5 Best Cost Effective WordPress HelpDesk Plugins

Are you tired of spending money on those WordPress support plugins who tend to just promise but not deliver? Still wishing for a plugin that will be not only efficient but also budget friendly?

Then this article may end your search with these 5 WordPress HelpDesk plugins that provide the best deal for the money.

WSDesk – WordPress HelpDesk and Support Ticket System

When it comes to cost effectiveness, user-friendliness, advanced features, and customer support, WSDesk is indeed one among the best WordPress HelpDesk plugins.

Okay, so you ask why?

Just the free version of this power-packed plugin provides access all the necessary features of a help desk system. Features like email piping, AJAX based interactive design, unlimited agents, a custom ticket-generation form and much more, are enough to make WSDesk stand out among competitors.

But that’s not all this extension also comes with a premium version. The professional version costs $89 for a single website and $129 in-case you want to use it on more than one site but limited to 5 sites. Furthermore, you also get a 30 days refund policy. Which means if this extension doesn’t meet your or your customer’s need, your or he will get his money back without being asked a single question. With yearly plans, WSDesk provides free support and updates too.

The premium version of WSDesk is a beast when it comes to performance and features. You get trigger based automation, where a pre-defined action will be performed automatically based on some conditions.

Auto-Suggestion is clearly one of the best features in WSDesk’s premium version. It is the ability to automatically suggest solutions with the help of a knowledge base,  before even submitting a ticket. This helps in reducing the number of tickets as well as the time to find the solution for an issue.

WSDesk, unlike other SAAS based systems, doesn’t need to store data in the cloud. So you don’t need to worry about the data privacy.

Some more amazing features provided by WSDesk are listed below:

• Triggers and automation actions happen automatically, once “triggers” are defined

• Tickets will be assigned to tagged automatically according to the tags created by your/your company.

• At the end of the support session, customers can rate agents based on how satisfied they were after the service was provided

• Backup and restore all your data wherever and whenever you want. This is really helpful in case your server fails, and you need to move to another server/hosting urgently.

• WooCommerce integration- integrate your WooCommerce store with WSDesk.

WP Support Plus Responsive Ticket System

It is an another free-of-cost, open-source help desk plugin for WordPress. With this extension, you truly get the most versatile set of features. The feature list can be as long as a customer is ready to pay.

As far as the cost is concerned, WP Support Plus offers two plans. A Personal Plan which costs $99 for a single website and a Plus Plan which costs $149 for five sites. Both these plans are on a yearly basis and provide access to all the premium add-ons for one year.

Like WSDesk, WP Support Plus also provides 30 days Money Back Guarantee.

Besides, you can get features like ticket submission by both admin and guest, attachment support, customizable priorities for tickets, an AJAX based design, and customizable email templates, etc. in the free version.

The professional version is indeed more powerful, and it can be further extended with the help of modules.

You can purchase these “extra” modules from the marketplace and then can install it directly on your site.

Premium features include email-piping, WooCommerce integration, etc. Additionally, they also provide specific custom features on-demand. Surely there will be additional charges for that.

Below I have listed some of the most important features of this help desk plugin:

• You can export your tickets in a .csv file.

• You can create multiple types of groups containing many users. These users then can share the information and allowed data.

• Ability to enable ticket timer which helps determine the time spent by an agent to solve a ticket. This is really helpful while evaluating your agency/business customer support response time. It’s a quite advanced feature and is not available in many premium help desk plugins and SAAS products.

• Event integration with Google Calendar. You can also perform import and exports.

Awesome Support

When it comes to WordPress based UI, no other plugin does it better than Awesome Support HelpDesk and Support Plugin. It is yet another open-source customer support plugin. It’s WordPress based UI can be primary selection criteria for some of the users, but at the same time, it can be less interactive.

Awesome Support plugin’s features include unlimited agents, email notification for tickets, ability to transfer tickets among agents, customizable email template and so on. While the free version lacks some core and advanced features, the premium extensions can be purchased for that.

If we see just the cost, one can say Awesome Support helpdesk plugin is a bit more costly than other plugins in this list. It’s true!

Their Standard Bundle costs $149 (single website) and $199 (3-5 sites), on a yearly basis. But you can not judge this plugin just by its cost and not looking at the features it provides.

