What Is Hubspot Help Desk Software & How It Compares to Alternatives

Explore HubSpot help desk software and compare it with alternatives to find the best customer support tool for your needs.

Sep 16, 2024

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What Is Hubspot Help Desk Software & How It Compares to Alternatives

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Picture this: Your customer support team is overwhelmed. They’re buried under a mountain of emails, social media messages, and support tickets. As a result, customers are waiting far too long for responses. Your team is stressed, performance metrics are plummeting, and customer satisfaction is taking a major hit. What do you do? HubSpot help desk software can help you tackle this challenge head-on. This article will explain why HubSpot is a market leader in help desk software and how it stacks up against alternatives regarding features, performance, and overall value for your customer support needs.

As you read, remember that Chatbee’s AI customer support software integrates seamlessly with HubSpot to help you achieve your customer support goals even faster.

What is Help Desk Software?

A help desk is a technology system that helps customer service teams intake, manage, organize, automate, respond to, and report on customer questions or issues. Help desks typically include:

Ticketing system

Inbox

Routing or assignment system for reps

Reporting dashboard

If you want to build a customer-centric company focused on increasing customer value and growth, it's critical to meet and exceed customers' expectations. The best customer support comes from humans using top-notch technology to help scale the impact of each support rep and the solutions they identify for their customers.

The Role of Help Desk Software in Enhancing Customer Support and Building Advocacy

A help desk is one example of those technologies. It empowers your team to provide delightful service that turns your clients into advocates, which will help you become a successful flywheel organization where customers' success fuels your company's growth. Prioritizing reactive customer support will earn you goodwill with your customers and help you form productive partnerships with them. Responding to and resolving customer issues is the basic element of excellent customer support.

What is Help Desk Support?

Help desk support is the process of answering customer inquiries, taking in tickets, resolving customer issues, and otherwise providing customer service through a formal, organized software system. Customers benefit from help desk support because of its ability to automatically prioritize issues without rep intervention.

You can compare help desk support with customer service that doesn’t use a software system, i.e. in-person customer service. Some companies provide customer service over email and chat, but don’t use a dedicated help desk to organize tickets and customer inquiries. While the end result might be similar, a customer gets help via an online avenue, and the process is much different for reps. They have to:

Organize all the emails

Chat conversations

Social media DMs.

Help desk support automates this process for both reps and customers. Here’s one help desk support example:

A customer submits a ticket.

The ticket pops up in the help desk system.

It’s automatically assigned to the next available rep.

The rep replies to the ticket with a solution.

The customer replies to the ticket if the issue isn’t solved.

The ticket is closed.

Here’s another help desk support example:

A customer sends an email to the customer support team.

The conversation pops up in the team’s shared inbox.

The conversation is assigned to the next available rep.

The rep and the customer message each other back and forth — the customer does

so through their email, while the rep does so through the help desk software.

If the issue is resolved, the conversation is archived. If an issue is surfaced, a ticket is created.

What Does a Help Desk Do?

A help desk has a certain set of capabilities that help both service teams and customers keep track of an issue and ensure there’s a successful outcome for both parties.

It Facilitates Customer Intake

Customer intake is how customers submit questions and issues to your customer support team. Examples of customer intake methods include:

Live chat

Customer portal submissions

Feedback forms

Social media

Phone calls

The channels used will depend on your customers and your industry, but it's advisable to offer a variety of different channels for customers to reach out to you to make sure you're helping them in the manner easiest to them.

Streamlining Customer Inquiries with Centralized Help Desk Systems

If you try to get customers to jump through too many hoops, they may grow frustrated and leave you for a more accessible competitor. How does a help desk come in? Without a help desk, these various modes of intake may get lost in the slush pile, physically passed along from rep to rep, or forwarded from email to email.

This is a sure way to lose critical information that will help you effectively resolve a customer complaint. A help desk keeps the information in one central location, where you can change the priority level of an inquiry and easily escalate the issue to the appropriate party. This keeps customers happy because they don’t have to repeat information or constantly have to reach out to your team.

