM (Enterprise Service Management) and “Insight” for IT Operations Management.
InvGate Service Desk includes many innovative and thoughtful features. Here’s an overview of its features.
- Ticket Management: Combines everything in a single pane of glass, linked tickets, tagging other agents privately, automated actions like approval requests, reassigning, sending email, and escalation, multi-channel support natively and through integrations
- Self-Service Portal: Customizable, mobile responsive, status tracking, notifications, allows end users to update requests and give approvals, service catalog, can add enterprise services, knowledge base, search bar (also provides info while typing), broadcasts and intelligent notifications, feedback and surveys, localization (time zone, language, and currency)
- SLAs: Define different resolution targets for issues based on rules, define different targets for different phases of issue resolution, visual indicator of the agreed SLA response time,
- Automation: Automation of ticket routing, ticket assignment, and ticket escalation; automations based on the status of compliance with SLAs. No-code custom automations, advanced no-code workflow builder, pre-built workflow templates for employee onboarding and offboarding, training requests, asset loans, and more automatically generate and distribute reports on a regular schedule
- Knowledge Base: Rich-media editor, role-based administration, article recommendations to end users at the time of request creation, article recommendations to agents, article usage statistics and feedback, knowledge base integration with service catalog
- Analytics and Reporting: Real-time data, reporting personalization, over 150 built-in metrics, multi-departmental reporting, customizable dashboards, sharing reports and dashboards with colleagues and management, reports can be shared with both billed and unbilled users
- AI Features: GenAI-improved responses, ticket summarization, creation of knowledge articles from incident resolutions, brief summary of relevant knowledge articles in the virtual agent
- Problem Management: ITIL-aligned best practices, associate incidents with problems, update problem-linked tickets globally
- ITIL-certified for Change Enablement, Incident Management, Infrastructure and Platform Management, Knowledge Management, Problem Management, Service Desk, Service Request Management
- Enterprise Service Management: Build any service desk using custom forms, custom workflows, workflow templates, localization support
- Support for gamification (rewards and incentives for agents)
- Both cloud and on-premises deployment methods are available for enterprises
InvGate Pros
Offers Cloud and on-premise deployment options
Provide low code automation solution
Increases team productivity using gamification element
Prioritise SLAs based on impact and urgency
InvGate Cons
Some features, like the advanced workflow builder, require some learning
Reporting features can be improved. But, improvements and new features are rolled out every few months.
InvGate Service Desk Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per agent/month) | Offerings |
---|---|---|
Starter | $17 | 5 Agents, Simple configuration, Self-service portal |
Pro | $40 | 6-50 Agents, ITIL-aligned Workflows, Automation, Enhanced Support |
Enterprise | Custom | Custom agents, On-Premise hosting (optional), Concurrent licensing, Advanced security configurations |
LiveAgent
Best for Real-Time IT Support
LiveAgent is a cloud-based, function-agnostic help desk software. It includes excellent features for real-time support. It features a light-weight but impressive live chat solution and a call center software solution.
LiveAgent is a product of Quality Unit, a Slovakian software company founded in 2004 by Andrej Harsani and Viktor Zeman.
LiveAgent contains an impressive list of features that it supports in the use cases. Here’s a round-up of its features.
- Ticketing System: Agent collision detection, agent ranking, audit log, drag and drop attachments in tickets, automated ticket distribution, business hours, canned messages, contact database, contact fields, contact form gallery, contact groups, copy-paste images in tickets, multi-department support, custom roles, email forwarding, email notifications, email templates, export tickets into PDF and HTML, filters for viewing and categorizing tickets, GIFs in tickets, hybrid ticket streams (journey across different channels), internal notes, mass actions, merge tickets, multiple ticket tabs, online ticket history (URL), pause ticket routing to specific agents, rules-based automation, SLA management, sounds, spam filters, split tickets between agents, custom ticket fields, time rules, time tracking, universal inbox, WYSIWYG editor for responses
- Live Chat: Customizable chat button, chat button animations, chat button gallery, chat distribution, Google Analytics tracking, chat history, chat invitation gallery, chats overview, chat window docking, internal chat, max queue length, online visitors tracking, proactive chat invitations, real-time typing view
- Call Center: Automatic call-back requests, call button, call detail records, call device scheduling, call routing, call transfers, internal calls, IVR, softphones (VoIP), video calls, unlimited call recordings
- Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, X, Viber, WhatsApp
- Reporting: Agent availability, agent ranking overview, agent reports, channel reports, SLA compliance overview, department reports, tag reports, ticket time reports
- Gamification: Benchmarks and leaderboards, levels, rewards, and badges
- Language-adaptable widgets
- Customer Portal: Knowledge base, attachments in articles, feedback and suggestions, forums, search widget, WYSIWYG editor for articles
- AI answer assistant
- Android and iOS mobile apps
- Integrations with many popular business software apps
LiveAgent Pros
Excellent for real-time support through live chat and phone
Includes call center software
Offers 200+ integrations such as Salesforce, Magneto, Wordpress, and more
LiveAgent Cons
Lacks ITSM features as it is a generic help desk tool
Does not offer reporting functionality in small business plan
LiveAgent Pricing
Plan | Pricing (per agent/month) | Description |
---|---|---|
Small Business | $9 | An advanced plan with less limits and more features |
Medium Business | $29 | A versatile and balanced plan for full-scale customer support team |
Large Business | $49 | An all-inclusive plan with sky high limits and full capabilities |
Enterprise | $69 | A full-scale solution with extra support & exclusive services |
JitBit
Available as SaaS and On-premises
JitBit is a cost-effective help desk software that is available in both cloud and on-premises versions. JitBit features multi-channel support but is optimized for email support.
