Best Free Help Desk Software in 2026
Free help desk plans are capped by agents, and that single fact makes this category behave differently from every other kind of software.
A free CRM caps your contacts, so it gets more expensive as you succeed. A free help desk caps the people answering tickets, which means it gets more expensive as your support load grows, which happens for reasons that are not always success. A bad release, a pricing change, a scaling problem: any of those adds agents.
So the question is not which free plan is most generous today. It is what happens on the week you need a fifth person answering tickets.
The ratings
Aggregated by Toolradar across G2, Capterra and SourceForge. Around 44,000 reviews across the products below.
| Tool | Aggregated rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Splashtop | 4.8 | 1,445 |
| Document360 | 4.7 | 776 |
| Tidio | 4.6 | 2,345 |
| Hiver | 4.6 | 1,421 |
| TeamViewer | 4.6 | 15,579 |
| HubSpot Service | 4.4 | 12,000 |
| Freshdesk | 4.4 | 7,041 |
| Jira Service Management | 4.3 | 963 |
| Insightly | 4.1 | 1,586 |
TeamViewer's 4.6 across 15,579 reviews is the best score-to-evidence combination here, drawn from 4.5 on G2 across 3,852, 4.6 on Capterra across 11,607 and 4.7 on SourceForge, all in agreement. It is also not a help desk in the ticketing sense, which is worth keeping in mind.
The two products most people actually mean when they say help desk, HubSpot Service and Freshdesk, both sit at 4.4 on samples of 12,000 and 7,041 respectively, with G2 and Capterra agreeing within a tenth in both cases. No platform disagreement, no distortion. Those are honest, consensus numbers, and they say these are solid rather than beloved products.
That is the expected result for software people are assigned rather than choose. It is the same pattern as our project management guide, where the broadest tools score lowest and the narrowest score highest. Splashtop at 4.8 does one thing.
The free plans, verified
Prices checked against Toolradar's pricing records between 16 and 23 August 2026.
| Tool | Free plan | First paid tier | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Splashtop | Personal, free | Business Access, $9.99/month | 16 Aug 2026 |
| HubSpot Service | Free Tools | Starter, $15/user/month | 18 Aug 2026 |
| Freshdesk | Free | Growth, $15/agent/month | 19 Aug 2026 |
| Hiver | Free | Lite, $19/user/month | 19 Aug 2026 |
| Jira Service Management | Free | Standard, $21/agent/month | 22 Aug 2026 |
| TeamViewer | Free | Remote Access, $24.90/month | 23 Aug 2026 |
| Insightly | Free | Plus, $29/user/month | 22 Aug 2026 |
| Tidio | Free | Starter, $29/month | 23 Aug 2026 |
| Document360 | Free | Standard, $149/month | 17 Aug 2026 |
Freshdesk and HubSpot Service are tied at $15 as the cheapest real help desk step, and the spread from there runs to $149. Tidio's $29 looks expensive next to them until you notice it is priced per account rather than per agent.
Freshdesk, the strongest free help desk
Freshdesk's free plan is the most complete in this article: up to 2 agents, with email ticketing, a knowledge base, basic automation and reporting.
That is a real support desk rather than a shared inbox, and for a small company where support is one person's part-time job, it will run indefinitely at no cost.
Growth is $15 per agent per month, checked 19 August 2026, and 4.4 across 7,041 reviews with G2 at 4.4 and Capterra at 4.5.
The agent cap is the thing to watch, and Freshdesk's is the tightest here. Two agents is a genuine limit that a growing company hits fast, and the step to $15 each is not painful, which is presumably the design.
HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot's free tools give you ticketing, live chat, email templates and a shared inbox, connected to the same free CRM covered in our lead management guide.
That connection is the whole argument. A support agent seeing the customer's full history, including what sales promised them, is worth more than any feature in a standalone ticketing tool.
Starter is $15 per user per month, checked 18 August 2026, with Professional at $90 and Enterprise at $130 on this record.
4.4 across 12,000 reviews, G2 at 4.4 and Capterra at 4.5, in agreement.
