Free ticketing systems and what they really cost

A free ticketing system comes in one of two kinds. A hosted free plan, such as Zoho Desk’s, HubSpot’s or Help Scout’s, costs nothing and needs no server, but it caps how many of you can use it and keeps chat, automation or a clean widget for the paid plans. An open source ticketing system, such as osTicket, FreeScout or Zammad, has no licence fee, but you pay for the server and for the hours spent keeping it patched, backed up and fetching email. What usually decides it is whether anyone on your team wants to look after a server.

Deacon isn’t a ticketing system. It’s an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves. It answers the repeat questions on your site in seconds, from your own docs, hands you the ones it can’t, and shows you what customers are stuck on and what they want next. It has a free plan with no card and no end date, so you can start on it long before a ticket queue earns its keep.

We read every plan, price and limit below on the vendor’s own pages or code repository on 23 September 2026, and each one links there. Where a pricing page opens on yearly billing, the monthly price is given too.

Free ticketing systems side by side

These are the hosted free plans, where the vendor runs everything and the limits are in the plan.

These are the open source and free-to-download ones, where the software costs nothing and the bill is for running it.

Free help desk software you don’t have to host

A hosted free plan is the quickest way to get tickets working, since there’s nothing to install. The trade is that each one stops somewhere, and it’s usually where the vendor’s first paid plan starts.

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk’s free plan is a full email helpdesk for three people, and it’s free for good. It gives 3 users email ticketing from one support address and one web form, and Zoho’s free help desk page adds a help centre with FAQs and articles. Zoho calls it Free Forever, and a paid trial drops back to it after 15 days.

What it holds back is the work a helpdesk does by itself. Zoho’s pricing FAQ lists automation, multi-department support, SLAs and AI among what upgrading unlocks. Express is $9 a user a month, or $7 billed yearly, and stops at 5 users. Chat on your site starts on Standard, for customers who are signed in, and the best customer service software for startups sets out how far each Zoho plan goes. The pricing page opens in your local currency, and its currency menu switches to dollars.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot’s free tools give 2 users ticketing, live chat and rule-based bots, with no card. The chat carries HubSpot’s branding, and removing it takes Starter, at $10 a seat a month, or $7 billed yearly, on an offer for new customers against a list price of $20.

It makes most sense if your sales already run on HubSpot’s CRM, because tickets then sit beside the contacts and deals. The free bots follow rules you set and don’t answer with AI. HubSpot’s AI agent needs Service Hub Professional.

Help Scout

Help Scout’s free plan works like email rather than a ticket queue. It covers up to 5 users with 1 shared inbox, 1 Docs site for help articles, 10 saved replies, 10 tags and 1 Beacon, the help widget you put on your site, and it needs no payment method.

The limit is 100 contacts a month. Help Scout counts a contact as anyone who got a reply from your team, however many times they wrote, so a busy week can use it up. Live chat, WhatsApp and a second inbox start on Standard, at $30 a user a month, or $25 billed yearly.

Jira Service Management

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management is free forever for 3 agents, with 2 GB of storage and help from the Atlassian Community rather than from Atlassian. Customers raise requests through a portal, by email, in Slack or Microsoft Teams, or through a widget on your site. Customers are free, so only the people answering count. The free plan also has a knowledge base and 1,250 automation steps a month.

It’s built around request forms, queues and workflows, which suits a technical team that already lives in Jira more than a founder answering customers. Go past 3 agents or 2 GB, and Atlassian moves you onto a 14-day trial of Standard, which costs from $20 an agent a month.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk’s free option is its Free Program, and it isn’t free for good. You can switch to it from the 14-day trial, and it’s free for 6 months for up to 2 agents. Its support article lists email and social ticketing, automatic assignment of tickets, a knowledge base and a ticket trend report.

After 6 months you pay, and once you’ve upgraded you can’t go back to it. It covers Freshdesk only, not the Freshdesk Omni bundle that adds chat. Growth is $23 an agent a month, or $19 billed yearly. It suits a team that expects to hire and wants to start on the helpdesk it’ll keep.

tawk.to

tawk.to is the one hosted option with no cap on people. Ticketing, live chat, a knowledge base and a CRM are free, with unlimited team members, and it makes its money from add-ons.