For all the bells and whistles, Awesome Support provides Premium extensions. These extensions include email-piping, SMS and SLACK notification on ticket generation, internal notes among agents, custom priority, custom status and default assignment rules, etc.

Some of the most impressive features of Awesome Support plugin are listed below:

• Unlimited agents, tickets, users, products, departments, tags- there is no limit on the number of agents, tags, etc.

• Custom priority support. You can set the priority to your customer bases on their purchased membership or plan. This feature helps ensure that your “corporate clients” receive the best and fastest support whenever they are in need.

• You can generate custom reports. You can also perform productivity analysis.

JS Support Ticket

Earlier we talked about the WordPress based UI of Awesome Support. But now for those who want something more from a HelpDesk than just having a WordPress based design, JS Support Ticket by Joom Sky is an interesting plugin.

It is open-source support ticket plugin for WordPress, which is known for its colorful interface. Just take a look at it below.

JS Support Ticket has many features in its free version. These functions include attachment support, ticket filtering, unlimited departments, customized support fields for tickets and multi-lingual translations.

The best free feature of JS Support Tickets is the Auto-Responder. It sends an email automatically once a ticket is created. And again, the Bootstrap based design and colorful UI too. But the UI can sometimes be a bit confusing too.

Apart from its colorful design and easy to use interface, it is packed with some extra functionality in its pro version. In the pro version, you get to choose from three plans. A 12 months plan for $55, a 24 months plan for $99 and a 60 months plan for $199.

In the pro version of JS Support Ticket, you get features like email-piping, staff permissions, reports regarding customer-satisfaction, Google ReCaptcha and the ability to block email Ids.

There is also a  feature called time tracking. It tracks the total time spent by an agent on every ticket. It also uses this feature to save responses to most common requests automatically.

Take a look at some other features in JS Support Ticket plugin:

• Ticket export feature gives you the ability to export your tickets in different formats.

• From with the control panel you can customize highlighted priorities.

• Support for various types of captcha services. This feature helps in preventing mass spam from bots.

• Email blocking gives you the power to block desired email Ids from submitting and replying to tickets.

Sola Support Tickets

It is another open-source HelpDesk plugin that can be included in ‘freemium’ category with an affordable price-tag.

When talking about the free version this extension has not much to offer. The free version provides single agent support, automatic email notification on ticket submission, and customizable priorities.

But apart from a free version, Sola Support Tickets offers two types of yearly premium plans. It charges $19.99, and you get a license to use it on three websites. If you want to use it on unlimited sites, then it will cost you $39.99. It is the cheapest one in the list, but it sure packs a lot worth its price.

The premium version provides a number of features to increase its value for money. Basically, it provides various add-ons which broaden its functionalities.

These add-ons give you the power to create unlimited support agents and email-piping. Furthermore, you can add support form Captcha to stop spams. The paid version also supports multiple languages.

It even keeps track of frequently submitted requests, to quickly solve them and to save a lot of time.

Some other advanced features of Sola Support Tickets are listed below:

• You can create unlimited agents. There are absolutely no limitations on the number of support agents that one can create.

• Improve your business with customer satisfaction survey. You can request your clients to take a survey regarding their satisfaction on your site.

• You get the ability to set priorities based on preferences.

• Quick responses save responses for frequently submitted responses.

In case you are planning to start a new online business then there are two important factors to consider. First, one of customer support and the second one is full fledge e-commerce management system. Online business always needs some sort of product, user and order management system.

If you are planning to start your business on WordPress, then Woocommerce is the best free option for you as it offers a simple interface to manage products, coupons, currencies, and users.

What’s even more interesting about it is the fact that it can be further extended with the help of add-ons. There are hundreds of free of cost woocommerce plugins which you can use to integrate more advanced functionality like direct checkout, analytics integration, stripe payment gateway, etc. to your site. Overall it’s one of the most versatile yet user-friendly plugins which will help you build a full fledge business online and that within your budget. And if you combine its power with any of the helpdesk plugin listed here, your customers will receive the best user-experience.

Conclusion

This was a list of some cheap, some expensive but really advanced, feature rich help desk plugins. They all provide excellent value for money considering the other SAAS products. The listing was purely based on our experience with these plugins. You can choose any of them based on your expectations and considering your business needs.

I tried my best to help you choose the best support help desk plugin that will prove its worth with the set of functionalities it provides. I hope you would have liked this article.