Choosing a help desk for five agents: count the seat, the operator, and what the export leaves behind.
Every vendor on this page will sell you a shared inbox. They do not charge for the same unit, hand back the same data, or leave the same amount of work with your team. Price one fixed scenario, then test the way out.
You leave with A five-agent price check from current vendor pages, the AGPLv3 self-hosted path, an administrator ledger, and a six-step export test
Who this is for, and who it is not for
This is for a small team — roughly three to ten people answering customer email — that is picking its first real help desk, or leaving one. It assumes you can read a price page and would rather know the exit cost before signing than after.
It is not for contact centres with voice, workforce management, or compliance recording requirements; not for teams whose main channel is live chat at scale; and not for anyone who wants a ranking. There is no winner below, only conditions.
The scenario, so the numbers mean something
Every figure on this page is priced against one fixed set of assumptions. Change them and the arithmetic changes.
- Five agents with individual logins, plus one part-time administrator drawn from the same five.
- Around 1,200 tickets a month, arriving by email and a web form. No voice, no social channels.
- One shared inbox and one public help centre with about forty articles.
- Annual billing, list price, no negotiated discount, taxes excluded.
- Three years as the planning horizon, because that is long enough for a renewal increase and a migration to both land.
Managed options at current first-party prices
Prices below come from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. They exclude tax, add-ons, onboarding, migration, integrations, and every hour your team spends. Annual figures are our multiplication of the vendor’s displayed rate against the five-agent scenario, not a quote.
| Product | Displayed entry pricing | The five-agent scenario |
|---|---|---|
| Zendesk ↗ | Support Team at $19 per agent/month paid yearly; Suite Team at $55; Suite Professional at $115. Enterprise is quote-only. | Five agents on Suite Team: $3,300 a year before tax, add-ons, and onboarding. Note that Suite Team is a Team plan, and the export article says Team plans lack the built-in export tools. |
| Freshdesk ↗ | Growth at $19 per agent/month billed annually; Pro at $55; Enterprise at $89. The page shows annual rates only. | Five agents on Growth: $1,140 a year before tax, add-ons, and onboarding. |
| Help Scout ↗ | Free for up to 5 users with 1 inbox and 1 Docs site; Standard at $25 per user/mo; Plus at $45; Pro at $75, with a 16% annual discount advertised. | Five users fit the Free plan on paper. At the Standard monthly rate the same five cost $1,500 a year. |
| Zammad Cloud ↗ | Starter v2 at 7 EUR per agent/month on annual billing (9 EUR monthly); Professional v2 at 16 EUR; Plus v2 at 25 EUR. | Five agents on Starter v2: 420 EUR a year before tax. |
| Chatwoot Cloud ↗ | Hacker at $0 for up to 2 agents; Startups at $19 per agent/month billed annually; Business at $39; Enterprise at $99. | Five agents on Startups: $1,140 a year before tax and Captain AI credits. |
Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Chatwoot display USD; Zammad displays EUR. We do not convert currencies, because the rate on the day you sign is the one that matters.
The open-source path, with the licence spelled out
Zammad ships its source under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 (checked 4 September 2026). Its own hardware requirements ask for at least 2 CPU cores and 6 GB of RAM, plus another 4 GB if Elasticsearch runs on the same box, and a PostgreSQL server. Zammad declines to recommend a disk size, saying it depends entirely on how you work — which is the honest answer and also a reason to meter it yourself.
FreeScout is also AGPLv3 (checked 4 September 2026), and its modules page states that modules are AGPL-3.0 licensed and sold as lifetime licences for a single FreeScout instance, with all payments non-refundable. It does not print prices on the index, so a FreeScout budget is incomplete until you price your module list.
Chatwoot uses the MIT Expat licence with an explicit carve-out: content under the enterprise/ directory is licensed by the separate file in that directory (checked 4 September 2026). Its self-hosting guide lists PostgreSQL 12+, Redis 6+, a reverse proxy, and a 2-core, 4 GB, 20 GB SSD minimum, rising to 4+ cores and 8 GB+ for production.
AGPLv3, MIT, and “self-hosted” are three different claims. Read the licence file in the repository you will actually deploy, not a comparison table.
The administrator cost most comparisons omit
A help desk is a routing system with a mailbox attached. Somebody maintains the routing. Name that person before you pick, and put their hours in the total.
- Mailbox and deliverability: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce handling, and the day a reply threads into the wrong ticket.
- Business rules: triggers, automations, SLA policies, and business hours, each of which silently rots when a queue is renamed.
- Macros, canned replies, and help-centre articles, plus the person who decides they are still true.
- Agent lifecycle: onboarding, roles, and the offboarding step that removes a departing agent from every view and inbox.
- Spam, abuse, and the recurring false-positive review nobody schedules.
- On Zendesk Team, the export script itself: if the plan has no built-in export, someone owns and maintains API code.
- Self-hosted only: OS patching, TLS renewal, PostgreSQL backups with tested restores, Elasticsearch, and version-matched upgrades.
Self-hosting removes a per-agent invoice and adds the last line on that list. Whether that is a saving depends on the hourly cost of the person who would do it, which is exactly what the lifecycle cost estimator asks you to type in.
What the export actually gives you back
This is where help desks differ most and market most quietly. Each finding below is from the vendor’s own documentation, checked 4 September 2026.
Read the Zendesk line twice. A ticket export without comments or descriptions is a list of subject lines and timestamps: it will reconcile on record count and be useless for answering “what did we tell this customer in March?”
Test the export before you buy, not at renewal
- Open a trial on the exact plan you intend to buy. Export behaviour is plan-gated, so a trial of a higher tier proves nothing about the tier you will pay for.
- Create twenty representative tickets: one long email thread, one with an attachment, one merged, one with a custom field, one closed by an automation, and one from a customer who later asked for deletion.
- Export as the role you would actually give an administrator. Record the format, the time taken, and the privilege required.
- Open the export with no vendor tooling. Count tickets, then check that the body of the long thread is present. Check the attachment. Check the custom field.
- Import into a clean destination — another desk, or a self-hosted instance — and see whether an agent could work a queue from it.
- Write down the hours. That number is the exit cost, and it belongs in year-one budgeting, not in a footnote.
The general version of this procedure is the five-step exit test.
A decision path, with conditions
None of these is a general recommendation. Each is a condition. If two conditions apply, run the export test on both candidates and let the recorded hours break the tie.
What we could not verify, and therefore do not claim
- Which current Zendesk tier is the first with built-in export. The export article names Suite Growth, Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus, while the pricing page shows Suite Team, Suite Professional, and Suite Enterprise. The tier names do not line up, so confirm with Zendesk before assuming a plan includes export tooling.
- FreeScout module prices. The modules index and an individual module page both showed only a lifetime licence for one FreeScout instance, with no figure until checkout. A self-hosted FreeScout budget is therefore not complete until you price the modules you actually need.
- Zendesk Suite Enterprise and Chatwoot self-hosted enterprise pricing, both of which are quote-only on the vendor pages.
- Whether the Help Scout Standard plan reaches the reporting API endpoints. The data-export article we read does not state plan-level restrictions, so we do not state one.
- Any claim about which desk resolves tickets faster. Nothing here was measured; this is a dated reading of vendor documentation.
Sources, all first-party
All pages checked 4 September 2026. Pricing and export behaviour change without notice; open the links before you sign anything. Software Sausage takes no vendor payment for placement.
Put your own numbers in with the lifecycle cost estimator, get a free shortlist, or ask for implementation help.