JitBit was founded by Alex Yumashev and Max Al Farakh in 2005.
JitBit includes asset management capabilities, in addition to help desk features. Here’s a list of JitBit’s features.
- Ticket Management: Categorizing and tagging tickets, file attachments, built-in anti-virus for attachments, screen capture and upload to the ticket from the app, email integration, time tracking, ticket reminders, linking and merging tickets, “close as duplicate”, subtickets, visibility into user/company history, anti-spam, custom fields, customizable working hours and timezones (global or per-user), customizable email templates, canned responses, multi-assign, collision detection, multi-lingual support, import/export, audit logs, GPT integration for response suggestions, calendar view, scheduled tickets
- Live chat tool
- Asset Management
- Knowledge Base: Self-service customer portal, search engine, granular permissions, access logs and reports, AI-powered auto suggest
- Reports: Resolution time, time of day distribution, response speed, Kanban view, custom report builder, export to Excel and CSV, dashboard
- Multi-department support
- Automation engine for workflows
- Customizable design, custom domain
- Integrations with popular business apps, REST API
- C# source code license available for developers
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android, mobile web UI
JitBit Pros
Provides suggestions for Knowledge base articles while the user is typing
REST APIs and 500+ integrations with popular business apps such as Google Drive, Asana, Slack, and more
Provides an “idea” forum for customers to suggest and vote for new features
JitBit Cons
Downloadable backup is only available in top plans
Does not offer direct social media integration
JitBit Pricing
Plan | Pricing (monthly) | Ideal for |
---|---|---|
Freelancer | $29 | The essentials to provide basic support for clients |
Startup | $69 | For aspiring teams getting traction |
Company | $129 | Established profitable businesses |
Enterprise | $249 | Big and serious enterprises with thousands of clients |
Comparison Table of the Best IT Ticketing Systems
The following table provides a comparative summary of pricing and key features of the best IT ticketing systems.
Product Name | Key Differentiating Features | Deployment Options | Pricing (monthly) |
---|---|---|---|
Freshservice | Unified platform covering ITSM, IT Operations, Asset Mgmt, Project Mgmt, and ESM, powerful AI features | Cloud-based | $19/user |
SuperOps | PSA for MSPs, modern UI | Cloud-based | $79/license |
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus | Unified platform for IT teams, AI virtual service agent, support for ITIL processes | Cloud-based and on-premises | Custom |
Zoho Desk | Ticket peeks, AI predictions (auto-fill) for ticket fields, AI answer bot for agents and customers, auto-generate agent responses, multi-department and multi-brand support | Cloud-based | $14/user |
SysAid | ITIL-aligned, asset management, submit tickets with screen captures and videos, AI chatbot, AI Emailbot | Cloud-based | Custom |
HappyFox | Ticket actions such as clone, relate, merge, and split, task management, audit logs, contact management | Cloud-based | $9/agent |
Jira | DevOps integrations, robust change management, AI virtual service agent | Cloud-based | FREE |
Spiceworks | Custom ticket queues, automated responses, knowledge base, community support | Cloud-based | FREE |
SolarWinds | Asset management, remote support | Cloud-based | Custom |
ServiceNow | Many advanced Gen AI features, release management, knowledge management | Cloud-based | Custom |
HelpDesk.com | Rich text messages, 24/7/365 support, ticket summarization, text enhancements | Cloud-based | $29/agent |
InvGate | ITIL-certified, impressive self-service portal, Gen AI features, gamification | Cloud-based and on-premises | $17/agent |
LiveAgent | Live chat, call center software, extensive and thoughtful ticketing system features | Cloud-based | $9/agent |
JitBit | Excellent ticketing system features and email support features | Cloud-based and on-premises | $29 |
What is an IT Ticketing System?
