Top 5 Help Desk apps of 2015

Every year we review the most notable players in the helpdesk software niche: newcomers, established players, interesting finds etc. Here are the ones we found worth mentioning for 2015

HappyFox

HappyFox is a rather new cloud-based SaaS helpdesk app we had no time to review yet.

The UI is very nicely designed, but still a bit overloaded with features - you are presented with 13 different ticket queues that are not very easy to navigate. On the other hand, this might increase the learning curve, but becomes really handy when you got used to the app.

The app comes with a very nice report module and "automation triggers" engine that allows macro-authoring. We also liked how the canned responses feature is organized.

HelpScout

HelpScout is a very nice find. The app's biggest advantage is - it looks like a regular email to the end-user. No weird "ticket-id's" in the subject line, no "helpdesky" formatting, no automated replies like "thanks, we received your request" - just regular emails that come from a personalized email address. That's actually nice. Even though some companies (the big) do have a policy that requires these emails, it's in their SLA agreements.

Otherwise the feature set is pretty standard.

Zendesk

Zendesk. Zendesk is the most popular system, everyone knows about it and we're just mentioning them here because, well, they're still worth a mention. Zendesk did an IPO last year raising over $100 million and it's not going anywhere, even though the company remains a losing concern (they are a public company now, after the IPO, so this data is now open).

Jitbit Helpdesk

Jitbit Help Desk is still the only one that offers both SaaS and "self-hosted" options. But that's not their killer feature. Jitbit remains one of the few helpdesk that look very simple, but offers all the powerful features under the hood. Their biggest disadnavantage is lack of Twitter/Facebook support. All the other features are there: automation, AD-integration, Knowledge Base - anything you can imagine.

Lack of Twitter support still looks stupid to us. How come a system offers all kinds of weird integrations, even with GitHub and Dropbox and other oddities, but not Twitter? Come on.

Snappy

Snappy was a promising start. It's a SaaS helpdesk from UserScape, the company behind HelpSpot - an "on-premise" enterprise helpdesk app (we reviewed it on our site). Snappy was their attempt to target small "bootstrapped" companies and startups. The app is nice and simple BUT UserScape decided to shut it down... After a while they have eventually decided to keep it alive and sold to an unnamed company. Their website looks alive and kicking.