Best Free Help Desk Software in 2026
Key factsFree help desk plans compared: Zoho Desk, Help Scout, HubSpot
- Zoho Desk's free plan includes three user licenses with email ticketing, and Zoho calls it free for life.
- Help Scout Free gives 5 users, 1 shared inbox and 1 Docs site, but caps at 100 contacts per month.
- HubSpot Service Hub is free for up to 2 users and connects ticketing and chat to HubSpot's free CRM.
- Jira Service Management is free forever for 3 agents, including 1,250 automation steps per month.
- Freshdesk and Hiver no longer offer free plans as of 2026, and Freshdesk's cheapest paid tier is $19/agent/month.
Free help desk plans are capped by agents or by volume, 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 mostly 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 fourth or fifth person answering tickets. Short answer: Zoho Desk Free is the best free ticketing system for most small teams, Help Scout Free gives the most seats, and HubSpot's free tools win if you want the CRM attached.
Two names you may expect are missing from the ranking. Freshdesk and Hiver, both long sold on their free tiers, now offer only trials, which we cover below.
The ratings
Toolradar data: aggregated by Toolradar across G2, Capterra and SourceForge, around 15,300 reviews for the ranked products that have enough of them.
| Tool | Aggregated rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Tidio | 4.6 | 2,345 |
| HubSpot Service | 4.4 | 12,000 |
| Jira Service Management | 4.3 | 963 |
Zoho Desk, Help Scout, FreeScout and osTicket have no aggregated rating in this dataset, so they are ranked on what their free plans include rather than on scores.
HubSpot Service at 4.4 across 12,000 reviews is the strongest score-to-evidence combination here, with G2 at 4.4 and Capterra at 4.5 agreeing within a tenth. No platform disagreement, no distortion. That is an honest consensus number, and it says this is a solid rather than beloved product.
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. Tidio at 4.6 does one thing, chat, and scores accordingly.
The free plans, verified
Prices and free plan limits checked on each vendor's pricing page on 25 September 2026.
| Tool | Free plan | First paid tier |
|---|---|---|
| Zoho Desk | 3 users, email ticketing | Express, €7/user/month billed annually (European pricing) |
| Help Scout | 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts/month | Standard, $25/user/month billed annually |
| HubSpot Service Hub | Up to 2 users | Starter, $7/seat/month billed annually |
| Jira Service Management | 3 agents | Standard, $20/agent/month |
| Tidio | 50 billable conversations/month | Starter, $29/month billed monthly |
| FreeScout | Open source, self-hosted, unlimited agents | Paid modules only |
| osTicket | Open source, self-hosted | Paid cloud version |
HubSpot at $7 a seat and Jira at $20 an agent are the cheapest paid steps from a free help desk, and Help Scout sits above both. Tidio's price looks different because it is priced per account and by conversation volume rather than per agent.
Zoho Desk, the strongest free help desk for most small teams
Zoho Desk's free plan includes three user licenses and email-based ticket management, and Zoho labels it free for life.
That is a real ticket queue rather than a shared inbox, and for a small company where support is two or three people's part-time job, it will run indefinitely at no cost. Three seats is one more than HubSpot gives you, which is exactly the headroom this article is about.
The first paid tier, Express, is €7 per user per month billed annually on Zoho's European pricing page; Zoho shows each region its own currency, so check the price for yours. The knowledge base, chat and a community forum arrive on Standard, the tier above.
The limit to watch is scope. The free plan is email only, so if customers also reach you through chat or social, you will be paying before you hit the seat cap.
Help Scout, the most seats on a free plan
Help Scout Free gives you 5 users, 1 shared inbox and 1 Docs site, which is the most seats among the hosted free plans here, plus a public help center.
The catch is volume. The free plan covers 100 contacts a month, and Help Scout counts a contact as each person who got a reply, however many conversations they had. A small SaaS or a shop with steady traffic passes that in a normal month.
Standard is $25 per user per month billed annually, or $30 billed monthly. That is the priciest first step on this list, so Help Scout Free suits teams with many part-time helpers and few customers, such as an agency or an early startup.
HubSpot Service Hub, if you want the CRM too
HubSpot's free Service Hub is free for up to 2 users and connects ticketing and live chat 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 $7 per seat per month billed annually, as of September 2026. Professional is $90 per seat per month billed annually plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500.