The caution is the one we have flagged before: HubSpot's free tier is the best free product in several categories at once, and the ladder above it is steep. Adopt it knowing the whole company's data will end up inside it.
Tidio, if support happens in chat
Tidio is live chat first, ticketing second, with an AI agent that handles the repetitive questions before a human sees them.
For ecommerce, where most support is pre-purchase and time-sensitive, this ordering is correct and a ticket queue is the wrong shape entirely. Someone asking whether an item ships by Friday will not open a ticket, they will leave.
Free plan with a conversation allowance, Starter at $29 a month, checked 23 August 2026, priced per account rather than per agent.
4.6 across 2,345 reviews, with G2 at 4.6 and Capterra at 4.7.
Hiver, if support happens in Gmail
Hiver turns a Gmail inbox into a help desk: assignment, status, notes and SLAs, inside the mail client your team already lives in.
The argument is adoption. A support tool people have to remember to open is a support tool that gets checked twice a day. One that appears in the inbox does not have that problem.
Free plan, Lite at $19 per user per month, checked 19 August 2026. 4.6 across 1,421 reviews, 1,276 of them on G2.
It is the right answer for a team of three answering support from a shared address, and the wrong one for a company that needs a customer-facing portal.
Jira Service Management
If your engineering team runs on Jira, this is internal IT support and incident management that links natively to the issues developers are already working.
Free plan, Standard at $21 per agent per month, checked 22 August 2026, rated 4.3 across 963 G2 reviews.
For external customer support it is heavier than it needs to be. For an internal help desk in a software company, nothing else here is close.
TeamViewer and Splashtop, the remote-access pair
Both are remote support rather than ticketing: you connect to the customer's machine and fix the thing yourself.
TeamViewer is free for personal use with Remote Access at $24.90 a month, checked 23 August 2026, rated 4.6 across 15,579 reviews, the largest sample in this article.
Splashtop is free for personal use with Business Access at $9.99, checked 16 August 2026, and carries the highest rating here at 4.8 across 1,445, split 4.8 on G2 and 4.7 on Capterra.
Splashtop is roughly a third of TeamViewer's price with a better rating on a smaller sample. If remote support is what you actually need, that comparison is worth an afternoon.
Document360
A knowledge base rather than a help desk, free tier available, Standard at $149 a month, checked 17 August 2026, rated 4.7 across 776.
It is in this list because of a fact that matters more than tool choice: the cheapest ticket is the one nobody files. Its analytics show which searches returned nothing, which is a direct list of the articles to write next. We covered it in more depth in our documentation guide.
The agent cap, and what to do about it
Every free plan here caps agents, and there is a predictable, expensive mistake that follows.
Teams share a login to stay under the cap. Two people on one account, then three. It works, and it destroys everything the tool was for: you lose per-agent assignment, response-time reporting, and any ability to know who answered what. The support desk becomes a shared inbox with extra steps.
If you are sharing a seat, you have already outgrown the free plan and are paying for it in visibility rather than in dollars.
The second trap is measuring the wrong thing. Free plans usually include ticket volume and first response time, and both reward speed over resolution. A team optimising for first response sends more "we're looking into it" messages and resolves nothing faster. If your free tier only reports those two numbers, track resolution time by hand rather than letting the available metric decide the behaviour.
The third is that support software cannot fix a product problem. If forty percent of tickets are about one confusing screen, the correct tool is a designer, not a faster queue. Every product in this article will happily help you process that volume forever.
Choosing
A small company that needs a real ticketing system: Freshdesk free, and budget $15 an agent for the day you pass two.
You already use HubSpot, or want the CRM too: HubSpot Service free tools.
Ecommerce, support happens before the sale: Tidio.
Three people answering a shared Gmail address: Hiver.
Internal IT support in a company that runs on Jira: Jira Service Management.
Remote support: Splashtop at $9.99, and compare it seriously against TeamViewer at $24.90 before defaulting to the familiar name.
And write the knowledge base. It is the only thing in this article that reduces ticket volume rather than processing it.
Related: free CRM software, free documentation tools and free lead management software.