An IT ticketing system is a software tool to streamline and effectively manage the tasks of IT support teams. They provide mechanisms for raising issues or service requests by users, resource assignment, tracking progress and time taken for resolution, recording interactions, and analytics.
A ticketing system is also called help desk software, as support teams and portals are often known as help desks.
Key Features of IT Ticketing Systems
The following are the key features of an IT ticketing system.
- Ticket Creation & Management: Tickets are the heart of IT service desk operations. Each issue, incident, or request is recorded in a “ticket.” The ticket contains all the information related to the issue like the issue description, the reporter, the assigned technician, date of reporting, due date for resolution, current status, steps taken, and more.
- Automation: The best IT ticketing systems include several automation features. Some of the common automated tasks are assignment of agents, escalations when SLA terms are breached, and status change notifications. Many ticketing systems also facilitate users to set up custom automations. Many vendors have added Gen AI features to assist agents. Some of the common GenAI-powered features are ticket summarization, automated response drafts, knowledge article generation, and automated knowledge-based article suggestions.
- Self-Service Portal: Self-service portals make it easy for users to resolve issues or address their needs on their own. Self-service portals contain a knowledge base in the form of articles, FAQs, known issues and workarounds, and more. Knowledge bases are typically enhanced with search functionality and AI-powered answer bots and chatbots.
- Collaboration: The best IT ticketing systems facilitate collaboration among agents for speedy resolution of issues. Examples of collaboration features are internal chat, sharing tickets, agent re-assignment, private notes and tagging others, and full context saving (through ticket history, etc.) so that a new agent can resume from the last action instead of starting from scratch.
- Reporting & Analytics: The best IT ticketing systems support out-of-the-box reports to monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. Many applications also allow users to create custom reports and dashboards.
Benefits of IT Support Software
The top benefits of using IT support software are the following.
- Improved Response Times: IT ticketing software streamlines the process of issue resolution, leading to improved response times.
- Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: IT ticketing software comes with many features, like automation, AI, and collaboration tools, to assist agents. This results in enhanced efficiency and productivity.
- Better Tracking and Management of IT Issues: IT ticketing software serves as the single source of truth about IT issues that is visible to users, agents, and managers. This helps better track and manage IT issues.
- Increased User Satisfaction: The ease of use of IT support software and better response times lead to increased user satisfaction.
- Cost Reduction: The enhanced efficiency and productivity reduce the cost of IT support and operations.
- Standardized Processes: Automated workflows ensure that standardized processes are followed.
- Knowledge Management: IT ticketing systems make it easy to create knowledge articles and content in various forms, maintain them, and serve them up to users when they need them.
Common Challenges in Ticket Management Systems
A few challenges that can impact the efficiency of ticket management systems are discussed below.
- Ticket Overload: Sometimes, ticket volumes can be high, resulting in the team being overloaded. This often leads to delayed issue resolution and user dissatisfaction.
- Miscommunication: Unclear or inaccurate descriptions of the issue and missing details cause a lot of problems for support teams. Miscommunication may cause issues to be assigned to the wrong teams or lead to incorrect prioritization.
- Ticket Prioritization: Fast and correct triage of issues is tricky. Incorrect triage leads to considerable loss of time. AI-powered suggestions and prioritization hold a lot of promise in this area.
- Ticket Duplication and Redundancy: Multiple users reporting the same issue make it difficult for IT teams to manage and prioritize requests. Sometimes, in systems that automatically convert emails and messages into tickets, thank you emails from users upon issue resolution also get added as new tickets! Some vendors have added thoughtful features like linking tickets and “thank you detection” to address such issues.
- Complexity of Automation: Many top IT ticketing systems include powerful workflow builders for setting up custom automations. Such tools often have a steep learning curve. Their complexity inhibits many teams from using them effectively.
Future Trends in IT Ticketing Solutions
AI, automation, and application integration will dominate the future of IT ticketing solutions.
AI, especially Generative AI, is already a part of many leading products. Its effectiveness and reliability are below par at the moment. However, AI/ML tech is improving fast and will soon reach a highly usable level. AI/ML technology can be expected to assist agents and customers in every step of customer service soon.
No-code automation will make its way into more products, and more teams will leverage it in the near future.
The trend toward application integration will continue. Vendors will continue to add more apps to their marketplace offerings.