Taking “Powered by tawk.to” off costs $29 a month for each site. Its AI Assist has a free tier of 100 message credits a month and paid plans from $29 a month, and tawk.to alternatives covers what each one gives. Without the AI, the chat only helps while someone on your team is watching it.

Raiseaticket

Raiseaticket is a smaller hosted helpdesk that’s free for 5 agents and 500 tickets a month, with email and a portal, SLAs, reports and a knowledge base, and no card. It’s run by Fonicom Limited from Malta, and its data is hosted in the EU.

At 500 tickets in a month, new tickets from email pause until the month resets, though customers can still raise them through the portal. A pack of 5 more agents costs £15 a month, billed yearly at £180, and raises the ticket limit too.

Open source ticketing systems you host yourself

An open source ticketing system is free to download, change and run. What you’re signing up for is the running of it, which the next section prices.

osTicket

osTicket is the plainest deal here. Every feature is free, and its own features page promises “no feature matrices”. It takes tickets by email and through a customer portal, routes them with filters and help topics, tracks due dates with SLA plans and locks a ticket while someone replies, so two people don’t answer at once. There’s no live chat.

It runs on PHP and MySQL behind Apache or IIS, and version 1.18.4 came out on 17 June 2026, according to its GitHub repository. If you’d rather not host it, the company behind it sells it hosted as SupportSystem, at $12, $16 or $24 an agent a month, after a 30-day trial.

FreeScout

FreeScout is built as a free, self-hosted alternative to Help Scout, and it works like a shared inbox. The core is free under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with unlimited agents, mailboxes and tickets. It runs on PHP and MySQL, which FreeScout says will even run on shared hosting, and it ships often, with version 1.8.241 out on 19 September 2026, according to its GitHub repository.

Much of what makes it a helpdesk comes as paid modules. Each one is a lifetime licence for one installation, and payments aren’t refundable. A setup a small team would want, with Saved Replies at $4.99, Tags at $6.99, Workflows at $14.99, Knowledge Base at $12, the End-User Portal at $12.99 and Live Chat at $13, comes to $64.96 once. Taking “Powered by FreeScout” off the widgets is another $15. Its AI module is free and drafts replies or summarises conversations, using an AI provider you choose and connect yourself.

Zammad

Zammad is the most complete open source helpdesk here, and the heaviest to run. The self-hosted version is free under the AGPL-3.0 licence and takes email, web forms, chat, SMS, Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp, with SLAs and a knowledge base. Version 7.2 is current.

Its documentation asks for at least 2 CPU cores and 6 GB of memory, plus 4 GB more if Elasticsearch, which it recommends for search, runs on the same server. There’s no Windows or macOS version. It installs from packages for Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, from source or with Docker. Hosted Zammad starts at €9 an agent a month, or €7 billed yearly, for up to 5 agents on email, web forms and SMS. Chat and the knowledge base start on Professional, at €18 or €16 billed yearly, AI features cost €0.03 a call, and prices exclude VAT. A support contract for the self-hosted version starts at €2,999 a year.

Frappe Helpdesk

Frappe Helpdesk doesn’t charge by the agent anywhere, hosted or not. Self-hosted, it’s free under the AGPL-3.0 licence and installs with a script that runs its Docker image. It takes tickets from email, web forms and a customer portal, with SLAs, assignment rules, saved replies and a knowledge base. Version 1.30.1 came out on 3 September 2026, according to its GitHub repository.

On Frappe Cloud it runs from $5 a month for a site on shared servers, with unlimited agents, tickets and customers, after a 14-day trial. Help with the product itself, rather than the hosting, starts on the $50 a month plan.

Chatwoot

Chatwoot is a chat-first support inbox rather than a ticket queue. It calls each request a conversation, and it puts live chat, email and social messages in one place. Its Community Edition is free to host under the MIT licence, without Captain, its AI, custom branding or SLA policies, and Chatwoot’s requirements page asks for at least 4 GB of memory, with PostgreSQL and Redis.

Its hosted free plan, Hacker, gives 2 agents 500 conversations a month on live chat only and keeps 30 days of history. Crisp chat alternatives covers its paid plans.