It Keeps All Customer Communication in One Place

Help desks not only make customer intake easy but also keep all submissions in one unified location, often referred to as a shared inbox. A shared inbox helps customer support teams manage and collaborate on customer responses to best determine a strategy for triaging and responding. Shared inboxes usually involve a way to consolidate and sort messages and assign incoming tickets to specific reps.

Examples of shared inboxes include:

Group email aliases

Conversational messaging inboxes

Live chat queues

Social media monitoring tools

Help desk software typically places all of these into one stream that your team can access and reply to. When customers receive a response, they won’t feel like it’s a disjointed experience, even if they’ve used three different methods in the past to reach out to you. This will help you provide a seamless omni-channel service experience and surpass customer expectations.

It Organizes and Routes Tickets

Help desks provide powerful ticket organization and routing features that helps customer support teams stay organized and on track. This is especially important when ticket volume increases, such as during product outages or your busy season. Customer issues frequently involve a variety of different teams to resolve, so sorting, prioritizing, assigning and tracking tickets helps teams save time and improve responses.

Automation is a helpful way to more efficiently route and assign tickets to team members who specialize in certain issues or complaints. When customers submit a ticket to your company, they might be expecting a long wait time, but with a help desk’s ticket organization features, you can pleasantly surprise them by providing a response in less than a business day. The best part is that most help desk tools support canned responses, so you can simply set a response to fire off once a customer submits an inquiry.

It Compiles Customer Service Data into Reports

Reporting on customer support issues and trends helps service teams optimize their work, incentivize and compensate reps, and make informed team priority and headcount decisions. A help desk’s reporting feature offers insights into how team systems and priorities work. This usually includes:

Dashboards that inform management about ticket resolution time

Customer satisfaction

Rep productivity

Customer experience and more

What is the Hubspot Help Desk Software & What it Does

HubSpot's help desk software, part of the service hub, improves the customer experience by organizing and bringing visibility to customer issues. As customers engage with your business more, they will inevitably run into issues, and your help desk software will be crucial for tracking and resolving these problems.

HubSpot's free help desk and ticketing software is a unified help desk dashboard where all customer requests are stored so your entire team can easily track, prioritize, and manage them. Staying organized becomes more challenging as you scale your business, making it more challenging to give each customer issue the attention it deserves. HubSpot allows you to monitor each issue and efficiently resolve it.

The Key Features of HubSpot’s Help Desk Software

AI-Powered Efficiency: Built-in AI powers automatic recommendations, and AI assistant features encourage rep efficiency at every click.

Personalized Support: HubSpot Help Desk integrates with your marketing and sales data to provide personalized support with unified customer insights built into every interaction.

Ticket Automation and Routing: Tickets are automatically assigned to the appropriate rep using skill-based assignment and intelligent routing.

Unified Analytics: Gain full visibility into customer metrics to understand recurring issues and keep a pulse on customer health.

The Benefits of Using HubSpot’s Help Desk Software

Seamless integration with HubSpot CRM: Directly connects with HubSpot CRM to eliminate data silos and bring clarity across your organization.

Automation Features: Not always available in free products, but we’ve got them!

Scalability: HubSpot is equipped to handle your business needs across all departments as you grow, unifying Sales, Service, Marketing, Operations, and more.

The Drawbacks of Using HubSpot’s Help Desk Software

Limited Seats: You’ll need to upgrade or purchase additional seats.

Limited Email Templates: Limited to five email templates at the free level.

What I Like About HubSpot’s Help Desk Software

I love HubSpot because it unifies all of your customer data so that you can provide a 360-degree customer experience. When I use HubSpot, I have complete visibility into a customer’s history, past tickets, and which representative they have worked with before. Armed with a full customer timeline, I can provide personalized, empathetic support and fully understand the customer’s needs and challenges.

HubSpot’s Help Desk and Ticketing software are just pieces of the puzzle. You can also use its all-in-one customer service software to streamline all your service efforts from the same place. For example, you can gauge your team’s performance by monitoring metrics like average response times and close times. You can also deploy and manage feedback surveys and more.

