What each free tier actually gives you
Read from each vendor’s published pricing page on 2026-08-22.
| Tool | Free seats | The wall | Then it costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho Desk | 3 agents | Email channel only | $7 per user per month (Express) |
| Freshdesk | 1 to 2 agents | First 6 months only | $19 per user per month (Growth) |
| Help Scout | 5 users | Capped monthly conversation volume | $25 per user per month (Standard) |
| Gmail with labels | Everyone on your domain | No support features at all | Nothing. It stays free |
Each one, and who it is for
Zoho Desk
A conventional ticketing help desk, priced well below its rivals and bundled into an unusually wide suite of business software.
The catch: No automation, no workflow rules and one channel. The jump to Express at $7 an agent is small, which is the point of the free tier.
Best for: A small team that wants a real ticket queue and is not ready to pay for one.
Freshdesk
A conventional ticketing help desk with a generous entry price and a deep feature list above it.
The catch: This is the one that changed. Freshdesk used to have an open-ended free plan for up to 10 agents and it was the default recommendation everywhere. It is now a 6-month window, and a lot of advice on the internet has not caught up.
Best for: Trying a conventional help desk properly before committing.
Help Scout
A shared inbox for support teams who want their replies to look like ordinary email rather than tickets.
The catch: The seat count is generous and the volume cap is what actually stops you. Cross it and the next step is $25 a user, which is the most expensive entry price in this comparison.
Best for: A team that values the inbox feeling like email rather than ticketing.
Gmail with labels
Where every founder starts, and the honest baseline any support tool has to beat.
The catch: It cannot distinguish a thread you finished from a thread you finished and told the customer about. Both are archived. This is the failure that eventually makes people shop for a help desk in the first place.
Best for: Genuinely most founders, for longer than the help-desk industry would like you to think.
The Freshdesk change worth knowing about
For years the answer to “what is the best free help desk” was Freshdesk, because the free plan covered up to ten agents with no end date and no volume cap. That plan is gone. The current free program is 1 to 2 agents for six months, after which it is $19 per agent per month.
This matters more than it sounds, because a great deal of published advice was written against the old plan and has not been revisited. If you picked Freshdesk on the strength of an article recommending it as permanently free, check the date on the article.
The free option nobody lists
Your mailbox. Gmail with labels and stars, or any IMAP client with folders, costs nothing and handles a support load of a few messages a week without complaint. Most guides skip it because it is not a product anyone sells, which is a bad reason to leave the honest baseline out of a comparison.
It has exactly one structural failure, and it is worth understanding before you go shopping. A mailbox has two states and support work has four. Not yet read, being worked on, done but not communicated, and closed. Archiving collapses the last two, so the customer whose bug you fixed on Tuesday and never told looks identical to the customer you finished with properly.
A free ticket queue does not fix that either. It tracks whether the ticket is open, and closing a ticket is not the same as telling a person.
The verdict
Questions people actually ask
What is the best free help desk software in 2026?
Zoho Desk, if you want a real ticket queue: three agents, one email channel, no time limit. Help Scout, if you would rather the replies look like ordinary email and you can live inside a monthly conversation cap. Freshdesk is only free for the first six months now, which a lot of older recommendations still get wrong.
Is Freshdesk still free forever?
No. The open-ended free plan for up to 10 agents is gone. The current free program covers 1 to 2 agents for the first 6 months, after which it is a paid plan starting at $19 per agent per month on annual billing. Any article telling you Freshdesk is permanently free is out of date.
Is a free help desk good enough for a solo founder?
Usually, for a while. The free tiers are all built to be genuinely usable, because the vendor is betting you will grow into a paid seat. The thing none of them solves for a single person is that a ticket queue models whether a ticket is open, not whether the customer has been told their problem is fixed. If that is the failure you have, a free ticket queue will not fix it and neither will a paid one.
What is the catch with free help desk tiers?
Three shapes. A seat cap, which you hit by hiring. A volume cap, which you hit by succeeding. And a feature wall, usually automation and routing, which you hit by trying to save time. Vendors put the wall where upgrading feels obviously worth it, which is honest product design rather than a trick, but it does mean "free" is a starting price rather than a price.
Is Moorline free?
No. Moorline is $9 a month with no free tier and no trial, and there is a 30-day full refund instead. It is on this page as the paid contrast, not as a free option. If free is a hard requirement, one of the tiers above is your answer and that is a reasonable place to land.
Every price and free-tier limit on this page was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-08-22. Free tiers change more often than paid ones, as Freshdesk shows, so confirm before committing.