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. Two users is also the tightest seat cap here. Adopt it knowing the whole company's data will end up inside it.
Jira Service Management, for internal IT support
Jira Service Management is free forever for 3 agents, with a customer portal, email and chat intake, an embedded knowledge base and 1,250 automation steps a month.
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. Standard is $20 per agent per month, rated 4.3 across 963 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.
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.
Tidio's free plan covers 50 billable conversations a month. Starter is $29 a month billed monthly, or $24.17 a month billed annually, for 100 billable conversations, priced per account rather than per agent.
4.6 across 2,345 reviews, with G2 at 4.6 and Capterra at 4.7. The weakness is the same volume logic as Help Scout: fifty conversations is a test allowance, not a support operation.
FreeScout and osTicket, if you can host it yourself
Both are open source help desks you install on your own server, which removes the agent cap entirely.
FreeScout is a free help desk and shared inbox built in PHP, advertising unlimited support agents, tickets and mailboxes. It feels closest to Help Scout, and it is the answer for a team answering a shared email address that has outgrown a hosted free plan's seat count.
osTicket is the older, more traditional ticketing system, free to self-host, with a paid cloud-hosted version for teams that do not want to run a server.
The cost moves from licences to time. Someone has to install, update, back up and secure it, and when email delivery breaks at 6pm, there is no vendor to call. For a team with a developer who already runs servers, that trade is often worth it.
The knowledge base, the cheapest ticket
The most valuable support tool is not on the ranking: the cheapest ticket is the one nobody files. A knowledge base with search analytics shows which searches returned nothing, which is a direct list of the articles to write next.
Help Scout Free includes one Docs site and Jira's free plan includes an embedded knowledge base, so two of the free options here already cover it. Document360, the dedicated knowledge base we used to list here, has no free plan: its pricing page offers a 14-day trial and quotes a price based on team accounts, workspaces, languages and AI usage. We compare the options in our knowledge base software guide and our documentation guide.
No longer free: Freshdesk and Hiver
Freshdesk has no free plan. Its pricing page offers a 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan, then Growth at $19 per agent per month billed annually. It is still a strong help desk, but it now belongs in a paid comparison.
Hiver has no free plan either. Hiver's pricing starts at Growth, $25 per user per month, after a 7-day trial, for both its Gmail and standalone versions. If you want support inside a shared inbox for free, FreeScout is the closest match.
The agent cap, and what to do about it
Every hosted free plan here caps agents or volume, 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: Zoho Desk Free, three seats of email ticketing at no cost.
Many helpers, few customers: Help Scout Free, as long as you stay under its monthly contact limit.
You already use HubSpot, or want the CRM too: HubSpot Service free tools.
Internal IT support in a company that runs on Jira: Jira Service Management.
Ecommerce, support happens before the sale: Tidio.
No seat cap at all, and someone to run a server: FreeScout or osTicket.
And write the knowledge base. It is the only thing in this article that reduces ticket volume rather than processing it.
FAQ
What is the best free help desk software in 2026?
Zoho Desk Free is the best free help desk for most small teams in 2026, with three user licenses and email ticketing at no cost. Help Scout Free gives more seats but caps you at 100 contacts a month, and HubSpot's free Service Hub is the pick if you also want a CRM.
Does Freshdesk still have a free plan?
No. As of September 2026, Freshdesk offers a 14-day trial of its Enterprise plan, and its cheapest plan, Growth, is paid per agent. Zoho Desk Free is the closest free replacement for a Freshdesk-style ticket queue.
Which free help desk allows the most agents?
Among hosted plans, Help Scout Free allows 5 users, Zoho Desk Free and Jira Service Management Free allow 3, and HubSpot allows 2. FreeScout and osTicket are open source and self-hosted, so they have no licence-based agent cap at all.
Is there a free help desk with a knowledge base?
Yes. Help Scout Free includes one Docs site and Jira Service Management Free includes an embedded knowledge base. Zoho Desk adds its knowledge base on the paid Standard tier, and Document360 has no free plan.
Related: free CRM software, customer self-service software and free lead management software.
Across our whole catalogue the median is $24 a month and 33% of tools advertise a free tier. Figures are the lowest recurring monthly price quoted in our own review of each tool, read on 2026-08-19. Full method and every category.