Pro Tip

Use HubSpot's help desk software to track all customer requests, manage tickets, and prioritize and distribute work among reps.

Automate Support

Ticket Deflection

Scaling Customer Support

Reduce Support Tickets

Ticket Analysis

Ticket Queue Management

How to Create, Respond, and Manage Tickets in the Hubspot Help Desk

The HubSpot help desk software makes creating, responding to, and managing tickets easy so support agents can efficiently triage customer issues. Use the help desk to navigate between existing tickets and create new ones without having to leave the workspace.

To make it easy for users to get started, tickets will automatically be created for every channel connected to the help desk. For example, if a team email address like support@mycompany.com is connected to the help desk, any emails sent to that address automatically create a ticket. Learn more about connecting channels to the help desk.

Note: Only super admins and users with a Service Hub seat can access all features in the help desk. Service or Sales Access users can still view and collaborate within the help desk workspace. They won’t have access to all default views, help desk settings and customizations. Users can only see tickets in the help desk that they have access to. Learn how to limit your users' access to tickets.

Create Tickets at the Help Desk

To create a ticket manually:

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Workspaces > Help Desk.

2. Click Create a ticket in the help desk workspace in the bottom left.

3. In the right panel, enter your ticket details. To customize which properties appear here, click

Edit this form at the panel's top.

The following fields are required by default:

Ticket name: describe this ticket.

Pipeline: assign this ticket to a specific ticket pipeline you’ve created.

Ticket status: choose a particular stage of ticket from your selected pipeline.

To associate a company or contacts with the ticket, click the Company and Contact dropdown menus, then search for the company or contacts. Learn how to associate the relevant company or contact activities with the ticket. When you create a ticket manually, a conversation is not automatically associated with it. To create a conversation, click Add Contact. Once you associate a new or existing contact, the reply editor will appear, and you can begin composing a message to the contact.

Respond to Tickets at the Help Desk

Use the reply editor to respond to an incoming email or chat message, or use the Comment tab to notify another team member of the conversation. The Comment tab will only appear for tickets created from incoming calls if an outbound email is drafted or sent.

Click and drag the reply editor to expand the reply editor while typing your response. Enter a reply using the toolbar at the bottom left to add rich text formatting (e.g., bold, italics, etc.). You can also click Insert and select an option to attach content from another tool in HubSpot, including:

Knowledge base articles

Snippets

Video

Meetings

Documents

Quotes

Templates

If the visitor you’re responding to in your conversation was originally unknown, and they later provide you with their name or email address, you can then associate them with a contact:

Locate one of the messages the visitor sent and click the search magnifying glass icon.

In the right panel, click the Create new tab to create a new contact or click the Add existing tab to associate the visitor with an existing contact. This will also associate their ticket and your conversation with them.

At the bottom of the panel, click Save.

Comment on a Conversation

If you want another user to review the thread or follow up with the contact, you can add a comment to the conversation. This comment will not be visible to the contact.

In the Reply editor, click the Comment tab.

Type @ and your team member’s name, then enter your message.

Use the icons across the bottom of the email editor to modify your text style, insert a link, or upload a file.

To add a document, snippet, meeting link, knowledge base article, quote, or video in your response, click Insert.

Click Add comment. The team member will receive a notification with a link to the conversation.

Manage Tickets in Help Desk

You can review, manage, edit, or merge tickets in help desk to help you or your team stay organized and quickly prioritize tickets in any view.

Edit Tickets

In your HubSpot account, navigate to Service > Help desk. In any of the ticket list views (e.g., Unassigned), you can click and drag a column to rearrange where it appears or resize the column if you need to review longer column names. You can also change the columns that appear in the table:

In the top right, click Edit columns.

In the dialog box, search or browse through properties on the left.

Select the checkbox next to a property to add it to your selected columns.

To reorder a column, click and drag a property.

To remove a column, click the X to the right of the property.

To remove all currently selected columns, click Remove all columns.

When you’re done configuring columns, click Save.

