Zendesk Alternatives: Comparison of Top 2024 Help Desk Software Products

To keep up with the most current and leading helpdesk software products, we have recently updated this article with information on 2025 top Zendesk alternatives and their comparisons.

Pricing isn’t the only factor when comparing the best help desk software in 2025. You have to consider other important factors including ease-of-use, support, and targeted users. Likewise, reviews are critical to help you get an overall picture of product performance. Where you lack experience and direct knowledge about the software, other users’ experience and expert reviews can guide you to pinpoint issues that, otherwise, are glossed over by vendors.

This comparison of Zendesk vs Freshdesk, along with Desk.com and LiveAgent, should help you get up to speed when shortlisting the best help desk software for your company.  We have updated the figures and ratings for 2025 based on the latest product specs, user reviews, satisfaction ratings, and our experts’ detailed analyses on these solutions.

After aggregating all these elements, an overall score is given for each software. Meantime, the User Satisfaction rating takes into account user reviews, social mentions, and other sources, including our own database of customer feedback about the software.

Check the comparison matrix below to guide you on finding the best help desk software in 2025 for your business. Cheers!

Zendesk	Freshdesk	Desk.com	LiveAgent
Our Score: 9.5	Our Score: 9.8	Our Score: 9.4	Our Score: 9.7
User Satisfaction: 94%	User Satisfaction: 100%	User Satisfaction: 90%	User Satisfaction: 99%
Free trial: 30 days	Free trial: 21 days	Free trial: 14 days	Free trial: 14 days
No awards in 2016		No awards in 2016
Ease of use: 96/100	Ease of use: 97/100	Ease of use: 89/100	Ease of use: 98/100
Cost-efficiency: 97/100	Cost-efficiency: 97/100	Cost-efficiency: 90/100	Cost-efficiency: 91/100
Help & support: 94/100	Help & support: 97/100	Help & support: 93/100	Help & support: 95/100
Ease of setup: 95/100	Ease of setup: 98/100	Ease of setup: 90/100	Ease of setup: 99/ 100
Pricing: from $5/mo	Pricing: from $15/mo	Pricing: from $20/mo	Pricing: from $12/mo
Pricing model: Monthly	Pricing model: Monthly Annual	Pricing model: Monthly Annual	Pricing model: Monthly
Customer types: Freelance Small business Medium business Large enterprise	Customer types: Small business Medium business	Customer types: Freelance Small business Medium business Large enterprise	Customer types: Freelance Small business Medium business Large enterprise
Deployment: Cloud-hosted	Deployment: Cloud-hosted	Deployment: Cloud-hosted	Deployment: SaaS Cloud-hosted On-premise
Customer support: Email Phone Live support Training Tickets	Customer support: Email Phone Live support Training Tickets	Customer support: Email Phone	Customer support: Email Phone Live support Tickets

Summary

If you’re looking for a help desk solution that can scale to your business growth, it’s a toss-up among Freshdesk, Zendesk, and LiveAgent. Freshdesk, which scored the highest in our comparison, is a fierce competitor of Zendesk. They both have almost the same features, value propositions, and target users (and some like to point out—last name).

Meantime, LiveAgent has a simpler interface, but has a straightforward appeal to companies looking for an all-in-one help desk. LiveAgent has the most deployment options and the easiest to set up among the solutions. On the other hand, Desk.com has pared down features focusing mainly on ticket management.

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.