UVdesk

UVdesk is an open source helpdesk built on PHP’s Symfony framework and pitched at online shops, with apps for Shopify and Magento. Its community edition hasn’t had a release since version 1.1.8 on 19 September 2025, so check its GitHub repository before you build on it. The hosted version costs $11 an agent a month, or $8 billed yearly, for at least 2 agents.

Hesk

Hesk is a small PHP helpdesk that has been free to download for over 20 years. Version 3.7.12 runs on PHP 5.6 to 8.5 with MySQL, and gives you tickets and a knowledge base. A free install shows “Powered by Hesk” links, and removing them costs $49.99 once, plus VAT, which adds no features. Hesk Cloud hosts it for you from $29.99 a month, or $299 a year, for 10 agents.

Check a project is alive before you install it

A few open source ticketing systems that still appear on lists have stopped. Peppermint is archived on GitHub, and its last release was 0.5.5 in November 2024. Helpy’s last release was 2.8.0, in February 2020. A newer one, LibreDesk, is a single program with live chat, email and an AI assistant under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and version 2.8.0 came out in August 2026.

What self-hosting a ticketing system really costs

The licence is the only free part of an open source ticketing system. These are the costs that come with it.

• A server. osTicket, FreeScout and Hesk run on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting. Chatwoot needs at least 4 GB of memory and Zammad at least 6 GB, or 10 GB with Elasticsearch on the same machine. On DigitalOcean’s price list, the smallest servers with that much memory are $24 a month for 4 GB, $48 for 8 GB and $96 for 16 GB.
• Email that keeps arriving. FreeScout and Hesk fetch your support mail over IMAP or POP3 on a scheduled job. When fetching quietly stops, customers stop hearing back, and nobody notices until one complains.
• Updates and security patches. osTicket asks you to join its mailing list to hear about upgrades and security patches. Hesk’s download page lists what self-hosting leaves to you, “updates, backups, SSL, cron jobs, server configuration, and email setup”.
• Add-ons and support. FreeScout sells its features as modules, a Zammad support contract starts at €2,999 a year, Frappe’s product support starts on its $50 a month plan, and Chatwoot charges $19 an agent a month to add its AI and your branding to a self-hosted install.
• Your time. Installing it, and fixing it when an update goes wrong, falls to whoever set it up, which at a startup is usually the founder.

If nobody on your team wants that job, a hosted free plan costs you less, even though the software is the same price.

How to choose a free ticketing system

Four questions narrow the list quickly.

1. Who will look after it? If nobody wants to run a server, pick a hosted free plan. If someone on your team is happy to, osTicket, FreeScout or Frappe Helpdesk cost little more than hosting.
2. Do customers write by email only, or chat too? For email, Zoho Desk, Help Scout, osTicket, FreeScout and Hesk cover it. For chat, look at HubSpot, tawk.to, Zammad, Chatwoot or FreeScout’s $13 module. Without an AI agent, a chat in any of them needs someone to answer it, and Zammad’s chat docs say its widget only shows when at least one agent is available.
3. How many of you will answer in a year? The hosted free plans stop at 2 users on HubSpot and Freshdesk, 3 on Zoho Desk and Jira Service Management, and 5 on Help Scout and Raiseaticket. tawk.to has no limit on team members, and FreeScout and Frappe Helpdesk have none on agents.
4. What happens at the limit? Help Scout stops at 100 contacts a month, Raiseaticket pauses email tickets at 500, Jira Service Management moves you onto a Standard trial, and Freshdesk’s Free Program ends after 6 months.

Then count how many of last month’s emails you answered by pasting the same link. A free ticketing system files those questions for you, and it doesn’t answer any of them. How to reduce support tickets shows how to count them.

Free ticketing systems for IT support

Many searches for a free ticketing system come from IT teams handling requests from their own staff, and our glossary entry on ticketing systems explains how that kind differs. These free tools are built for it.

• Jira Service Management’s free plan, above, is built for IT as much as for customers, with alerts, on-call schedules and incident templates.
• Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk has a free Core plan for 1 to 5 technicians, with ads. Premium removes them and costs $5 a seat a month billed yearly, or $6 monthly, priced by your number of active employees.
• GLPI is an open source IT service desk with asset management, under the GPL-3.0 licence, and version 11.0.9 came out on 16 September 2026.