You can also edit property values individually or for tickets in bulk in your list views

To quickly edit property values in list view:

Click a property in the row of the ticket you want to edit.

Depending on the property’s field type, select or type to edit a value for the property.

You can continue to click and edit additional properties in the table.

Once you’re done, click Save.

To edit the same property for multiple tickets:

Select the checkboxes next to the tickets you want to edit.

You can also select all tickets in the current list view by selecting the checkbox in the top left of the table.

At the top of the table, click Edit.

Delete Tickets

You can delete a single ticket or delete tickets in bulk from the help desk workspace. When you delete a ticket, the associated conversation will also be deleted.

In your HubSpot account, navigate to Workspaces > Help Desk.

To delete a single ticket, select the checkbox next to the record you want to delete.

At the top of the table, click Delete.

To delete multiple tickets:

In the table view, select the checkboxes next to the records.

At the top of the table, click Delete.

In the dialog box, enter the number of records to delete, then click Delete.

Merge Tickets

If you want to consolidate related threads regarding the same customer or issue, you can merge two tickets directly within help desk:

In any of the ticket list views, click the name of a ticket.

In the top right, click the ellipses menu icon, then select Merge ticket.

In the dialog box, click the Search dropdown menu to search for and select another ticket to merge with.

Select the Primary radio button under one of the tickets to use its property values for the new record created as a result of the merge.

Click What happens when you merge two tickets to review additional information about what will happen after you merge the tickets. Learn more about merging records in this article.

By default, the conversation that appears in the thread is the one most recently associated with the ticket. This means the most recent conversation might not appear automatically in the thread. You can use the Conversation dropdown arrow in the right panel to switch threads.

Click Merge. Once merged, tickets cannot be unmerged.

Review Your Tickets and Conversation Details

To review and manage tickets in help desk:

In your HubSpot account, navigate to Workspaces > Help Desk.

In the help desk workspace, you can connect additional channels, create, respond, and manage your tickets, and customize ticket properties.

Click a ticket to view the corresponding conversation, along with details about the associated records (e.g., contacts, companies, and deals).

To edit a ticket’s properties:

Click the Ticket owner, Priority, Category, or Status fields at the top of the ticket.

In the right sidebar, you can edit the tickets information, such as the description or the priority, or update the ticket’s associated contacts, companies, or deals.

Learn more about customizing the cards shown on the right sidebar.

To receive notifications when there’s new activity on a ticket, follow the record:

Click the ellipses menu icon in the top right corner, then select Follow.

If you already follow the record, to turn off notifications, select Unfollow.

Search for Tickets in Help Desk

To review and filter all tickets in a single high-level view:

In your HubSpot account, navigate to Workspaces > Help Desk.

You can locate a specific ticket by entering a term in the search box in the top left, which will search across all tickets in help desk.

Any of the following fields are currently supported as search terms:

Ticket information: search by name, ID, or description keywords.

Associated contact properties: search by first name, last name, phone number, mobile phone number, email address, or company.

Ticket message and comments: search for keywords within ticket messages or comments in the thread. The Message column will display a preview of the most recent message or comment matching the search.

To execute an exact search, add double quotation marks around your search term. For example, entering a System outage incident will only return results that match the entire phrase exactly, eliminating partial results. After you’ve entered a search, hit the enter key to execute your search. You can sort tickets by a specific property by clicking the column header for that property.

Click the dropdown menus at the top of the list view to filter by:

Ticket owner

Priority

Pipeline

Ticket status

HubSpot team

You can use quick filters to pin properties to the top of help desk. Users can easily access specific ticket properties and filter data:

At the top of the ticket list view, click add More.

Search for or select a ticket property to filter by. You can select up to 5 additional filters for each view.

The quick filter will be added to the top of the ticket list view. Click the dropdown menu at the top to set the criteria for the selected property.

To remove quick filters:

Click + More. Then, click edit Edit quick filters.

Click the deleedelete delete icon next to the property.

Click Apply

You can create a customized filter by clicking Advanced filters:

In the right panel, enter and select a property to filter by.

