Helpscout vs Zendesk vs Jitbit

Helpscout

Ever jump into your workday and wish everything connected a little smoother? Helpscout feels like that coworker who knows where the coffee is and how your tickets should flow. It’s built around a clean, centralized way to manage customer inquiries—from the first ping to final resolution—so you spend less time hunting and more time helping. The interface is grounded in familiar office workflows, which makes it easier to pick up without long onboarding sessions.

A big part of that smoothness comes from practical integrations and permissions. Single-Sign-On keeps you from juggling multiple passwords, while Active Directory ties in your user and group structure so people see exactly what they should. Behind the scenes, Workflow Automation nudges tickets along, routing them based on rules you set, so nothing slips through the cracks. And when you need to share answers or reduce repetitive questions, the Knowledge Base serves as a living library that agents and customers can reference. It’s not flashy, just useful—a quiet backbone for support teams that want to stay organized and responsive.

Zendesk

If you’ve ever had to juggle a dozen support threads at once, you’ll appreciate how Zendesk tries to keep that chaos contained. It brings together ticket collaboration so teammates can annotate, assign, and loop in others without losing track of the thread. You can leave comments, share internal notes, and still keep the customer view clean and focused on the issue at hand.

On the customer side, there’s a straightforward flow: tickets come in, you respond, and you can spin up quick surveys to gauge satisfaction after a resolution. It’s easy to see how you’re doing through simple metrics rather than digging through dashboards. For the folks typing the same responses over and over, canned responses save a lot of keystrokes, while still letting you tailor messages when needed. When you need to nudge a customer or notify them of updates, email notification templates help keep those alerts consistent and timely. Overall, it feels like a practical toolkit for keeping conversations organized without getting in the way.

	Helpscout	Zendesk	Jitbit
	A simple help desk focused on email.	The most popular help desk app out there	Help Desk Software built for email. Trusted by thousands of companies across 50 + countries.
Pricing: 3 years / 5 agents	$6300	$8820	$3897
Pricing: 3 years / 10 agents	$12600	$17640	$8367
Active Directory	✅ Only Azure AD is supported	✅ Active Directory authentication is possible if you install a special script on your server	✅ Integration via a script for your server or ADFS and SAML
Activity Dashboard	❌	✅ You can put data from some reports into your dashboard	✅ Live overview dashboard
Asset Management	❌	❌	✅ A complete asset management module tightly integrated into the rest of the app
Canned Responses	✅ They are called Saved Replies. You can insert them in ticket replies	✅ Macros allow you to respond to tickets with a pre-written message.	✅ You can also assign canned responses to specific ticket categories if you need to
Community Forums	❌	❌	✅ Ideas Forum comes out of the box
Custom Fields	✅ Up to ten custom fields per mailbox	✅ You can add custom fields and use them with other features such as automation, macros, etc.	✅ Many custom field types, including dependant fields. Various privacy options.
Custom Statuses	❌	❌	✅ Add custom statuses, customize how your customers see them and assign different colors to them
Customer satisfaction survey	✅ Comes with CSATs and a Happiness report	✅ Only on Professional plan or higher	✅ Optional CSATs in email notifications and a report
Design Customization	✅ Customize Knowledge Base with externally hosted CSS files	✅ You can customize the public-facing pages, but not what your employees see	✅ Unlimited customization options. Change colors with a live preview, add custom CSS and JS
Email Notification Templates	❌	✅ You can fully customize most email templates for notifications that your customers get	✅ You are able to completely change a template for any notification type
Escalation	❌	✅ Possible to escalate tickets with workflow automation features	✅ Possible to set up various escalation scenarios via automation
Exchange Integration	❌	❌	✅ Native EWS support instead of IMAP. oAuth support for Office 365
Import and Export	✅ Can be done via API	✅ Starting with Professional plan you can export your tickets to an XML file. Import only possible via API.	✅ Import and Export tickets via CSV files
Internationalization	✅ You can manually translate some parts of the app	✅ UI is not translatable. You can provide content, such as Knowledge Base articles in multiple languages on Professional plan	✅ Available in 16 different languages
ITIL Compliance	❌	✅ Claims to be designed with ITIL principles in mind	✅ Support for most ITIL processes
Knowledge Base	✅ It's called Docs and it is highly customizable	✅ Basic version comes with Professional plan. Full version is only available as a separate add-on	✅ Customizable Knowledge Base optimized for search engines
Live Chat	❌	❌	✅ A free live chat component in the web widget
Mobile Apps	✅ iOS and Android	✅ Offers apps for iOS and Android	✅ iOS and Android
Multi-channel support	❌	✅ A lot of support channels are built-in in the app: email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.	✅ Possible to add unlimited channels via integrations and API
On-premise Version	❌	❌	✅ A full on-premises version that runs on Windows Server
Reports and Analytics	✅ Most must-have reports are included	✅ Reports are only available on Professional plan or higher	✅ 13 reports with an ability to build your own and to export everything to Excel
REST API	✅ Sparate APIs for KB and tickets	✅ Fully featured API on all plans	✅ API covers all the app features
Single-Sign-On	✅ Separate add-on for $5 per user per month	✅ Most standard SSO options are available	✅ SAML, Google login, Windows-integrated etc.
SLA Management	❌	✅ SLA features are natively supported in the app	✅ Full SLA automation via actions/triggers
Support Widget	❌	✅ Web widget and Mobile SDK	✅ Two different versions of a web widget
Third-party Integrations	✅ 80+ apps	✅ Hundreds of integrations with all popular apps	✅ 30 native integrations and 500 more via Zapier
Ticket Collaboration	❌	✅ Light agents, side conversations and CCs and followers	✅ See when other techs are viewing tickets in real-time, assign multiple people to a ticket
Workflow Automation	✅ Very basic automation features are available	✅ Powerful engine that allows you to automate any business process	✅ Automation Rules are very powerful and can go beyond simple if-this-then-that logic

Looking for help desk software? Check out Jitbit. We offer a fully-featured app at a very affordable price. It comes with all the must have features like knowledge base, two-way email integration (including native Exchange and Office 365 support), automation, hundreds of integrations with third-party apps and much more. Available both as a hosted "SaaS" version and an on-premises version you can install on your own server.