Where Deacon fits, if you don’t need tickets yet

A ticketing system keeps track of questions so that several people can share them. While you’re the only one answering, you are the queue, and most of what lands in it is the same few questions your docs already answer.

Deacon works before a question becomes a ticket. It’s an AI customer support agent that answers your customers in a chat on your site, in seconds and at any hour, from your website, files, pasted text and the answers you write, in whatever language they write in. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email.

It hands you the rest. When a visitor leaves their email or asks for a person, you get an email. You reply from Deacon’s dashboard, and if they still have the chat open, your reply appears there under your name. If they’ve gone and left an email in that conversation, your reply reaches them there.

It gets better as you answer. Every question your docs didn’t cover waits with an Answer this button. What you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks, and Save & check shows you the reply it now gives and how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less it needs you.

It shows you what customers need, which a ticket queue doesn’t. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group similar product questions, count the people who asked and label most groups as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on, so you see what customers are stuck on and what they want you to build next.

To be exact about what it isn’t, Deacon has no ticketing. It has no ticket numbers, no statuses such as pending or solved, and no assignment, queues, routing or rota. It doesn’t read your support email or connect to a helpdesk. When a queue does earn its keep, usually once a second person answers support or you promise reply times, run one of the systems above for email and keep Deacon answering on your site. The two work side by side.

The free plan gives you 50 answers a month, about 25 conversations, with every feature, no card and no end date. Starter is $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. It goes on your site as one script tag.

Questions about free ticketing systems

Is there a completely free ticketing system?

Yes, if you host it yourself. osTicket gives away every feature, Zammad, Frappe Helpdesk and Chatwoot’s Community Edition are free to run, and FreeScout’s core is free with unlimited agents. You still pay for the server and the time. Of the hosted ones, tawk.to’s ticketing and live chat are free with unlimited team members, and Zoho Desk’s free plan for 3 users has no end date.

What’s the best free ticketing system for a small business?

For two or three people answering email who don’t want a server, Zoho Desk’s free plan or Help Scout’s. Help Scout’s covers 5 users but stops at 100 contacts a month, and Zoho Desk’s covers 3 users. If someone on your team is happy to run a server, osTicket costs nothing but hosting, and FreeScout gives you a shared inbox for a few one-off module fees. If you’re a founder answering alone, you may not need tickets yet, and an AI agent such as Deacon, answering the repeat questions on your site, is the better first step.

What’s the best open source ticketing system?

It depends on what you’ll run it on and how customers reach you. osTicket and Hesk run on ordinary PHP hosting and handle email and a portal. FreeScout works most like a shared inbox. Zammad takes email, chat, SMS, Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp, but needs a server with 6 GB of memory. Frappe Helpdesk suits a team that wants SLAs and a portal, and it has no per-agent price even when Frappe hosts it.

Which free help desk software includes live chat?

HubSpot’s free plan has live chat with HubSpot’s branding, and tawk.to’s free chat shows “Powered by tawk.to” unless you pay $29 a month. Chatwoot’s free hosted plan is live chat only. Of the self-hosted ones, Zammad and Chatwoot include chat, and FreeScout sells it as a $13 module. Zoho Desk and Help Scout keep chat for paid plans. Unless you add an AI agent, a person has to answer each chat.

Can I run an open source ticketing system with Docker?

Yes. Zammad publishes a Docker install, Frappe Helpdesk installs with a script that runs its Docker image, Chatwoot documents a Docker setup, and FreeScout lists Docker among its one-click installs. osTicket, FreeScout and Hesk also run on plain PHP and MySQL hosting without it.

Is Deacon a ticketing system?

No. Deacon has no tickets, no statuses such as pending or solved, no assignment or queues, and no inbox for support email. It answers your customers on your website, hands you the questions it can’t answer, and you reply from its dashboard. It doesn’t connect to a helpdesk, so if you run one later, the two sit side by side.

Can Deacon answer the emails my ticketing system gets?

No. Deacon answers in a chat widget on your website, and it doesn’t read or reply to support email. What it does is answer customers who ask on your site, before they write to you.