Set the criteria for the selected property.

To select another property, click AND or OR. When you set a filter with AND, records must meet all of the criteria in the filter group in order to be included in the view. When you select OR, the records must meet the criteria in at least one filter group to be included in the view.

To remove a property, hover over the filter and click the deletdelete delete icon.

To remove a group of filters, click the delete icondelete icon in the top right corner of the group.

To remove all filters, click Discard.

Once you’re done, click the X in the top right corner. Filters will be saved and applied globally to default views only. Applied filters won’t be saved to custom views.

Move Tickets Between Help Desk and the Conversations Inbox

You can move conversations associated with tickets between the conversations inbox and help desk. Please note: only super admins and users with the Account access permission can move tickets between the conversations inbox and help desk (and vice versa).

To move a conversation from your inbox to help desk:

In your HubSpot account, navigate to CRM > Inbox.

Click a conversation.

In the top right, click the ellipses menu icon, then select Move to another inbox.

Click the Select inbox dropdown menu in the dialog box, then select Help desk. You can reassign the conversation if needed and add an optional comment to provide context on why you’re moving it.

To move a conversation from help desk to one of your conversation inboxes:

In the help desk workspace, click the conversation you want to move.

In the top right, click the ellipses menu icon, then select Move to another inbox.

In the dialog box, select an inbox. You can reassign the conversation if needed and optionally include a comment to provide context on why you’re moving it.

Click Save.

Why You Might Want a Hubspot Help Desk Software Alternative

Businesses looking at HubSpot's help desk software often turn away due to steep pricing. While the customer service software starts free, many of the most powerful features are locked behind expensive paywalls. HubSpot's various products are priced separately. To run a help desk with HubSpot, you’ll need to buy the Service Hub. This help desk software has a free tier, but the next level up, Starter, costs $45/month.

Professional plans, which unlock the most powerful features, start at a whopping $1,600/month. HubSpot also has costly onboarding fees that can leave a dent in your budget. While the software is user-friendly, setting up HubSpot help desk software can be complex. As a result, many businesses hire a HubSpot expert to assist with onboarding. This is another cost to consider on top of expensive monthly fees.

HubSpot Help Desk Software Has Too Many Features to Sort Through

Another turnoff for businesses looking at HubSpot help desk software is the overwhelming

number of features. HubSpot isn’t just a customer service tool; it’s part of a gigantic ecosystem that includes marketing and sales automation. While this is great if you need a general solution that can help your team across various departments, it can be hard to find the features that are most relevant to you.

The truth is, if you’re looking for a simple help desk software to manage customer inquiries and support tickets, HubSpot isn’t the right choice. It can take a long time to sort through all the features to find the ones that can help you achieve your goals.

Hubspot Ticketing System

Ticketing Tools

Service Hub Hubspot

Hubspot Operations Hub

Hubspot Notion Integration

Hubspot Help Desk

Hubspot Tickets

Call Center Ticketing System

Best Ticketing Apps

Top 27 Alternatives to Hubspot Help Desk Software in 2024

1. ChatBees: Revolutionizing Internal Operations for Enhanced Customer Support

ChatBees optimizes RAG for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc., with our AI customer support software, which has the most accurate response and easily integrates into their workflows in a low-code, no-code manner. ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases.

This improves predictability and accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service.

Start for free

Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations. Get started for free, with no credit card required. Sign in with Google and get started on your journey with us today!

2. Zendesk: A Customer Service Solution Built for the Customer Experience

Zendesk is a customer service solution built for the customer experience. Our CX expertise provides businesses of any size with the tools, best practices, support, and guidance they need to deliver exceptional customer service. Our agile product sets up quickly and is easy to learn, resulting in a fast time to value and better ROI. Because our scalable solution grows with your business and customer base, you’ll have the tools and functionality you need now and in the future.

Unified Agent Workspace: Our intuitive omnichannel interface allows agents to seamlessly manage customer conversations across channels, view customer data and context, and easily collaborate in one place.

Intelligent routing and triage: AI-powered tools identify the intent, sentiment, and language of incoming customer service requests and automatically direct them to the best-suited agent.

AI-powered Content Cues and knowledge management tools: These features provide teams with quick insights into creating and optimizing help center articles and self-service content.

Pre-built and custom reporting and analytics: Plug-and-play reporting dashboards and customizable reports provide businesses with real-time metrics and actionable insights.

3. ActiveCampaign: More Than Just Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based CRM and marketing automation platform. It offers features including:

Email marketing tools

Sales and marketing automation

Task management

Knowledge base

Its email marketing capabilities allow users to create and send targeted customer messages using customizable templates and automation. With the platform's CRM, users can manage customer data, track interactions, and gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. ActiveCampaign features lead scoring based on customer engagement and activity and offers reporting and analytics dashboards so users can track the performance of sales and marketing campaigns.

4. Keap: CRM and Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Keap provides small business software that combines CRM, marketing automation, and eCommerce tools to help businesses manage customer interactions. Its CRM enables users to organize and centralize customer information, track interactions, and manage leads and contacts in a single interface.

Keap offers marketing automation tools, allowing users to create and send emails to targeted customers. The software also includes customizable drag-and-drop templates for emails and landing pages, helping users design marketing materials.

5. Salesforce: A CRM With Customer Service Capabilities

Salesforce is CRM software that provides businesses with a centralized platform to manage customer support, sales, and marketing tasks. Its features include contact and lead management tools so businesses can store and organize customer data and track customer interactions. In addition to its marketing and sales products, Salesforce includes customer support and service features, which can help businesses manage customer requests and handle issues.

Salesforce doesn’t include a native voice solution and requires add-ons for chat, messaging, knowledge, and self-service software. Customers without technical knowledge can find it complex and difficult to customize, requiring an investment in consultants and dev teams to make the changes. This can ultimately drive up the total cost of ownership.

6. Mailchimp: An Email Marketing Tool With Help Desk Features

Mailchimp is an email marketing automation software that can help businesses create, send, and analyze marketing campaigns. Its email marketing features allow users to:

Design emails

Newsletters

Automated drip campaigns

Mailchimp provides tools for case management, like email alerts and notifications. The software also offers reporting and analytics, allowing users to track campaign performance and view metrics, like open and click-through rates.

7. Pipedrive: A CRM for Sales Pipeline Management

Pipedrive is CRM software for sales pipeline management. It helps sales teams track leads, deals, and sales activities. With features like customizable pipelines, users can create a visual representation of their sales processes and statuses.

Pipedrive offers lead and contact management tools, providing a central hub for storing and organizing customer data and interactions. Sales teams can also use other tools, such as:

Sales automation

Email integration

Reporting features

8. Zoho: A Suite of Business Applications

Zoho offers a suite of business applications, including:

Customer service

Sales

Marketing products

With Zoho CRM, businesses can organize customer data, manage leads, and create reports. The platform also provides project management tools so teams can collaborate, track and automate tasks, and manage customer requests. Zoho also offers an email marketing app for businesses to create custom email marketing campaigns.

9. EngageBay

EngageBay offers CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, sales automation, and customer support tools. The CRM feature enables businesses to:

Keep customer data in one place

Handle customer inquiries

Automate common tasks for their sales and marketing teams

EngageBay's marketing automation capabilities allow users to create marketing emails and automate lead sequences, while the platform's sales automation tools can help sales teams manage their leads and sales pipelines.

10. GetResponse

GetResponse is an online marketing solution that offers features including:

Automated email marketing

Landing page creation

Webinars

Email marketing features enable users to:

Customize emails

Build and segment contact lists

Track email metrics with reporting and analytics

Users can create automated workflows that trigger based on customer behavior. GetResponse's tools allow businesses to host webinars and engage with their audience in real time to generate leads and educate customers.

11. Ontraport

Ontraport is an all-in-one platform for small and medium-sized businesses to automate email marketing, as well as manage sales and leads. Its marketing automation capabilities can help teams perform A/B testing with marketing materials and track leads throughout the sales funnel. The platform also features tools that can help users create custom landing pages. And its e-commerce tools can enable businesses to build a better online and social media presence to assist with marketing and sales.

12. Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform that offers a shared inbox, knowledge base, and reporting tools. The shared inbox feature allows support teams to collaborate and respond to:

Customer emails

Issues

Inquiries from a unified interface

Help Scout offers a knowledge base tool that helps businesses create and maintain help center articles for self-service. It also offers reporting and analytics for businesses to track response times, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and other support metrics.

13. Freshdesk

Freshdesk’s shared inbox allows support teams to centralize customer emails, tickets, and inquiries in one place. It offers businesses self-service knowledge base software where they can create and organize articles, FAQ pages, and resources to help customers find answers to common questions and issues. Freshdesk has ticketing and automation features, enabling businesses to prioritize and assign tickets to agents and automate repetitive tasks.

Freshdesk’s limitations include a lack of custom attribution (how customers reach conversion) and correlation (how metrics are related), which means there’s limited reporting and analytics. The platform is also missing omnichannel reporting, so you’ll need to run separate reports per channel. This can impact visibility into customer issues and team performance.

14. Drip

With Drip, users can create and send customized email campaigns. The platform includes customer segmentation and tagging features, which help businesses organize their subscribers by behavior and preferences and allow for more accurate email targeting.

Drip's marketing automation capabilities enable users to set up workflows triggered by specific actions or events, such as website visits or email opens. Drip also has reporting and analytics which can be used to gather insights based on custom metrics.

15. Insightly

Cloud-based CRM software Insightly helps businesses manage and organize customer data. Insightly provides a central platform to:

Store and access customer data

Track interactions

Maintain a comprehensive CRM database

The software offers project management features that allow users to:

Create and manage projects

Tasks

Milestones

Making it easier to collaborate and keep teams organized. Insightly also includes email integration, which enables businesses to track email communication and easily associate emails with specific contacts or projects. Reporting and analytics tools provide insights into sales performance, project progress, and customer engagement.

16. Nutshell

Nutshell is a cloud-based CRM software designed to help small and medium-sized businesses manage their sales and customer interactions. Nutshell offers core CRM features that:

Centralize and organize customer data

Track interactions

Create a clear view of the sales pipeline

Nutshell includes reporting and analytics features, which provide insights into sales performance, conversion rates, and other key metrics, helping businesses make data-driven decisions. The software offers email integration as well, enabling users to track email communication with leads and customers.

17. ProProfs Help Desk

For those looking for AI-powered help desk features without breaking the bank, ProProfs Help Desk can be a good option. It can automate ticket management, assist customers on multiple channels like email, live chat, etc., and reduce ticket volume with a knowledge base.

18. Hiver

Hiver is another simple help desk solution like HubSpot that doesn’t compromise on important ticketing features. Being Gmail-based, Hiver offers familiarity and flexibility, allowing you to tailor your inbox to fit your exact needs.

19. JitBit

JitBit Helpdesk improves mobile customer support with its powerful Android and iOS app, enabling teams to handle tickets and address inquiries from any location. The app has an intuitive interface and features such as:

Agent collision detection

Pre-written responses

Time tracking

20. LiveAgent

LiveAgent can help you revolutionize your customer interactions with its robust chat-based support. The immediate access to prospects and customers on your website through live chat can boost engagement rates. The tool includes video chat and real-time typing view, which make interactions more personal and efficient.

The proactive chat invitations can help you reach out to customers before they even know they need help, potentially increasing sales and satisfaction. Plus, the tool’s chat history feature is invaluable for maintaining context in ongoing support conversations.

21. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk enhanced my support team’s effectiveness by helping us provide contextual customer support. By integrating seamlessly with other Zoho applications, it offered:

Holistic view of each customer

Pulling in data from CRM

Past interactions

Sales history

This valuable context enabled my team to provide more personalized and informed responses. Besides this, the tool’s multi-channel capabilities mean you can manage:

Emails

Social media messages

Calls all in one platform

The AI-powered assistant, Zia, offers suggestions for response templates and automates ticket tagging and assignment.

22. TeamSupport

TeamSupport offers a highly customizable ticket management system. Whether it’s handling complex technical queries or managing customer relationships, the tool adapts to various scenarios seamlessly.

The visual customer roadmap is a standout feature, providing a detailed view of the customer journey. Integration with inventory management systems also allows support reps to see product details related to customer tickets.

23. HappyFox

Do you want to know how well your support team performs and whether customers are happy with their experience? HappyFox is another impactful HubSpot competitor that helps you improve customer service through its comprehensive reporting and analytics features.

This tool captures and analyzes all customer interaction data to provide actionable insights. For instance, you can track everything from ticket volumes and resolution times to agent performance to continuously refine your processes.

24. Wishpond

Best HubSpot alternative for marketing teams looking to boost lead generation. Wishpond is another popular HubSpot alternative with a solid all-in-one solution for marketing and sales teams. It’s got some of the premium automation features that HubSpot has without the premium price tag.

You can send potential leads to your sales team inbox using smart automation. It’s also easy to track your email campaign's lead activity and customer demographics. Automate email workflows like:

Welcome sequences

Abandoned cart messages

Reminders

25. Aritic

Aritic is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and support platform for businesses of all sizes. The customer relationship management (CRM) software focuses on drilling down on customer data to close more potential deals. You can automatically log every page visit, form completion, and interaction to inform your understanding of customers.

Aritic’s data-informed lead scoring enables you to categorize valuable potential customers better. You can track and monitor sales leads through prebuilt workflows and build out your ideal automation workflow to match your business needs.

26. Groove

Of all the options I tested, Groove is one of the simplest and most cost-effective cloud-based help desk software solutions for small businesses. It helps companies communicate with their customers via:

Live chat

Social media

Phone calls

Over 10,000 users trust Groove as a simple yet powerful Zendesk and Freshdesk alternative. According to them, Groove’s help desk is easier to use, quicker to set up, and provides a much better customer experience.

27. Spiceworks

Spiceworks is a ticketing system that helps businesses manage both internal and customer-facing tasks. The software is all online in a cloud, so there's no hassle in getting it set up and maintaining it. Once I signed up, I was immediately redirected to my inbox, where I could start answering mock tickets. Best of all, Spiceworks is free without limits on tickets, devices, or agent access. It's a good option if you just want to explore the basic features of a help desk.

6 Evaluation & Selection Criteria for Hubspot Help Desk Software Alternatives

1. Digging Through User Reviews and Ratings

User reviews reveal the real-life pros and cons of HubSpot help desk software. Look for feedback from reputable sites to gain a ground-level perspective on customer satisfaction and potential problems. User reviews can highlight areas you may not have considered before, so they are worth exploring.

2. Getting to Know Essential Features & Functionality

The value of HubSpot help desk software is ascertained by its core features and overall functionality. By exploring these aspects, you can better understand the tools' practical usefulness and effectiveness.

3. Assessing Ease of Use and User Friendliness

The user-friendliness of HubSpot help desk software is also essential to assess. This covers the design, interface, and navigation of the platform to ensure a positive experience for users of all levels of expertise.

4. Evaluating Customer Support Options

Customer support is another aspect to consider when looking at HubSpot help desk software and any alternatives. You want to evaluate the efficiency of customer support and how well it helps users in different phases, setting up, addressing concerns, and resolving operational issues.

5. Exploring Value for Money

Value for money is evaluated by comparing the quality, performance, and features of HubSpot help desk software to its price. The goal is to help you understand whether you would be getting your money’s worth if you chose this product.

6. Personal Experience and Expert Opinions Matter

This part of the evaluation criteria draws insightful observations from personal experience and the opinions of industry experts.

Ticketing Management System

Ticket Management Tools

Most Popular Ticketing Systems

Hubspot Autoresponder

Smart Ticketing System

Ticketing Automation

Hubspot Ticket Automation

Helpdesk Integrations

Best Help Desk Tools

Automated Ticket Routing

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